Land of a Million Elephants

UPDATE ON QUOC Letter dated January 7, to a friend

2006-03-04T06:04:00.000-08:00

I am including this item, a "paste" from a letter to two longtime friends, Long Nguyen and Randy Holmberg. This expresses my panic -- at the time -- as decently as I was able:

Today [January 7, 2006] at noon, we took a friend and his wife and one of their three kids out to dim sum in Tampa. The friend, a guy named Quoc, took a work team to New Orleans to make a little Christmas cash for their families. Somebody had cranked up a generator (to watch TV) in the building where they were sleeping. One of Quoc’s team had gone back home that afternoon because he sensed “evil spirits” in the building. The police found Quoc collapsed over the generator, apparently trying to turn it off, with his two best friends dead on the floor at his feet. The final member of the crew, who was in another room, came back to St Pete as a permanent “human vegetable.” Quoc himself was in a coma for almost two weeks. Ban, Quoc’s two brothers, and his wife, camped out in the ER waiting room the whole time. When they got him back to St Pete, no ER would treat him or even diagnose him due to lack of insurance. Good old “Bush-ism” in health care! (If you’re too stupid – or poor – to buy insurance, to hell with you. Literally. Let god clean up the gene pool.)

Hell, Florida’s “baby Bush” version of “Compassionate Conservatism” is at least a tiny bit more in touch with ordinary people’s reality than that of his older brother George, and that of the political "Star Chamber" cabal he fronts for.

Well, Quoc isn’t at all the same person he was: used to be a real hell-raiser, always mouthing off; now, pensive and silent. We thought he was a Night-of-the-Living-Dead zombie until somebody cranked up a Karaoke machine in his house: Quoc suddenly “came to life.” I was able to help his wife understand that though she didn’t get back the same Quoc, just as Ban didn’t get back the same Frank, she did get back the REAL Quoc. If there is a god, he surely is perverse to stick me, with my annoying but relatively minor brain damage into the middle of such a heartbreaking episode of brain damage! (The last two entries to my “blog” have to do with my near insanity at home alone while Ban camped out in the New Orleans ER waiting room with Quoc’s wife, and his brothers.

The one advantage seems to be that both of us, Quoc and me, came out of the “brain-dead” experience looking younger, me a little younger, him a lot younger. Today was the first time I’d seen him face to face since the coma. He looks much too young to have a wife and three kids! On my advice, we kept me and Quoc from meeting, up to now, because he seemed not to be able to cope with English, and I knew from my own experience that having me, with my only Vietnamese being bedroom-and-poolhall-Vietnamese, attempt to talk with him could really drive him nuts.. My experience with similar phenomena is that it is kind of like being back in your own home (in your own brain) and suddenly finding that somebody else has come in and rearranged everything: you know where everything is, only when you try to grab something, it isn’t there. So you have to keep groping around until you find it. As you may be able to see, I am still a little emotionally “strung out” over all this. It made my OWN difficulties return vividly. Unbearably vividly.

(Beware, I may paste some of the above into my “blog.” This is the first time I’ve put it into words that seem to me to be an honest description of what happened to me and also seem to have some likelihood of being understood by others.)

[And this posting is what was threatened in the parentheses above. -- Lobsang]

New Orleans on my Mind - A Gal Named Katrina

2005-12-17T10:47:00.000-08:00

Another "post" to the blog that doesn't add chapters to the Laos Experience!

I have been nearly psychotic the past week or so due to obsession with the fate of friends (one old, one new) affected by what has been going on in New Orleans. Most recently, our dearest friend Quoc (pronounced more like "wok" in English) went to New Orleans to take advantage of reasonably good wages for doing the kind of work he does best; if he advertised, he'd probably call himself "handyman." He worked for a small residential remodelling company in St Petersburg, but injured his back on the job and, of course, was promptly fired. That's one of the consequences of Florida's "growth friendly" labor laws, loosely defined as "Employment At Will." Basically, both employer and employee have the right to terminate employment at any moment for any reason with no prior notice -- the essence of Donald Trump's "Your Fired!"

"Use 'em up, then trash 'em" is another way of putting it.

So Quoc is now a self-employed "remodelling specialist," seeking independent jobs that fit his abilities. And his repertoire of skills is prodigious!

Ban, my lifemate, first met Quoc at his gym. At that time, Quoc could best have been described as an "angry young man." Or, less attractively, he might also have been described as "street punk." Under Ban's mentorhood and with my encouragement, he became a responsible family man: attractive wife and three young daughters. With perseverance he worked his way from publicly subsidized housing to buying a small bungalow in a neat neighborhood.

Then, his first disaster, the back injury, occurred.

We got word of his second disaster early in the evening of December 1: two members of the New Orleans Work crew he organized were dead; he and two others were in comas. Someone, perhaps Quoc himself, had started up a generator in the building where they were working and (as is pretty necessary in today's New Orleans) eating and sleeping. The police had found him collapsed over the generator, which he appears to have been trying to stop. The two dead guys were nearby.

Quoc is bright enough to have heeded the warning (not really required, but usually present on generators) only to use the machine in a "well ventilated area." Open a window, right? WRONG! After every hurricane that passes through Florida several people, anywhere from three to ten, pay the price of thinking a garage or carport is "well-ventilated." For internal combustion engines, only a location outdoors or in another uninhabited, ventilated building is safe. Carbon monoxide is deadly. It is an invisible gas, but flows through space like a liquid, with currents and "water levels" all along the way. If you are inside a building, for example, it will fill up a room until the "water level" reaches the windowsills, then it can overflow to the outdoors. Anybody whose head is below the level of the sill of the open window will first experience a sense of extraordlinary well-being and relaxation. If the person gives in to the urge to take a nap, he probably won't wake up. That is why suicide by carbon monoxide is so popular: mild nausea at first, but then uncontrollable euphoria and that feeling of well-being and relaxation. What a way to go to heaven!

(No, I don't have this info from personal experience -- I'd be dead then, wouldn't I? It comes from a book Self Deliverance - The Good Euthanasia Guide by Derek Humphrys, updated regularly. I read it avidly at a time when my numerous medical problems made "self deliverance" seem to be the best option for me. Carbon monoxide was the method I had chosen for myself.)

Quoc somehow managed to overcome the euphoria and think to try to save his friends. As noted, the police found him collapsed over the still-running generator with his hand near the "kill" button. Ban immediately made arrangements to accompany his wife and two of his brothers to New Orleans. Due to my own critical medical problems, I had to be the one to stay home alone and take care of Skippy, our canine "son." As some of you will know, I almost lost my mind worrying about both Ban and Quoc! Ban told me as he packed his little travel bag, Quoc is my younger brother! And on reflection, I thought, "Yes, Quoc is 'favorite nephew' to me too."

During my despair, I made a personal pledge -- a possibly bad habit left over from my Christian upbringing -- that I would somehow involve myself in a spiritually oriented organization, perhaps a church, perhaps the little Buddhist Temple that Ban and I have informally supported in the past. I haven't been able to implement that goal yet, but perhaps it will be one of my first major projects in the new year to come. But to whom would a Buddhist make such a pledge? One wit proposed a Buddhist definition of "God the Omnipotent and Omniscient" as a "socially acceptable imaginary friend for those over age 12." A person can have one god, no god, or thousands of gods as far as the teachings of the Buddha are concerned; the "god-concept" just isn't particularly central. So somehow, I'll drag my hybrid (but probably nonexistent) "soul" to one religious establishment or another until I find one that seems to "fit."

Early last week, Quoc was simply discharged from the hospital in New Orleans, the only hospital that reopened in the city after Katrina. Though he was probably very obviously in need of further attention, no referral was made. Ban kept probing me with regard to what options are available to someone with no insurance. Well, in Florida even those WITH insurance are well advised to invoke the state law that anybody who manages to stagger into an Emergency Room MUST be accepted for treatment, as Ban and I found out on numerous occasions when I myself was near death. Neither hospitals nor doctors are particularly pleased at the idea of accepting patients, unless the law forces them to.

This is the nearest present day concept I know of that parallels the medieval concept of "Sanctuary." If you make it to sanctuary, you live. If you don't, you die.

