VII. "Te Deum": a Vivid Flashback
It is strange how my finding a good CD of Berlioz's "Te Deum" a few days ago would bring back a day back in 1973 with such perfect clarity. I had just gotten my stereo components hooked up so that they work. (We jokingly call it the "DoubleOpenRumbleFart" because of the way it overpowers the room it is in.) For a while I have been looking for the occasional CD of music that I remember from the past. I seem to have taken the advice to "wear the world like a loose garment" a little too literally: A few bits of artwork, a couple of deeply revered images of the Buddha are about the only material souvenirs that remain from my past. Always living so near the edge, with an emergency medical evacuation or two here, a politically necessitated evacuation there, the occasional drunken stupor and those who take advantage of them (If you'd like to be worked over by drunken sailors, I recommend Bangkok's port district Klong Theuy.) and not much but the clothes that were on my back at the time have remained after life's little turning points like these.
To begin nearer the beginning of this "flashback episode," there apparently was a major religious denomination that had quietly supported my work in Luang Prabang for several years. Normally, IVSers are "pushed out of the nest" after a single two years' service contract, but somehow I kept re-volunteering again and again and was re-accepted. Their support for me and my project is probably a big factor in my being able to see my adopted kids all the way through, until we could lock arms and march through the streets singing "Peace has come at last!" at the top of our lungs. No more forcible inductions into various armies!
IVS uses very little besides the newsletters written by volunteers for their friends and relatives back home to publicize the organization. After reading some of my descriptions of my work with students and refugees, these church people wanted to offer "earmarked" donations to keep my specific work going. (Later, when it was determined that brushing up my French would help me, they also paid for me to attend an intensive French language course in posh Villefranche sur Mer, on the Riviera.)
Villefranch sur Mer -- hangout for half the fashionable
The first I heard of all this support was when I received a "sideband" ("Single-Sideband," a shortwave method of sending things that looked like telegrams) message that a Bishop wanted to come to visit me and his only request was that we go together to see some of my summer student programs in refugee areas. I tried to drop in on my volunteers at least once every two weeks, so it wasn't hard to schedule. We could deal with Bishops.
That year our students were working in an area called the "Long Nam Khanh" -- the Nam Khanh valley, which had little to recommend it besides the lack of bombs and the fact that there was a year-round stream. A string of ten refugee settlements was established with fetching names like "Village Number One," "Village Number Two," etc. By refugee standards, it wasn't all that bad a place, but it was hard for me to describe it as much more than a lot of misery in a very small place. The village people were moved there solely to get them out from under "carpet bombing." The ethnic "Lowland Lao" didn't do too badly: their houses built 8 feet above the ground on stilts were fairly well adapted to the bottomless ooze they stood above in this Nam Khanh Valley area. The "High Mountain Lao" (Some Yao, more Khmu tribal peoples) fared worse; their ground-level huts had near knee deep mud for the main indoor floor, so about the only places they or their guests could even sit down during the rainy part of the year were on the sleeping platforms along one side. And of course, the only villages that got really clean water were the ones furthest upstream along the little Nam Kanh stream. Every village made its contribution to the pollution of the water in the villages further downstream. By the time the water made it to Village Number Ten, it had a definite "body" and "nose" to it!
We (the Bishop and I) stopped off in three villages to drop off the students' monthly bag of rice The only food they got from us was the rice; they had to get veggies from the villagers and fill out the diet with minnows they caught with cast nets from the stream. We also carried along cans of kerosene and "testicles" -- the students' name for replacement mantles for the pump-up lanterns they used in evening teaching. One of our programs was to offer a head start sort of program teaching younger kids reading and arithmetic in the daytime then teaching their parents the same subjects at night. The deal was, we would teach the kids (which everybody wanted) only if the kid's parents came to night school to learn the same subjects (which nobody wanted). We were correct in guessing that the parents would come around and discover it was great fun to learn these "kiddie" subjects, even at the "wrong" stage of life. I checked with several other villages to be sure nobody was sick, nobody was having problems with "phi" (little woodland spirit beings) and to gather notes for family back in Luang Prabang or even in other more settled refugee villages.
