IV - Things to Come

I apologize for the long lapse between my postings to this "blog." Several things, mostly health-related, kept me from paying adequate attention to it. This particular chapter sort of fills the gap between my time stuck in Vientiane and my posting to teach at the Teachers Training College of Luang Prabang. (Of course, I eventually made it! If I hadn't, there would not be much point in this blog, would there?) There will be a few more photos there too, since I tended to avoid regimented army-camp atmosphere of Vientiane like the plague.

Among the coming attractions,

• Attacked by two dragons -- "Nagas" actually, primordial beasts from the very roots of the world, even older and more terrifying than the Balrog that almost ate Gandalf in The Fellowship of the Ring.
  
  
• Xao La, the Hungry Ghost who became our friend and protector.
  
  
• Fun times at the Pond House.
  
  
• My kids, who meant and even after these 30 years still mean the world to me! Americans jokingly referred to my house as "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness," from the 1950s movie of that name. The movie is saccharine sweet, but check it out. It says volumes about my personality and my motivations in this period of my life.
  
  
• And later in this posting, notes on a book of "fiction" that tells more about what was going on in Laos during those years than books that masquerade as history. (It was written by a regular columnist for Playboy, if that suggests anything.)
  

So don't give up hope! There are more interesting things to come.

The rest of my stay in Vientiane was not very eventful. Since I already knew the Lao language as well as or better than many current volunteers, not to mention those new arrivals who were in introductory language classes and mostly still learning how to recite the Lao alphabet, I was encouraged to find my own ways of broadening and deepening my skills. There was a large wat, Wat Khoun Ta, just across the highway from the IVS Guest House, so that was my first stop.

In the Wat courtyard at 6:30 a.m., just after the monks returned from their morning begging tour, I just hung around the porch-stoop area of the Wat, which I knew to be the place where most teaching took place. Monks wear simple robes of pieces of saffron-colored cloth. Saffron is a really bright danger-orange-yellow color. The robes are pieced together in a traditional way so as to end up with one large piece of cloth that is draped over a shoulder and around the waist, a little like an ancient Roman toga. Patching the robe together from smaller pieces of cloth is meant to remind the monk of the need for humility even in clothing. No fancy robes or embroidery or damask for these dedicated men. This is plain, thin cotton.

Monks on daily pre-dawn begging round

Four of them, one clearly the senior, sidled over, and the senior monk, Ajaan Somphu, started a conversation -- something on the order of "Nice weather we've been having, isn't it?" I quickly explained my needs in carefully pre-rehearsed Lao and mentioned that IVS would even pay money to the Wat for their help. They quickly refused the cash, but took me to Ajaan Somphu's room, where we sat cross-legged on the floor. The monks sat on cushions; I sat on the bare floorboards. The monks were on cushions because one of the eight precepts on which monks are judged on a daily basisforbade their sleeping or sitting on high furniture. I was on the bare floor so as not to embarrass the monks by sitting as high as, or higher than they were on their low cushions. We talked about many many subjects, and I filled more than four notebooks of words and phrases that are not to be found in any published dictionary, including even the definitive Lao-English Dictionary published by the Catholic University of America in 1972, consisting of two thick volumes and 1,839 pages of dense type.

Eventually, our linguistic explorations turned to such practical matters as bodily functions, body parts, and the verbs that go with them. Well, monks apparently don't have such body parts and in any case certainly don't make any use of them. My motivation in seeking this kind of vocabulary from monks was to get as polite terminology as possible, considering my own position as a non-religious "Ajaan." But even in the 227 rules of the "Vinay" -- Pali Vinyana -- for daily behavior, language is less than straightforward. Instead of saying that "monks don't fart too loud," for example the Vinay says something more on the order of monks "abstain from loud and unseemly noises while in small chambers." (Later, when I had to be part of a monastic community for a while, I had a lot of trouble with that one: one meal a day eating food donated by scores of people, and my non-local intestinal flora. )

So on alternate days I set up shop in the huge Vientiane morning market. Never did I lack for companions in conversation. A "Falang" with a notebook in hand, just sitting there with nothing to do is apparently an irresistable attraction. I never did learn those high-class ways of referring to low-class functions, but I did end up with two school notebooks full of near-pornographic terminology. In fact, once I was in Luang Prabang, a fellow faculty member who thumbed through those two notebooks suggested I consider a career writing pornography in Lao!

All of this time, the war situation became more and more tense. My situation seemed not to be in doubt because I was tentatively assigned to the national proto-university, the senior teacher training institute of Vientiane, affectionately known as "Dong Dok." Dong Dok was located at "Kilometer Post 12," just past the fenced and well-guarded American suburb known just as affectionately as "Kilometer Post 6." Just so I could see a few sites outside Vientiane, which looked more and more like an army camp every day, I was allowed a "do-it-yourself tour" of Luang Prabang, the legendary Shangri-La of Laos, nestled in its own bowl of mountains that looked as if they came from a Chinese scroll painting. IVS had a small guest facility there too -- a row of former servants' quarters behind the old French Commandant's house in Ban Wat Nong. A really wonderful IVS supervisor and his very typical large Lao family lived in the main house. It was impossible not to have a good time in Luang Prabang. Even today, with the influx of tourists and the inevitable pollution of the authenticity of the place, Luang Prabang remains a quiet haven of tranquility. Do a "Google" on "Luang Prabang" plus "tourist" and you will get a sense of what I'm trying to say.

While I was there, another IVS jeep was rocketed. There was not much left of the people who had been in the jeep. This was the last straw, the step past the line of sanity, the signal that the time had come for IVS to begin serious consideration of removing Laos from the list of countries where they had programs.

To try to understand the events and feelings of that time in thinly disguised fiction, try to get hold of a copy of The Land of a Million Elephants by the late Asa Baber. Your library might be able to arrange an interlibrary loan of the book, or you might order a second-hand copy: it costs less than $5, but then there are shipping costs, total probably around ten dollars postpaid.

It is a good one-evening read if you don't stop to reminisce (and occasionally cry a little) as I did. The book is a satire on the total miscommunication between in-country officials and their governmental superiors in Europe and America, between one group of government representatives and another, between non-Lao and Lao, and between everybody and the cadre of international misfits that seems to gather whenever there is such a vacuum of sanity and common sense as so often exists in war zones. All of these characters coalesce to create a wacky but tragic disaster for the people who have nowhere else to escape to. In a way, IVSers fit into almost all these groups, though the primary place for us was with our Lao friends, neighbors and colleagues.

At the end of it all, of course, the foreigners went home with juicy stories to tell. The various international misfits went on to the next international Twilight Zone, but the locals stayed there with their broken homes and families, each with its private disaster, each with its private heartache.

I went to a "rest house" on a beach on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia to drown my sorrows mostly with alcohol over loss of my family -- the only meaningful family I had had -- and to try to make sense of this huge portion of my life. Ultimately, it turned out that there was no sense in it. It just was.