So we had no option but to wait: knowing that Quoc would get sicker and sicker without treatment, hoping for some crisis that would qualify his case as an "Emergency." He spent last Thursday, Dec 15 "dizzy," then collapsed on Friday Dec 16. They rushed him to the Emergency Room at a county hospital (I won't say which one) that has the reputation of "sanctuary of last resort" for the poor, the homeless, and the uninsured. Hallelujah, they accepted him as a patient but immediately referred him to St Joseph's hospital in Tampa, where they knew the high tech equipment and the medical specialists needed for "brain cases" are available.

At St Josephs, they got him to the point of being "stabilized" and sent him home. He is still officially a patient and his orders are to return Monday morning, when the brain specialists and the staff who run the brain-related diagnostic equipment will all be present. We, his "family," are on pins and needles, but at least we managed to get him to an Emergency Room in critical enough state that law required them to accept him, but not in that old critical medical state known as Death!

Lately I have spent much more time in front of the Buddha, "sitting." Those of you who try to practice the Buddha's teachings in their starkest form will know what I mean by "sitting." It is all there is for me to do. And even if it doesn't do anything to heal Quoc, it helps to heal me.

The older New Orleans friend? He arrived in St Petersburg several weeks after Katrina as a refugee. He is a very attractive young man and has proven to have both the education and the work experience necessary for survival. The one requirement he did not have was a white skin. Back in New Orleans, he had had to sit on the rooftop of his building watching the helicopters go by to "whiter" places. He and the people on top of his building lived out a nightmare of trying to protect themselves (without weapons) against those who had weapons to take away.... what? All that was left for them was the clothes on their backs.

When the water went down to chest-deep, he made it to the Superdome. He loses the ability to speak when he tries to describe what went on there. Having undergone my own little "post traumatic stress," I predict it may be years before he can verbalize those memories in an attempt at self-healing. Or he may never be able to access all of them. Every time we meet, those things hidden from us become the topic of conversation. Our brains are remarkable in being able to file the unthinkable in separate compartments, each small enough not to kill if accessed. Somehow he managed to be evacuated and just happened to end up in the Tampa Bay area. Volunteers tried to help him get settled.

The first 51 phone calls to prospective landlords -- developers and property owners who saw potential for making a buck out of Katrina -- turned out to be interviews mainly oriented toward determining his race, which most would classify as "black," a hangover from the old miscegenation laws that defined "Negro" as anyone who had "even a fraction of a drop of Negro blood" in their veins. (I get this mental picture of a ghoulish coroner dissecting out the circulatory system one vein or artery at a time, trying in vain to find that fraction of 'black' blood." I think I would call it hybrid, a delightful melding of racial qualities that make him the deep south equivalent of Hawaii's "Golden Man."

As fate would have it, this man is, like me, a gay alcoholic. And, as fate would have it, the largest and, in my opinion, least idiosyncratic gay meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous in St Pete sits across the street from the most upscale gay bar in St Pete, Georgie's. I've made it a personal crusade to make a turn northward toward the meeting and continued sobriety more alluring and enticing than a southward turn toward familiar ego-validation and the subsequent oblivion at Georgie's, the familiar bar environment.

In truth, my contribution has been next to insignificant. This man is self-motivated and, no matter how emotionally scarred by his experience, will succeed! For me, in fact, it is a privilege that he allows me to share as a spectator and self-appointed head cheerleader as he pushes toward success. His current job involves work shifts of at least 12 hours out of every 36, so he has little time at present for his passions. Maybe that's a good thing right now. Passions can drag a person upward toward heaven, or downward toward the various hells of despair.

But, at his direction, I've made up business cards for his lifelong dream: a martial arts salon.

Somehow, this man's fight uphill against heavy odds and Quoc's fight just to remain in the world as a human rather than as a vegetable are inextricably intertwined in my mind.

A New Beginning

2005-11-19T08:38:00.000-08:00

One reason I think I've been so reluctant to continue the pattern of posting I had developed -- essentially, the rough draft of a potential book, in chapters -- is that I was beginning to tread perilously close to topics that even today have a capacity to wound me deeply. Topics that, to me, have had a lot to do with my acquiring a lot of psychological baggage that ultimately led to some pretty unsavory periods in my life, things that even now I am dealing with, recovering from.

Another reason is that I have long tended to avoid starting anything unless I can "win." How does one "win" with a blog? I don't know, but I've always had somewhat of a chip on my shoulder and I've been notorious for doing things at the last minute or not doing them at all, all in order to somehow "win" in an imaginary life competition. This predisposition has been at the root of the bizarre extremes my life has gone to. Granted, I have done a lot of "winning," but was it worth the price? A chronic "winner's" life is a lonely one!

As of now, I'm going to stop waiting until I can cope with the feelings involved before adding to the blog. I'm going to try to force myself to contribute at least once a week, even if all I am ready for is air-head "dear diary" postings. Yes, the "Adventures in the Land of a Million Elephants" will continue. But no, they will be added only when I feel I can cope with them. The result, I think, will do me more good as well as eventually turning out more rewarding stuff for this hypothetical "book."

From this point on, the format will be as follows:

1. "Dear Diary" entries, like this one....

2. My most recent "chapter" in "The Land of a Million Elephants"

3. The "chapters," in logical order, from Chapter 1 onward.

In other words, the most recent stuff first, even if it isn't all that "good," followed by "The Book."

Another thing that will change: I will start allowing people to post comments that will appear with the blog, at least for a while. That will oblige me to check more frequently to be sure that material that violates the blog provider's "Terms Of Service" does not appear for too long.

And those of you who have continued as loyal readers even when I wasn't a very loyal writer, please accept my warmest regards. I'll do better!

Foreword

2005-09-28T08:53:00.000-07:00

The current "post" is

Chapter VIII. Souk's First Birthday; the Arrival of Mr. Nixon

You may click on any chapter

In the list to the left
in order to get there directly.

Hear ye, hear ye! From now on, I will have the most recent "post" appear at the top, just under this announcement. Other chapters will appear in order below it, some of them scrolling off the screen. Use the menu at left to get to them.

Note that dates are not correct. They are "spoofed"
to make the "Chapters" Come out in order, like
chapters in a book -- which this "blog" may evolve
to become someday.

Feel free to send comments to me at fwelsh1@tampabay.rr.com.

If you wish, I can add you to a mail list through which I let my "fans" know when I've managed to get around to adding to the "blog." Thanks for all the encouragement!

VIII. Souk's First Birthday; The Arrival of Mr. Nixon

2005-09-25T09:55:00.000-07:00

First posted September 28, 2005

After the family trauma of Thongdy's near death (Chapter VI), it was difficult to settle down to routine. But what had brought me to Luang Prabang was a contract to teach English at the Teacher Training College of Luang Prabang, which supplied primary school teachers for most of the northern half of the country. So Thongdy was left with orders to rest, mostly, and Khamsouk did the marketing (a formidable task), running our kitchen, and tending to laundry and basic cleanliness in the house. I had to ride my trusty (mostly) 50 cc. Vespa motorscooter to the College, a kilometer or so outside the town, in time to be at the flagpole assembly to join in the singing of the haunting Royal anthem ("Since we Lao migrated here....") and chant the Buddhist "Five Precepts for Laypersons."

The Teacher College of Luang Prabang, also known locally as "Houanakang,"

as it appeared when I first arrived. A three story classroom building

joined the nearer yellow two story building.

Dorms, library, dining hall, and infirmary are across the road.

The French Lycee is in the white buildings to the left.

These "Five Precepts" are worthy (I hope) of a short digression. Westerners often confuse the "Precepts" with "Commandments." "Commandments are prescriptions for behavior that must be met. "Precepts" are goals that probably never completely fulfilled, but toward which a person strives on a daily basis. The "Precepts," -- imperfectly transliterated and imperfectly translated into English are --

"Panatipata veramani, sikkhapadang samadiyami."
I undertake the training rule to respect the lives of all sentient beings.