It was the Rainy Season. That day was one of those many days when the driving rain started well before dawn, kept up every minute of every hour of the day, and then even all night and into the next day. Most of the time it appeared that the gusts of rain were spattering drops the size of giant frogs horizontally. I had long since given up on trying to keep warm or dry in weather like this, so it was fun to watch the Bishop try to cope in his thick black woolen cape. He gave up his shoes and socks and rolled his trousers up past his knees after the first two villages. I just hope he didn't pick up hookworm, as I did most summers. I'm not a sadist. I had tried to outfit him with some blue jeans but at that time my waist size was 30 inches, a very un-episcopal dimension.
The Bishop's attire below the waist also had the disadvantage of allowing ever present leeches easy access to some of the more tender parts of his anatomy. The students had no idea precisely what a "Bishop" might be, but they were entertained by having such an authority figure there, with his pants down around his ankles and two or three of them (the students) chasing around his privates with lit cigarettes -- the standard method of making leeches let go and fall off. Leeches look totally gross! Sort of a slimy, fat wormlike blob. They functioned a little like our ticks except that each leech could suck HUGE amounts of blood, enough even to make a person pass out from low blood pressure. Also, they inject a substance that keeps the blood from clotting to close the hole; each bite continues to bleed for several days.
We finished our work about four p.m. The dim reddish rainy season light that filtered through the delicate foliage of the bamboo trees looked like a winter afternoon in the temperate zones. As we got back to "Village Number One," the last refugee village before our passage across the actual "Nam Khanh" stream and then another hour slogging through deep mud with the jeep in compound low gear and, of course, four wheel drive engaged, to the nearest real road (that first year, all the roads within the Long Nam Khanh were mere bulldozer tracks) -- people came running out into the rain to flag us down. There was a nine year old boy with a high fever -- all fevers were called "jungle fever" there. He was not conscious and would surely die before the next morning without medical care that I could not provide. The villagers already had his body trussed to a makeshift bamboo stretcher. The Bishop had to sit on the floor behind me in the jeep to make it possible to prop the stretcher across the top of the passenger seat. To make things even more cosy, the boy's father, fresh from his upland, unirrigated rice field, squeezed in beside the Bishop. "Eau de Armpit!"
The day's rain had raised the water level of the stream we had to ford a lot more than I had expected. The water was high enough that it would have drowned out the Jeep's motor if we'd just charged right in. While my Lao assistant organized lashing the stretcher of the sick kid to the canvas top of the Jeep, I got out my submarine gear: a big roll of duct tape and some lengths of thin-wall pipe the same diameter as the exhaust pipe. We had to wait until the exhaust system cooled down, and that put us far enough into twilight that the crossing became more dangerous by the minute. With short pieces of pipe to angle the exhaust gases above water level and with electrical parts of the engine sealed up with swatches of duct tape, it is usually possible to navigate pretty deep water as long as you start out with a reasonably cold motor, get a running start, and don't stay underwater more than a few minutes.
We did just barely make it to the opposite shore, and were the last vehicle to make it for almost two weeks. Otherwise, it might have turned out to be a "two-week holiday in the beautiful, muddy Long Nam Khanh."
Given the condition of the bulldozer track to the main road, and the condition of the unpaved main road itself, it was near midnight when we finally made it back to town. We went straight to the Provincial Hospital, a mildewed leftover from the days when the French Army guarded the remotest outposts of "La Monde Francophone," and unloaded the stretcher at the recently constructed "critical care building" which had been built to provide a clean place for people to recover after surgery. Before the Swiss medical team, there had been no such thing as surgery in Luang Prabang. The young attendant radioed the Swiss doctors' house and immediately started ventillating the sick kid's lungs; no machinery, just a squeezable bag that looked somewhat like a floppy football.
The Swiss medic arrived and fairly quickly said that the kid was a lost cause, that he would be dead in a matter of hours no matter what we did. I remembered my son Thongdy who had miraculously survived his case of Blackwater Fever, normally fatal. Why not another miracle? I told the Bishop what I wanted to do and sent him to my house in a "Samlo," the universal three-wheel bicycle taxi. Then I said to the medic, "Well, if anything at all can be done, I will stay here and do it, no matter how long it takes." The medic thought a few seconds, hooked up an intravenous bag with a salt-water drip, prepared two hypodermic syringes, and labelled them -- one with a blue piece of tape, the other with red tape.
