e. e. cummings

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best night
and day to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest
battle any human being can fight and never stop fighting.

-- E. E. Cummings

Dirt cheap: take a second look

I take to eating at the market in town. It is dirt cheap, the cheapest food I have eaten in Southeast Asia in fact, and I am the only tourist. This morning, I eat a bowl of noodle soup. I have two choices: kao soi, made with fermented soybeans and pork, or another one, which has tiny brown cubes that look like tofu which I understand to be beef liver.

Of the lesser of two evils, I choose beef liver. It is only tomorrow, after a bout of wicked food poisoning lasting 14 hours, that an American will laugh and tell me I was eating congealed blood.

We were stopped just fifteen minutes out of town. The highway had been clear on our ride here, but just a week later, we found that the Chinese-funded road was shut down for three hour stretches. It was 9 and the sign indicated we had a two hour wait. I was anxious; this wait would be followed by a five hour bus ride on a bumpy, largely dirt road to Oudomxai today and an equally long but slightly less bumpy ride tomorrow over mountainous roads to get to Luang Prabang in Laos.

We sat around, kicking up dust, initiating idle conversations, staring at the thick, green foliage of the forest below us. We were all surprised to see a Laotian man walk up the hill's crest with a stunned owl, all stripes and swirls and the most beautiful eyes. The man was clean cut, with slacks and a button-up shirt. He could have been on his way to a business meeting in the city. He had just hit the owl with a slingshot.

The Lao men gathered round, slipping a small noose around the bird's leg and then watching it try to take flight, only to be yanked to the ground when it reached the end of the short rope. There were perhaps a dozen of us tourists, most of us recently returned from forest treks where we saw little, if any, wildlife. Plenty had been on display, dead, in the local market, however. We were appalled, mumbling, discussing what, if anything, to do.

The men laughed, poked the bird, spread its wings. It was unclear if they wanted to keep it as a pet, sell it for food, or simply release it when the buses began again to move, entertainment no longer needed. One man looked at us, mimed snapping its neck, wringing his curled fingers in opposite directions.

"Stop that," the Englishwoman yelled. "You're a bad man, a bad Lao."

I cringed, embarrassed for the recipient of her verbal force. Lao people value "cool heart" - an ability to stay calm, not raise voices, and deal with conflict in indirect and face-saving ways.

At the same time, I was ashamed of my paralization. Frozen between mutual desires to help the owl and to respect my role as visitor in a foreign culture, I did nothing except stare at the owl. At one point, it looked at me for a long moment, as if to plead its case.

The woman finally walked over with a pair of scissors, and snipped the rope. Wait, the slingshot owner seemed to indicate, as he held up a finger. He carefully removed the noose from the bird's leg, and held it up to the sunlight, where it took flight.

**

Later, I talked about this with a man from the states on a bus ride from a rural town back to Oudomxai. I asked him what he'd have done in my place. "Nothing," he said. "This place is perfect just the way it is. I hate it when foreigners come over here and try to make this place just like home."

"What if you saw a woman being beaten by her husband?" I asked. "Would you act then?"

"That doesn't happen here."

"Yeah it does. I saw it. In Thailand, not Laos. Still, what then?" I posed the question, honestly curious. I wasn't trying to push his buttons.

He sat quietly, for a moemnt. Then he pulled his shades down over his eyes. "I don't know," he said. "But I'm not here to change anyone into my own ideal." He turned to look out the window, ending the conversation.

I looked out my own window, puzzled. What's an empathetic heart adrift in a foreign culture to do? Do I step forward to challenge what I see as injustice? Or abandon that, recognizing it as the same cleverly-sugared impulse responsible for colonialism and failed development efforts by the western world? Where, exactly, does compassion end and the white savior complex begin?

I gave blood to Red Cross and all I got was this lousy 2nd degree burn

I stepped over the threshold of the Red Cross blood donation center in Luang Prabang, Laos. It looked more like someone's bedroom than a medical center; random posters haphazardly graced the walls, the beds were littered with multi-colored blankets and pillows in lieu of the stark medical-issue beds I'm used to seeing, and there was a plate of cookies sitting on the table.