"Adinnadana veramani, sikkhapadang samadiyami"
I undertake the training rule to refrain from taking anything that is not freely offered.
(A little stricter than "Thou shalt not steal.")

"Kamesu michchara veramani, sikkhapadang samadiyami."
I undertake the training rule to refrain from sexual misconduct.
(Sex by coercion, sex that involves breaking a promise. No, the Buddha didn't much
care what folks did with their genitals, as long as there was no coercion, no broken vows.)

"Musavada veramani, sikkhapadang samadiyami."
I undertake the training rule to refrain from allowing untruthful things to be communicated.
(Stricter, I think, than a mere prohibition on one's own lying.)

"Sura meraya majja pamadatthana veramani, sikkhapadang samadiyami"
I undertake the training rule to refrain from the use of substances that might tend to
impair the functioning of the mind.

These Precepts were chanted daily in Pali, the language of all early Buddhist scriptures.

My first year, my time was devoted almost solely to teaching English, interspersed with Sunday outings with students to swim at really glorious nearby waterfalls and perhaps collect wild orchids off trees along the way. I was pretty good at teaching English as the Peace Corps had given us the equivalent of the classroom work for a Master of Arts in Teaching English as a Foreign Language under the combined auspices of Princeton University in the U.S. and "Robert Koleje" (now "Bosphorus University"), often affectionately called the "Harvard of Turkey," in Istanbul. That was followed by two years' teaching English at Ataturk University in Erzurum, high in the Pontic mountain range, in the foothills of Mount Ararat in the far northeastern part of the country. To give you an idea of distances, it took overnight on the "Far Eastern Express" to get from Istanbul to Ankara, the capital, and then another two days and a night on the same train to get from Ankara to Erzurum. In Ankara, the hotels hated to see us coming because we turned the bathrooms black with the soot we'd accumulated going thru tunnels on the rail line with coal-powered steam locomotives along the way.

If other moral obligations had not presented themselves, I probably would have fulfilled only the two-year contract I had with International Voluntary Services (IVS) and then returned to the U.S. Not that teaching in Laos was not enjoyable! Because the only thing actually "worshipped" by Buddhists is "knowledge" or "wisdom," teachers are treated with an unbelievable degree of respect. In Turkey, teachers were expected to manhandle unruly students; I had found it bizarre to be slugging or wrestling a 280 pound university soccer player to the floor (I weighed about 130 pounds at the time and was as scrawny as a beanpole). In Laos, the idea of a student behaving in an unruly way never even occurred. One of the national holidays was "The Day for Worshipping Teachers." The idea appalled me at first, until somebody pointed out, "They aren't worshipping YOU; they are worshipping any wisdom that may be in you." On meeting a teacher anywhere, students would bow their head and put their hands together in the universal sign of respect.

Watch this Space!

I will continue to add to the current chapter, VIII!

Souk's Birthday Party

Mr Nixon's Arrival (Nixon the Monkey, that is)

I. Prologue:

2005-06-18T17:30:00.000-07:00

Almost all non-military people I know who worked in Laos during the war years were, and probably still are, paranoid to one degree or another. Laos in the war years was more isolated than Tibet has been for the past few centuries. You had to have a job in Laos or pull a lot of strings. Nobody, especially media people, made casual visits.

A friend of mine, really upset at what was happening in the carpet bombing zones, wrote an anguished letter to his Senator. The Senator's chief of staff and the usual gaggle of reporters arrived. As a result, a tiny bit of what I call "The Stink of War" began to escape the hermetically sealed box that was Laos. For months we received memos and letters from officials of the American Mission along the lines of "loose lips sink ships," and the necessity to see that none of the facts escaped the information wall that was around the country. Some people, even "neutral" IVS volunteers, were suddenly sent home or reassigned.

A lot of the non-Lao people who were there were, and still are, in positions to really hurt you if they want to. Some of the Lao we lived and worked with are still there; in fact, most of the best people I worked with stayed, determined to make the best of what was then an uncertain situation. The people I was closest to are the ones most likely to be injured by having their names thrown around loosely. I hope some of them are in government and education and are making their patriotic contribution to the Laos of the future. In my classes I always emphasized that whether it was right or wrong, the government was still OUR government.

That is why, as they say in some prefaces "the names have been changed to protect the innocent...

"...and the guilty."

Luang Prabang in the morning mist.
The gilded stupa at the top of the sacred mountain centers the town.
The white walls of the former King's Palace (Now the National Museum)
gleam through the coconut palm trees on the far shore.

Partly because my own life has been complicated (mostly by critical medical problems) and partly because I didn't want to put innocent people in harm's way, I have lost touch with almost everybody I was directly associated with while I was there. One of my dreams is, if my health permits, to make a nostalgic trip to Southeast Asia. The first stop will be in Rach Gia, on the southernmost tip of Vietnam to meet the half of my life-partner's family that chose to remain in Vietnam after the war. It would also be wonderful to go back to Laos, especially if I could make contact with any of my old friends there. Maybe this "blog" can help me make contact anew with colleagues or even with some of my foster sons, who should be celebrating the births of grandchildren by now.

Looking at current tourist maps of Luang Prabang, it seems that almost half the houses have been turned into tourist facilities: hotels, guest houses, restaurants --even a swimming pool or two! (The buildings in all that existed of Luang Prabang in the early 1970s are a part of the United Nations "World Heritage" zone and cannot be altered externally or torn down.) Where do all those people from the houses live now?

LUANG PRABANG TOURIST MAP: The "Pond House," the first place we lived, is across "Bounkhong Road" from #67 on the map. Our second house, where we moved to escape the virulent malaria at the "Pond House," is next to Wat Xieng Thong, The [former] King's Wat, #2 near the top edge of the map. So who ever knew that "Bounkhong Road" had a name!

When I was there, there was one restaurant, one soup shop, and three 24 hour-a-day Ovaltine cafes. Yes, Ovaltine! There was one place for transients to stay called locally the "bunk-ka-low"("bungalow"), and until the Phou Vao Hotel was built just before my departure, there was no swimming pool closer than the American suburb outside Vientiane, hundreds of miles away. But who needed swimming pools with three magnificent waterfalls with crystal-clear water to relax in? One of my traditions while I was there was an annual Christmas Day skinny-dipping party at the most spectacular of the falls, the 150-foot-high-three tiered Kouang Sy falls just south of town with its three basins, each in a more enchanting tropical glade than the one before. This trip could have been dangerous as "the other side" in the war pretty much controlled that territory. (Americans called the Pathet Lao -- "State of Laos" -- army "the other side." Lao called them "our brothers and sisters." Slight difference in point-of-view.)

Fun at a tiny waterfall within easy walking distance
from town. The scrawny white guy in the middle is me.

Khamsouk and Thongdy, my first adoptees, are to my right.
The guy furthest toward the left in the picture is Bounthanh. He got swept up
in one of the regular dragnet sweeps and shanghaied into one or another
of the armies the day after this picnic at the falls. He came to show us his
gun, which was as tall as he was, and probably weighed more. His family
told us he died three days later. We never saw him again.
His sad, short life - 14 years - is probably a whole other story.

Before I found myself in Laos, I had graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a Summa Cum Laude degree in English literature, with a specialization in renaissance literature and somewhat of a gift for languages. My original choice for a career, the calling for which my really first-class education prepared me -- things like classical and New Testament Greek, a smattering of self-taught Hebrew, sundry theological courses -- was blocked mostly because of my family's deserved reputation for public scandal (the South could be like that, 'way back then).

Old East at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill,

built in 1792, was my dorm.

Nowadays, it has been gutted, rebuilt, and turned into an office building.

The only thing left of my Old East is the brick skin.

Alas, the little rooms for the students' personal slaves

are long since gone too, the victim of even earlier makeovers.