He had me take the kid's pulse every five minutes. If it was too slow, I was to put a cubic centimeter from the red syringe into a section of brownish rubber tubing in the intravenous setup. If, on the other hand, the kid's heart started racing, I was to use the blue syringe to "cool him down." Every third pulse reading was to be followed by an old fashioned blood pressure check (none of those fancy beeping blood pressure robots they have in US hospitals' critical care units!) After the medic left, I did my first couple of pulse readings and wrote them down. In a fit of excessive confidence, I held his hand between pulse readings and kept ordering him "Live, damn it, LIVE!" I hoped to feel it if anything was going wrong between checkups.
My almost letting Thongdy die due to sheer neglect made me determined that I would not under any circumstances allow this kid to die! We Buddhists rarely pray: nature will do whatever is natural, there are no Buddhist parallels to things like the Parting of the Red Sea. No likelihood of divine intervention. Anyhow I begged that any Merit I might have earned in my regular Buddhist practice might be given to thiskid, not to "all sentient beings who suffer, as is more usual. My will power was to no avail. After about the third hour, at 4 a.m., the kid gave a snort, sort of. It was his "death rattle," the only one I have ever heard. I never want to hear another of them! We radioed the Swiss medic again, and only out of sympathy to me, more or less, he came to the hospital yet again, checked the kid, and told me to go home and get some rest before I too ended up needing hospitalization -- or a funeral pyre.
When I got home, the Bishop was snoring away in a rattan armchair; the kids had put a blanket over his lap -- after having given him one last going over in pursuit of leeches. Khamsouk brought me a little one-person "ep" of glutinous rice and a little bowl of frog stew left over from supper. I guess the noise of getting my dinner served woke the Bishop up. We looked at each other. No words. He knew. He too had had a personal investment in trying to do the impossible, in trying to will the kid to live.
As I finished eating, still wordlessly, I poured us both a healthy jelly-glassful of Jack Daniels' Black Label over some ice cubes. (Much later, I learned that the Bishop's denomination had a real fetish about avoiding beverage alcohol at all costs.) Then I put on the Berlioz "Te Deum" I mentioned above, the audio cassette of which had been a "hostess gift" from a previous passing "world traveller." A live presentation of the music requires at a minimum a larger than usual symphony orchestra, a huge concert organ, two large adult choirs, and a boys' choir. I hadn't listened to it before, but this seemed to be the time for at least a "Te Deum." ["We praise the O God, we acknowledge thee to be the Lord..."]
The tape and the Jack Daniels ended at about the same time. I was crying like a baby, an explosion of emotion from this day and maybe from all the human misery I had been immersed in for so many months. The Bishop had turned to face the corner; when he turned to face me, I saw that he too, for whatever reason, was also overcome by emotion, also shedding rivers of tears.
I don't know where the Bishop's head had been during the music and the booze, but I know that I had been in a place where little kids didn't have to die because of adults' foolishness, a place where wanting obviously Good things was enough to make them happen. The Bishop had only a few terse comments: "I have been in the religion business for forty years and I still don't know what can cause a mere human to create something like that. And I still don't understand how God can torture such innocents as that kid."
The silence between us stayed in effect all the way to the airstrip. For once, the little two seater plane that would take him back to Vientiane and the outside world was on time.
I hurried back to the Provincial Hospital to look for the boy's father. He was sitting with his son's corpse on the veranda of the building that served as a morgue, which was a pretty busy place: some days they delivered dismembered soldiers piled up in dump trucks fresh from the "front." Amid the carnage, the father was sitting with his dead son, chanting quietly. I waited until he seemed to have finished and offered to pay for whatever he wanted in the way of a funeral. Even though the Lao normally cremate their dead, the cost of wood for the funeral pyre, incense and a candle for each family member and friend, perhaps a few monks to "make it official" can run into pennies for a white Ajaan like me, but those pennies were beyond the means of a farmer whose income amounts to a negative number. The father answered "No, thank you. He had not yet lived long enough to have become a person." He did accept pocket change for the fare on a truck-taxi back to the Long Nam Khanh.
Even today, I don't think I've completely recovered from the emotions of that day, and I experience them again when I play Berlioz's "Te Deum." I am back in the Long Nam Khanh.
I never learned their names. To this day they remain "the sick boy" and "the boy's father."
posted by Frank | 6:57 PM
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