No one was inside, but two women were outside watering the plants. I waved one of them over and we started the checklist. It was bare-bones, nothing like the questionnaires in the US, and her demeanor wasn't nearly as official as I'd expected. Within 5 minutes, I was sitting with a needle in my arm, a squeeze ball sandwiched in my palm, and a bunch of Laotians sitting around me making conversation.

When I finished, a man approached me. He was a tireless flirt with the women in the area, and I was hoping to avoid him. But apparently, from me, he just wanted English translation help. He asked how to use a keyboard shortcut to make a superscript letter in Word, and with our language barrier, I just couldn't explain it, even in writing. The power was out for the computer in this office, so he asked me to come upstairs. Or so I thought.

I go outside, and he's on a motorcycle. He wants to drive to another office, a few kilometers away. I back away from the motorcycle like it's a wild animal. "Don't like bikes," I say. "If I come, you drive slow, slow, very safe."

Yes, yes, he nods, haphazadly. I get on, despite my gut reaction. I have reason to hate motorcycles. I was hit by a speeding motorbike 2 years ago and it took 6 weeks to walk without pain. The only time I've been seriously sexually harrassed while hitchhiking involved a motorcycle, on that same trip in Tahiti. And I've already seen 4 motorbike accidents in my first month in Asia; one resulting in a dead body laying at the side of the road.

Motorcycles suck.

But I climb on; what's my choice? We pull up to the new site, where it turns out I'm to help him compose an application in English for the International Red Cross. As he stops, I start to get off the bike, but he suddenly decides to start it up and shift the parking spot. My inner calf brushes up against the exhaust pipe, and i get a half-dollar sized second degree burn that turns into a series of blisters within a day.

So, I gave blood to the Red Cross, and all I got was a lousy second degree burn :)

No, the scorpion didn't actually win. I'm still here

I've just spent two days in a more rural Laos - Ban Kuh Nang - a town so off the map that my host wasn't even sure of its name. We'd met in Khon Kaen, Thailand, at the visa office. He was peering intently over what appeared to be a thin guidebook, and despite his age (nearing 50), his sandals and shorts seemed to indicate him as a tourist.

"Where are you going?" I asked. "Laos, renew visa," he replied. We started chatting over a map of the country, and then, unexpectedly, an invite.

"Why not come stay village? Wife Lao, love visitor." And, why not, I thought? We traveled together for the rest of the day, and truth be told, it was nice not to have to think about logistics. The countryside slid by, dusty and dry, a miracle that anything could be grown. The vivid technicolor patches of sticky rice plots never failed to amaze me. There wasn't much to see along this stretch. I racked my brains for an American comparison, but the only thing that came close was Eastern Washington, maybe, crossed with the dryest upper reaches of the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico. I loved it, wrestled for a reason to stop and visit.

We finally made it, after 8 hours, 3 trucks, 3 buses, 1 train, and 2 tuk-tuks, to his house. His wife, Noi, greeted us. I showered, using a scoop to dump chilling cold water over my body on the cold concrete of the bathroom floor. Then I sat on the front porch, watching the passing traffic. It was difficult, the language barrier, but I'd decided to stay here for two nights.

In the morning, we headed off to the market. "Breakfast is bread, coffee," Hiro had said. "No butter, sorry, okay?" Of course it was.

"We like you stay 7 day, 10 day," he invited. "But you stay more 2, 3 night, police. But no problem, no problem, just talking!" he said. I wasn't sure what he meant, and as I sat on the truck rumbling into town, I tried to erase the image of Laotian military men, dressed like Mao recruits in khaki pants and round shades, coming for me in the dead of night.

When we returned, arms full of fresh fruits and vegetables and loaves of bread, a young man in his twenties, dressed in a Puma hat and an Adidas jacket, was sitting on the porch. I offered him some peanut butter for his baguette and some slices of dried mango, just to be friendly. A few minutes later, Hiro leaned over. "This man, police. You stay one week, 10 day, okay police." Guess it pays to bribe the cops, even in Laos.

me against the scorpion