In France, or even in Britain, black sheep sons from disreputable families used to be sent overseas with the Foreign Legion or with Colonial Armies. In the U.S. the Peace Corps sometimes served the same function. Completely demolished emotionally and totally confused as to what meaning the rest of my life might have, I joined the Peace Corps on graduation and was assigned to teach in Turkey. For some reason, I felt (and still feel) that I have to prove myself "tough enough." History is full of men who because of physical weakness or emotional turmoil pit themselves against the toughest odds they can find. In recent history Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt come to mind. I maneuvered myself in to one of the more challenging assignments available, teaching at Ataturk University in Erzurum, a frigid place on the lower slopes of Mount Ararat. It was a wild place where people were either tough or dead. One crisp winter morning, a wolf was killed on my doorstep. From October through mid-May there were snow accumulations of several feet with drifts of several yards and nighttime low temperatures hovered between 40 and 50 degrees below zero. (At minus 44 degrees, Fahrenheit and Celsium temperatures are the same.) We rode one-horse sleighs to work at the university campus just outside town. Motorized vehicles couldn't make it. The only times I got really warm was Saturday afternoons, when I went for my weekly bath at a local hammam (Turkish bath), some of which were built in the early 1200s. A whole afternoon of luxury for less than 5 cents! Then a leisurely dinner of schnitzel, the local specialty, and plentiful, cheap Turkish beer. It would be worth a trip back to Erzurum just to repeat one of those delightful Saturdays, probably minus the beer.

After returning to the U.S. with admission to graduate school at Cornell University, it seemed that my future as a professor was made. Yet I knew that the tameness of American college life was not what I really wanted. The only other choice in the mid-1960s was to sit and wait to be drafted for cannon fodder in Vietnam. I didn't want that either. A friend had had experience with an outfit called International Voluntary Services (IVS) which had a colorful history dating back to World War I as a haven for young men from the traditional "peace churches" to serve honorably, usually as ambulance drivers or attendants where their survival rate was often lower than that of soldiers in the trenches.

II. Getting There

2005-06-16T12:31:00.000-07:00

It is said that President Kennedy modelled his earliest ideas for the US Peace Corps on the IVS volunteers he had seen teaching (and occasionally getting shot or blown up and killed) in Vietnam, when on junkets as a young Senator. By the mid-1960s, IVS had programs in Vietnam and Laos, among other places. At first I thought I would push for assignment to one of their teaching positions in Vietnam -- the "tough guy" obsession again. IVS, however, was gradually pulling back in Vietnam because so many of its volunteers were being killed in particularly gruesome ways. IVS was used to being treated as "neutral," somewhat as the World War I ambulance attendants had been treated, so this brutal treatment was puzzling. Years later we found out that American intelligence operatives had infiltrated the organization and compromised its neutrality. In Laos, the only jeeps ever to be rocketed were being driven at the time by intelligence operatives, usually with one or more unsuspecting "normal" volunteers aboard. Both kinds of volunteers were barbecued.

My options seemed to be either cannon fodder in Vietnam or rocket fodder in Laos. I chose Laos. If I was going to die, I at least wanted it to be doing something that helped somebody.

The local draft board in Charlotte NC had fixed ideas on who could possibly be a "real" pacifist: "Do you belong to the Quaker church? Then you aren't a pacifist. Classification 1-A. Next." I had already left graduate school, so I went on to Washington to prepare to leave for a position teaching in Laos, exact location yet to be determined. There was one catch: those with potential draft problems had to sign agreements that if drafted, they would pay all transportation costs and in-country costs associated with being in Laos. I couldn't do that.

For six months I cooled my heels in Washington, with nowhere to go and nowhere to return to. The more I heard about Laos, the more I wanted to go there. There seemed to be almost no reliable written resources on Laos, even in a place like the Foreign Service Institute's library, and this was the prime place for training America's diplomats. I did meet a steady stream of returning volunteers, though. Without exception, whenever the subject of "the Lao people" came up, their faces lit up and they got a special warm smile. All their "war stories" told of a gentle people coping with a particularly savage war they didn't understand. I wanted to go to Laos!

I first heard the maxim "When buffalo fight, it's the grass that suffers" in Laos.

A "friend of IVS" (it still amazes me how many of these "friends" IVS had then and still has now) knew of a young Foreign Service Officer in Lao language training at the Foreign Service Institute in Arlington, VA. His posting to his first job as a diplomat in the Embassy in Laos depended on Lao language competemce. His Laotian teachers felt he would benefit by being in a classroom environment. He was getting one-on-one training -- the best money could buy -- and access to state-of-the-art language laboratories. I was invited to join his class on an informal basis.

The strategy seems to have worked. He graduated with flying colors. By the time IVS had cleared up my draft status (by routing my draft board appeals to the New York state draft board where yet another "friend of IVS" was a member) my Lao language skills had gotten pretty good. I had learned to read it and write it, as well as speak it. I remained in draft classification 1-A, but somehow I never got called, even when a national draft lottery was instituted some years later.

Privately I was told that the "friend of IVS" on the New York draft board relayed the unofficial opinion of the board to us: "If the fool wants to go to Laos without a gun and be shot at from behind practically every bush and boulder, LET HIM!"

"The "Vertical Runway"
The "Vientiane International Airport" had mostly unpaved runways.
Cement was donated to pave them and otherwise modernize the
airport. This is where the cement ended up. The "Samlo," or "Three-
wheeler" in the foreground is how peons like me mostly travelled.

Before that time, IVS in Laos had trained new volunteers only in spoken Lao. When they saw how quickly I was progressing after becoming literate, they began an experiment in teaching them to read and write as well as to speak. The usual result was that they got a slow start since Lao script is alien to the basic concepts of western languages. Vowels are made up of an assortment of squiggles that can be before, after, above, and below the consonant that "carries" them. Very often a particular vowel sound can involve squiggles in all four directions. None of the consonants were like those in Western alphabets. That slowed the students down in the beginning. But when they finished the introductory part of the course, the ability to read and write gave them the ability to keep on learning rapidly. Lao is a tonal language, and Lao script represents the tones well. "Phonetic rendering" into western alphabets does not. So the volunteers spoke more correctly as well as having a tool that any second grade Lao school kid could help them with.

Laos was a pretty dangerous place when I arrived. Two voluteers died when their jeep was rocketed on an isolated country road. At that time, it seemed that IVSers were serving in places unbelievably isolated and vulnerable. To the cynical, it appeared that these volunteers were being given radios and then posted mostly in order to serve as expendable "enemy" troop detectors. I almost was not sent out to a site; nobody was sure whether IVS's neutrality would be respected. A decision was made to place volunteers only in major towns and never in such isolated locations as before. As it turned out later, I was able to help reinforce the idea of neutrality in a quiet way, just by being myself, treating everybody I met with honor, doing a good job for my Lao school directors, and especially by trying to avoid being absorbed by the ever-present American community. (They used to have to withhold my Living Allowance funds even to make me go to Vientiane for Team Meetings.)

Ultimately it did turn out that Southeast Asia and Laos were to be a big part of my future.

Those years in Laos turned out to be the most rewarding of my life.

III. Bienvenu a Laos!

2005-06-14T14:16:00.000-07:00

We last saw our intrepid volunteer, draft problems resolved, ready to depart for exotic Laos. The trip was the longest I had ever taken. A total of 48 hours just counting air travel time. Luckily, IVS let people stop off in Hong Kong for a day to go shopping and to begin decompressing and re-synching diurnal rhythms. Going in either direction, you end up needing to go to the toilet at strange hours and waking up in the middle of the night ravenously hungry. All I saw of Bangkok's Don Muang Airport was the International Arrivals lounge, outside the passport and visa check, since there hadn't been time to process a Thai visa. Apparently I lacked a formal certificate that I had not visited a zone with Yellow Fever cases in the past year. So I dozed six hours all by my lonesome on a hard bench (pretty much like a bus station bench) waiting for the Royal Air Lao plane to arrive.

It turned out to be an elderly DC-3 plane, held together with baling wire, paper clips, chewing gum, and prayers. It proudly bore the Royal logo: a red circle with the three-tiered umbrella and the three-headed elephant in white. In spite of the Thai guards who guarded the door -- perhaps to prevent my running amok in the Kingdom of Thailand, I went out onto the porch of the International Arrivals building, and good thing I did! Royal Air Lao was sashaying past, headed to the takeoff runways without me. I flapped my arms like a wounded buzzard, and apparently somebody noticed me. The side of the plane lettered in Lao faced me, and if I hadn't known what to make of it, I'm not sure whether I'd have caught it or not. The plane slowed to a stop, spun around, then taxied back to a spot not too far from the porch I was on.

After a wait, an equally elderly World War II surplus jeep came to take me and my carryon luggage out to the plane. If they hadn't come back for me I would have had to wait another 24 hours for the next Royal Air Lao flight. There was no ticket counter in the Arrivals lounge so I couldn't have switched airlines there. Finally on the plane, my first real Lao people! (The teachers at the Foreign Service institute didn't count -- they'd been in the U.S. too long and only spoke Lao in the classroom.) Almost everybody who wasn't Lao had tickets on a Thai Domestic flight that had taken off several hours earlier. The iced, jasmine scented towelettes dispensed with tongs by stewardesses were exactly appropriate for the climate. The ladies wore Lao skirts, the famous sexy Pha Sin, each of which had a hand-woven lower border that usually told where the woman was from. The stewardesses, however, had Pha Sins that had a pattern that only signified Royal Air Lao.

Sam Sen Thai Avenue, the "main drag" of Vientiane, Laos.
If you can't find it here, you don't need it.

My IVS welcoming committee figured correctly that I was hungry, so they took me to a nice Chinese restaurant in downtown Vientiane. In Laos, there was no such thing as a Lao restaurant with Lao cuisine in the whole country. Let the Vietnamese and Chinese do un-fun things like run businesses. There are too many streams to fish in, to many forests and jungles to go hunting in, too many fun things to do!

Our order was mainly the restaurant's specialty, roast duck. This was my first time using chop sticks. My first time with roast duck, slippery, oily randomly chopped chunks of duck! My first time with a chilli pepper sauce a la Laotienne -- the peppery-hottest seasoning I had ever experienced, even hotter and more peppery than Korean cuisine, which I had thought held the championship for scorched tonsils. And my origins were in the US upper South, where even a dash or two of black pepper was considered bold, adventurous cuisine. Thanks to slippery chunks of duck and clumsy chop sticks, most of the meal ended up in my lap and then discreetly kicked back under the bench.

These sauces are made from a special kind of pepper, even fierier than those used to make Tabasco sauce. In both Lao and Thai, they are referred to as "Rat Turd Peppers (mak phet khi nu), a reference to the size and shape of the peppers. If you should happen to touch one of these peppers and forget to wash your hands thoroughly with soap before using the toilet, you are in for several hours of agonizing pain in particularly sensitive parts of the anatomy. As if that weren't enough, the pepperiness remains full strength all the way through the digestive tract, if you get my drift. Stories abound of newly arrived volunteers having a usual dinner with the usual seasonings. Then, the next morning when using the toilet (often just a pit privvy) they would come lurching out with trousers around their ankles shouting "Help! Help! I've been bitten by a rattlesnake."

These chilli-peppers are that hot!

We have a few plants of these "Rat Turd" peppers in our back yard in St Petersburg, Florida. It is a relatively hardy perennial in tropical climates. We are popular with people of various Southeast Asian nationalities who come to pick a cup or two of them for use as seasonings and in sauces. And even people who should know better forget to wash their hands. We get a little entertainment out of that.

What can I say about this "Welcome to Laos" meal? I went to bed fairly hungry that night. IVS's staff guest house was modern enough (indoor plumbing) that I didn't mistake the effect of the peppers for a rattlesnake. I did, however, wonder if I'd done myself enough grievous bodily harm to need to see a doctor. Later in the morning I slipped out and wobbled along the edge of the rice paddies to a little shop out on the main road where I could buy a thing the shop owner told me was a "Kala Pao." I know now that it really was just a Chinese style steamed dumpling. After so long in the air and with so little in my stomach I thought I was consuming manna from heaven.

I ate four of them!

IV - Things to Come

2005-06-12T08:51:00.000-07:00

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.

V. Luang Prabang - the Pond House

2005-06-08T09:49:00.000-07:00

After a lot of soul-searching and many team meetings in all the towns where there were IVS volunteers, a decision was finally reached that the organization would not terminate programs in Laos. However, there would be no further isolated sites -- where a frightened volunteer and a walkie-talkie could serve as an expendable early alert for troop movements. For volunteers who remained in urban areas there would be many more restrictions on travel, even local travel. The more macho soldier-of-fortune types started calling us IVSers "wusses," but better an alive "wuss" than a dead hero.

Violation of travel restrictions would result in automatic termination of contract and return home. No exceptions, no appeals.

Early one fall morning I was taken to the Air America Terminal -- actually larger and better equipped than the Vientiane national airport facilities next door even though both terminals and towers used the same runways and taxi areas. It is sometimes hard to separate myth and fact on Air America. It was a subsidiary of American Airlines. In movies like "Air America" little attempt was made to separate fact from fiction, myth from history. (The movie features the young Mel Gibson as the idealistic young guy and John Candy as the evil guy, an odd role for him.) It was in fact the cover for a part of the American intelligence operation in Laos. Until recently writers had to say "allegedly," but if you Google "Air America" and "movie," more than half the articles acknowledge the Air America-CIA connection as a fact. Continental Air Services, CAS, a subsidiary of Continental Airlines, also served as cover for intelligence operations. In general, Air America ran the larger planes -- DC-3s and C-123s -- and CAS ran the smaller ones, like "Porters" ("Pilatus-Porter STOLs" that could land in very few feet of runway space, some that seemed shorter than the average ping pong table). C-123s were neat! They had a flap in the rear that let down like the seat-flap of long underwear; it was possible to drive a jeep right into the plane. My trip was to be on a DC-3 called the "Milk Run," so-called because it flew twice a week to deliver embassy commissary orders to the larger sites, mostly provincial capitals like Luang Prabang. Other regular flights were the two daily Kangaroos, small planes which hopped from site to site, one in a clockwise direction, the other in a counterclockwise direction and usually ended up in "Tango," or Thailand. The third regular American air service was the "Thai Elephant," a lumbering C-123 which shuttled back and forth between Vientiane in Laos and Udorn Air Base in Thailand, most of the time on a half-hourly schedule.

The terrain was so rugged that my Milk Run flight spent the last parts of the trip flying through narrow valleys. Almost anything I could say about emerging from the last valley into the basin where Luang Prabang sat would be a cliche: an emerald green saucer of gently terraced wet rice farming land. The contrast with the surrounding rugged, Chinese scroll-painting crags was breath taking. There was a reason Luang Prabang folks called their airport the "Flying Field." The field itself was about all there was to it. We used to joke that the toilet facilities were a large bush, ladies to the left, gents to the right.

Luang Prabang was packed. A military technique often referred to as "carpet bombing" had made it unwise for villagers to remain in huge swaths of the countryside. The idea was to drop bombs so close together that no living thing could survive within the targeted area. Toward the end of the war, I worked with former students who were primary schoolmasters in areas that had been "carpet bombed." It was gutwrenching to see what violence could be inflicted on the landscape. Explosions from anti-personnel mines occurred almost daily. The people had been removed before the worst of the bombing and returned again afterwards to a lunar landscape. As with Vientiane, Luang Prabang's population doubled, then tripled, then quadrupled.... Villagers with no place else to go were everywhere. New villages spread up and down roadsides all around town. The end of one village and the beginning of the next was arbitrary. Finding housing for anybody, even somebody sponsored by the government, was next to impossible.

But Luang Prabang has a magic about it that can't be dispelled by things like that, debris of war that would have been sordid elsewhere failed to dispel the magic here. It is so green in its own bowl of mountains even in the dry season that only enchantment could have been at work. Perhaps there was truth to what people said about the Phi (pronounced "Pee"), little spirit presences that could be almost anywhere -- in rocks, trees, plants, people, animals -- and could be mischievous but mostly behaved protectively if treated with reasonable respect. I've been told by wistful Frenchmen that this valley enclosed by almost vertical limestone cliffs around Luang Prabang is reminiscent of the Dien Bien Phu plateau in northwest Vietnam, where perhaps some similar kind of enchantment was involved in their choice to make one last stand against the Vietnamese nationalists there. The French ended up losing the siege largely because they discounted the stubbornness of the Lao tribal people who live in the region. These people call themselves Phou Thai. The Americans called them Thai Dam, or "Black Thai" because of the black clothing most wear. These people did the impossible (maybe assisted by Phi): they coaxed huge artillery pieces up the vertical cliff faces and through the mountain passes to commanding heights at the edge of the craggy limestone cliffs of Dien Bien Phu. The French were caught by surprise and outgunned by their own weapons on their own turf. All the Vietnamese nationalist armies had to do was march in and accept a surrender. A lot of mythology has arisen about Dien Bien Phu, but none of it ever credits these hardy mountain Lao who may have made the crucial difference between victory and defeat.

The first young man to become part of my household, Mr Khamsouk, aka "Souk" was of that Phou Thai heritage. He had lost his family in other village skirmishes to a horrible weapon of mass destruction known as a "Spooky," about which more much later. Souk, as an orphan with no clan left to stand behind him eked out a living as a short order cook. I knew none of his heritage when he came and asked for a one day trial, hoping to become cook for me and whoever else became part of my household. He asked for only lodging and food, but I gave him five dollars a week salary (in Kip, the national currency). Souk was probably about 20 years old, maybe more. Even he had no idea of his age or when his birthday might be. His heritage gave him a stout, muscular build and a pie-face with Asian eyes so tightly slitted upward that our friends used to joke that when he laughed too hard, the eyes disappeared completely.

The second was Thongdy Siphanthong (surnames were rare among villagers), from a village 35 or 40 kilometers up the Mekong. His family endured unpredictable intense bombing whenever American planes were unable to drop their bombs on Hanoi. Since the planes weren't allowed to land with bombs on return to Udorn Air Base in Thailand, they had to ditch the bombs somewhere along the way. "The way" led across our part of Laos at very high altitudes. To be fair to the flight crews, they were told not to worry, that all the civilians in rural areas in that part of Laos were "being taken care of by our people," that no harm would come from dropping bombs on apparent civilian targets. To achieve a dual purpose, ditching the bombs and getting a little target practice along the way, they appear to have chosen village structures for targets. Thongdy's family had to remain in the village. They had nowhere else to go. But Thongdy's father decided his son would be better off scrounging as a street kid than risking his life at home. Again to be fair, I don't think Thongdy's father had any comprehension of the abominable behavior that might be required for a street kid's survival; many came out of the experience as little more than animals. Thongdy claimed to be 18, but maybe was a year or two younger. He was of pure lowland Lao ancestry, with that characteristic trim Buddha-like look and a sculpted face that could hide deep mysteries. I was unable to offer Thongdy a salary, but he industriously took care of house cleaning and laundry mainly to remind me constantly of his worth. His time on the street had left him with some deep insecurities. With formal training and with a donation for tools from my relatives back in the U.S., Thongdy eventually was able to become a village carpenter.

Thongdy (left) and Souk (right)
working on a home improvement project,

in this case, getting raw materials for our

"mosquito-proofing" project from

coconut husks

Souk and Thongdy both had worked at a place we palefaces jokingly called "Howard Johnson's," a spacious Tiki-Hut food-stand where a clientele that consisted mostly of foreigners could have meals of Vietnamese "Chai Gio," aka "Saigon Tacos." Our Howard Johnson's was under a spreading banyan tree in the yard of the only lodging facility for well-off transients in town. Souk had worked as a skilled cook. Thongdy was more a "bottle-washer and jack-of-all-trades." In exchange for their labor, they received leftover food and a sheltered place to curl up on a floor to sleep.

We lived in a place we came to call our "Pond House." It sat on posts over the confluence of two medium-sized ponds right in the middle of town. Except for the fact that it was over water, it resembled houses you might find anywhere in rural Thailand: made almost totally of teak, but with a tin roof. Outside the brick fence and gate, Luang Prabang. Inside the gate, we had our own little world with a private village on the other side of the ponds. The ponds themselves were covered with a kind of algae-like weed sometimes called duckweed that could be skimmed off, dried in the sun and covered with sesame seeds. It looked sort of like thin tarpaper, but tasted really good. Good for you too. A concentrated vitamin enriched veggie snack.

The pond, looking out my bedroom window. Our village.

Our house sat on one little peninsula that separated the two ponds. On the peninsula that stuck out from the other bank toward our living room window, there was a strange unoccupied stucture. It was raised off the ground and had posts made of plastered masonry as its main structural elements. The roof was thatch. The floor was teak. I lived in the Pond house for over a year before I thought to ask what the structure was, and then it was only because of strange noisy all-night gatherings that took place there. Besides eating and drinking (and Lao manage to eat to excess and to at least get a little tipsy at almost any gathering) athletic contests seemed to be the rule of the day. There was a sort of oil wrestling, most similar to Turkish yagli guresh and an ill-balanced kind of tug-of-war. In the tug-of-war, at one of the rope was an older woman wearing strange clothing which included a lot of silver jewelry, which was fairly common, and head decorations made of feathers, which was not. She had her back to the pond. On the other end of the rope were almost all the young men from the neighborhood. There seemed to be genuine effort on both ends of the rope, but the old woman always ended up pulling the group of athletic young men into the pond. This two night get-together happened about every six months, always near midnight, always on the dark of the moon.

It was dark!

The next time the ceremony happened, I tippy-toed in my flip-flops through the mud around the pond. At first, I seemed to be making people ill-at-ease. They gradually warmed up, or at least stopped staring daggers at me. Then the peculiar old lady came and served me a thimbleful of lao-Lao, the 90 percent (not "proof," percent) alcohol national beverage. The lao-Lao, even a thimbleful of it goes allll the way down, bounces, then comes allll the way back up, unless you have somehow learned the technique of keeping it down, not barfing. Then the whole crowd became more cordial. I joined the tug-of-war game and got pulled into the pond with the others. I figured that the young men must be just letting the old woman win, so the next round, I put myself at the head of the line, closest to the old woman. I figured that even if the other young men tried to let the woman win, as front man, I could still pull hard and end up winning for my side. To my surprise and chagrin, even though I pulled with all my might, I still got pulled into the pond. Lets face it. The pond was kind of nasty and there was something about the old woman.

As we sat and drank more and chatted they told me that the gala was in honor of two Nagas, one of whom lived in each of the two ponds. In and of themselves, Nagas are neither good nor evil. If not treated with a minimum of respect, however, they were capable of causing all sorts of trouble. Considering the dwelling place of the Nagas, at the foundations of the world, the trouble they could cause if they chose was catastrophic in nature. Better safe than sorry. Besides, any excuse for a festival, getting a little drunk, and engaging in a group effort was a good thing.

One of the reasons for the initial hostility toward me was, I think, embarrassment at being caught performing such a major animistic, non-Buddhist ritual. Placating the Phi was a fairly common thing. A little "Phi-House" altar was a fixture in most yards though not in mine. But secret ceremonies honoring something reputedly as powerful as Nagas was another thing entirely. It reminded me of the doings of farm blacks off in the woods when I was a little boy in the mid-South. They maintained great secrecy about the gatherings, but everybody knew they occurred (it was impossible not to hear the beating of the drums). But everybody, black and white, feigned ignorance of the goings on.

I woke up in my own bed across the pond the next morning. I had a pounding headache and the queasy stomach that goes with a lao-Lao hangover. I have no idea how I got home and I found it wiser not to ask. I barely made it to the school for my first class. I did, however, manage to participate in this clandestine festival for the two Nagas one more time before we moved away from the Pond House, perhaps because of the dissatisfaction of the Nagas. That story will come later, though.

In our next little story here, I hope to discuss our decoration of the Pond House for the fall festival of lanterns, a a picture of the decorated Pond House from the street. Perhaps too, our large male monkey named Nixon.

VI. Lantern Festival, Getting Ready for School

2005-06-06T08:18:00.000-07:00

1. Fall Festival

There was hardly time to catch my breath before one of the almost monthly Buddhist festivals was upon us, a "Festival of Lanterns" that observed the end of the time when monks were once again allowed to travel, to visit families, to do anything outside the Wat besides the daily begging round. People from the west refer to a "Buddhist Lent." Well, this period of relative seclusion has none of the penitential meanings the word "Lent" usually conveys in western religious settings. This holiday celebrates the end of the most intense part of the rainy season when roads are so muddy that except for a few paved ones they are impassible even on foot. Rather than risk sinking up to their knees in mud, even in the historical Buddha's day it was thought to be more sane for the monks just to stay home and engage in more sedentary pursuits. Having this time for intense academic concentration is one of the reasons that Buddhism has always, right from the beginning, placed heavy emphasis on having learned clergy.

This is the local equivalent to Interstate 75 in the Rainy Season.

I could pull myself through in a jeep with a winch on it.

Try to imagine a monk with his shoulder-to-toe saffron robe

traipsing through this knee-deep mud.

In a way, this fall festival kicks off the coming year's festivities. In Laos, it is a festival of lanterns. (The Thai have a festival of lanterns too, but I think it occurs at a slightly different time due to difference in seasons.) Staying in our house at this time were Souk, Thongdy, another IVS volunteer, Fred, who was using my spare bedroom, and a "Whiskey Tango" (pilots' phonetic language for the letters WT -- "World Traveller" -- our sarcastic term for western travellers who had just assumed that some sort of hotel accommodation would be available in a town like Luang Prabang). The five of us spent almost a week making festive lanterns: split bamboo tied to make forms to serve as frames and colored tissue paper pasted over the openings in the split bamboo frames. The traditional lanterns were generally a sort of Star-of-David shape about a foot-and-a-half high and wide, and about six inches thick. A flat piece of bamboo went in near the middle to provide a place to stick a candle. In the spontaneous parades that took place several evenings, these lanterns were carried around on strings attached to six-foot bamboo poles.

My unique contribution was a couple of lanterns shaped like fish with their mouths open. Souk and Thongdy immediately gave it a name that is off-color enough not to warrant translation here. Okay, okay, after "rat turd peppers," there is no real reason for restraint; it's that their Lao was colorful enough that I just can't think of a way to translate it into English. A linguist named Whorf noted that Eskimos (Inuit) had at least 32 different words for our word "snow." In a place where the national sport is sex, the language relating to sex got quite varied and colorful. So just as Dr Whorf's inability to translate what the Inuit were saying about "snow," I can't really translate a lot of the off-color language my kids used without launching into an involved explanation.

Our IVS guest Fred went to the "Grand Market" as the town's only market was called and found a couple of squashes that passed muster as medium size pumpkins. Our gateposts were the only ones in town had that halloween pumpkins on them that year.

On the night before the Big Parade and also on the night of the Big Parade itself, the town generator was shut down for several hours so that no grinch could spoil the effect of the lights that outlined fences, tree branches, porches, whatever. We didn't really miss the electricity. There weren't any traffic lights, and nobody was home to listen to the radio station. What else was there to interrupt? The festival outranked all these other activities anyway. These decorative lights were small candles. Since each candle lasted about 45 minutes, by the time the last candle was in place, it was time to go back to the first candle and replace it. Sadly, I bet that by now these candles have been replaced by cheap holiday strings of lights from the Peoples' Republic of China as they have taken over in the U.S. as holiday decorations. After this festival, I can see why the candles twinkling in the dark night were so special in their day!

I also bet that by now there is at least one traffic light in Luang Prabang.

The gate and fence of our Pond House decorated for the

fall Festival of the Lanterns.

My "Fishie" lantern hangs to the upper left of the gate.

Candles are stuck along the top of the brick wall.

Our Pond House was at the southern edge of the old town. Wat Xieng Thong, the former "King's temple," which was the terminus of the Big Parade, was almost at the northern tip of the peninsula that made up old Luang Prabang, all of which is in the zone of United Nations "World Heritage" protection today. Wat Xieng Thong has been shown by archeologists to be on the site of successive pre-Buddhist animist shrines. The current Buddhist temple was built around 1560 by King Setthathirat, one of the kings of Lan Xang (the Kingdom of a Million Elephants) in its glory days, and is the single oldest building in town, though it is somewhat like the axe that has had three new heads and five new handles.

A leisurely stroll from our house to the Wat would normally take less than a half hour. The Big Parade took almost three hours. Each of Luang Prabang's 30 or 40 wats (depends how you count them) is the center of its own "village," which we would refer to as a neighborhood. Each Wat organized its own mini-parade around a big float shaped like a boat. Different streams of the parade came in from side roads all along the way, slowing things down. The richer the neighborhood, the fancier the lights decorating the houses were, and of course folks like that could afford servants to keep many hundreds of candles lit.

Besides people like us "householders," almost all the major Wats. civic organizations and public institutions in town had huge lanterns in the form of boats. These "boat-lanterns" were used like floats in the parade. The smallest boat-lantern was, perhaps, 15 feet long. The longer ones were up to 40 or 50 feet long and had major bracing inside them, all made of whole, unsplit bamboo. Of course, the outermost layer of these boat-lanterns was made of split bamboo splints with more colored tissue paper pasted to the openings. The lights within these boats were kerosene lamps made of beer cans with mop strings used as wicks. As many pairs of people as needed were spaced up and down the sides of the boat holding onto the heavy bamboo supports.

A swirl of lanterns on their three turns around the Sim of Wat Xieng Thong, the Wat of the former Royal Family. Later, the lanterns are set adrift down the Mekong on lantern-boats.

On the Mekong River side of the Wat court yard, an elegant masonry staircase with railings in a Naga motif swept down to the water. This time of year, just after the rainy season, the river was fairly full, fed by melting summer snow from the lower slopes of the Himalayas along the boundaries of China's Yunnan province, the legendary homeland of the many Lao and Thai peoples, and by runoff from the agricultural land from Yunnan southward to Luang Prabang. As we trooped into the Wat courtyard, we detoured to make a ceremonial three turns around the Sim (the "sim" is the church-like building, the principal structure in any Lao Buddhist monastery -- the temple itself). Then we went to the top of the steps that led down to the river landing taking our lamps with us. The big boat-lanterns were supposed to be kept afloat by their framework of bamboo, but just in case, chunks of styrofoam from weapons packing cases were hidden away within. The main organizations launched their boats into the river a few at a time, and people with individual lamps like ours could stick the bamboo poles to which the lamps were tied into the open deck area of the big boats. The star-shaped lamps were cantilevered out over the water. Each boat, no matter how big or how small, became a bejewelled kaleidoscope of sparkling colors: the boat-lamp itself and all the many household lamps the boat-lamp carried with it. My two "fishie" lamps were among those we added to the rather large boat with a tall multicolored lamp-stupa on the top of it that had been made by students at the Teachers' College, my eventual place of employment.

I met my first prospective students here. One of them was Thao Phay whom, at the request of Nay ("Master") Phao, Dean of Students of the school, I would end up adopting as a step-son a week or two later. Phay's educational career was in danger of ending before graduation, and he would surely have ended up as cannon fodder in one or another of the local armies if the school and I had not collaborated in seeing that he was cared for and protected. After the armistice that ended the shooting phase of the war we were able to spend a long weekend with Phay in the bombed-out, burned-out village where he was Schoolmaster: now "Nay Phay."

On terms of address: The address "Thao" (as for Phay as a student) was used for any young person who was educated and who was continuing his studies; education has always been highly respected in Lao culture. "Nay" (as for Mr Phao and for Phay after he was in charge of his own school) was reserved for people who occupied positions of authority. "Ajaahn," or "Professor" was the term by which I was addressed. It had a threefold application: teaching monks were entitled to it; very highly learned elderly laypersons were also accorded this title; and finally, people with advanced academic degrees who were teachers were considered to be entitled to it. The full time I was there I never got quite used to being addressed by the same title as the Abbot of the monastery on one side of my house and the old "lore-master" who lived on the other side. This old secular Ajaahn will surely play a part in this narrative later, when he helped me cope with life-threatening cases of malaria.

2. Cleaning the House Up

There were a few odds and ends of "settling in" to accomplish before the school year started and I was tied up most days. There were cracks in the floors of our house and so many mosquitoes came in through them that even mosquito nets didn't help much.

Souk and Thongdy to the rescue!

I never realized that caulking would be one of my new skills. Coconut palms seemed to be everywhere, and the fiber from inside the outer coconut husks ends up being involved as a costfree raw material for all sorts of arts, crafts, and home improvement projects -- including caulking. Besides the coconut fiber, the tools needed were a kind of hardwood mallet and a chisel-like tool, also made of hardwood. There were lots of different kinds of hardwood available. In the West, we think of mahogany and teak as being relatively hard woods. In places that are warm and muggy year round, they are just termite food. The favorite local "hardwood" was rosewood -- the kind that is used for fine furniture making, also something that was called ironwood locally. I'm convinced that this "ironwood" was five or six species of trees with wood so hard that it was capable of breaking high quality carbon steel chisels and drills. Since rosewood was cheaper, though softer, that's what our caulking tools were made of.

The procedure was mind-numbingly simple and time-consuming: One person ripped the powdery dried fibers from inside the husks, and another used the wooden mallet and chisel to pound bits of it into cracks in the floor. For wide cracks, somebody had to go under the house and pound the same kind of fiber upward. You have to do this when the weather is fairly dry -- a season hard to find in tropical places -- so that as the fiber rehydrates it will lodge itself more firmly into the cracks. I, for one, found out that this caulking procedure is critical! Without the caulking as well as faithfully tucked-in mosquito nets around beds, these pesky dive bombers are 100 percent infected with the Plasmodium protozoan parasite, also known as "malaria."

It appears we were a little late in our mosquito-proofing project.

The first variety of malaria Europeans became familiar with in North Africa came to be named "Plasmodium malariae"; it is the one that gets into your system and can keep recurring for the rest of your life even if you're cured of an individual attack of it. It keeps reproducing in whatever organ of your body it has hidden itself in. A a second variety, Plasmodium vivax, which is rampant in Laos is somewhat like P. malariae in that it hides mostly in the liver and spleen and pops out whenever people are at their weakest, not for the rest of a person's life, but at least until the supply of reinfection from within the body is exhausted; this can take several years.

In most non-urban parts of Laos (really, all of the country except Vientiane, the administrative capital), the "killer variety" of malaria, a drug-resistant variety, Plasmodium falciparum, is prevalent. Of the three basic kinds of malaria, falciparum is the only one that even otherwise healthy people normally die of. Thongdy and I both almost died of falciparum malaria. How unpleasant the death is depends on which parts of the body the plasmodium parasites attack first. Given a choice, the best way to go is to slip into a coma and never wake up. In Laos I had falciparum malaria every three months, as regular as clockwork, no matter what prophylactic drug I was taking. I just chalked that up as a "cost of doing business" in Laos. I came close to dying of falciparum several times. My determination to continue my self-appointed role as "guardian angel" for young people who would otherwise have been gobbled up by the war machine was not in the least affected by this peril to life and limb. It was too important a job.

The parasites bore into the blood cells and live there, much as today's HIV infections do. Unlike HIV, these plasmodia are huge and end up multiplying so rapidly that the cells explode. It is while this garbage along with any infant parasites are floating loose in the bloodstream that "Mama Mosquito" comes along for a drink; she then bites another person and the life cycle of the parasite is complete. The patient very often dies, partly of loss of blood cells and partly of failure of the kidneys when they are overwhelmed by all this garbage mixed in with the "normal" blood. This stage of falciparum malaria is called "Blackwater Fever." For years I thought the name was because the urine turns black as the patient slowly dies an agonizing death. I sat with Thongdy in the hospital as he slowly moved toward death by Blackwater Fever. In fact, "Blackwater" refers to the town of Blackwater, Ohio, where the disease was given its first formal medical description. The other two parts of the body falciparum likes to settle in are the lungs, which get so squishy and swollen that the patient chokes to death and the brain, which swells and causes coma followed by death. This is a nasty bug!

None of the varieties of malaria is pleasant I've repeatedly had two of them, vivax (in Indonesia) and falciparum (in Laos). From my own experience with these varieties of malaria, all the joints of the body including even the spaces between the vertebrae ache and feel as if they are going to explode. The headache feels worse than any I have ever had before or since. The fever is so hot that even the patient can feel the heat rising from his own body. I once had a measured fever of 108 degrees Fahrenheit! Since the Laotian version of falciparum malaria is generally resistant to synthetic medicines, the Western approach is to put you on an intravenous drip of old fashioned natural quinine and dope the quinine up with either morphine or codeine to deal with the pain. If they use morphine, even if it doesn't relieve the pain much, you at least have the entertainment of hallucinations.

After many of my own cases of malaria, the "ajaahn" who lived next door to me came over with a kind of banana that looked for all the world like a football: it had an oval shape and reddish skin. Eating the flesh of this particular kind of banana gives temporary relief from the pain and makes you feel deliciously cool all over, as if air conditioning had been installed. (Unfortunately, if you don't have malaria, the "air-conditioning effect" doesn't work or I would have eaten the bananas around the clock daily.)

You do remember what an "ajaahn" is, don't you?

One evening while we were in the middle of our mosquito-proofing project, I was busy doing advance preparation of my lesson plans when Thongdy came down with what appeared to be a cold. In a matter of hours he started slipping into delirium and calling out softly "Daddy! Mommy!" ("I-pho! I-mae!") I didn't even hear him for the first hour or so. Souk came and called me and I picked Thongdy up in my arms and went jogging down the street for the two blocks to the old former colonial hospital. We were lucky. A travelling medical team from Switzerland was in town helping out. Without them, Thongdy would have died in my arms and it would have been largely my fault. Only a few weeks as a father, and a total failure!

The orderly at the emergency entrance had a walkie talkie and asked me if I wanted to "call in the Swiss." Swiss? Call in anybody who could help. Thongdy had pretty much slipped into unconsciousness by this point. (I swore I wouldn't do this, but I'm crying like a baby as I write about it!) After an hour or so of bathing Thongdy with icewater from the little Ovaltine shop across the street, a French-speaking Swiss male nurse arrived. He immediately did blood-types for Thongdy and me and they matched! So for his first transfusion, we were hooked together by a clear plastic tube. Strange sensation watching some of "you" snake its way along the tube! Thongdy gradually turned a little pinker, but did not regain consciousness. They also gave him steroids through an intravenous hookup in his other arm, to suppress any rejection that might have resulted from the crude attempt to match our blood.

While I could still stand unassisted, I did a BIG no-no and rode my bicycle across town to the barracks where junior American pilots were housed. I wasn't supposed to go there, because then I would have been witness to the fact that somebody in Washington was telling a fib when he (guess who!) said that the U.S. had no fighting forces in Laos. I asked would anybody with type B blood PLEASE come with me to help a dying patient. They asked, "is this a 'round-eye' or a 'gook'?" I said he was Asian. They replied, "Sorry" and returned to ping-pong.

Eventually when nobody returned home, Khamsouk wandered down to the hospital to see what was up. The nurse was glad to see him because I was, as he put it, "milked dry." I explained to Souk that Thongdy had run out of blood and that we needed for him, Souk, to let us put some of his blood into Thongdy. Souk went pale and grudgingly agreed to start a second transfusion. His reluctance pissed me off. Oddly, he too had turned out to be compatible. Much later I found out a strange fact: by far the majority of Asians (almost 80 percent) have the B-positive blood type, not O-positive as in the West. I am B-positive and so were Souk and Thongdy. Souk lay down on the cot where I had been and with a few changes in the plumbing of the plastic tubes, got hooked up to Thongdy. As we watched, Souk began to tremble and blood trickled slowly to Thongdy. After about 10 minutes, it slowed down almost to a halt. I had been pumping blood over to him for an hour or more, and Souk could come up with only a measly ten minutes?

I didn't find out why that had happened until evening the first day after the crisis abated somewhat. I have no idea how long that was because other than Souk I was the only source of compatible blood we had immediate access to, and we just kept hooking me up over and over until, each time, I ran out of blood pressure to keep the "donation" going. I think it was two days, after which time Thongdy was showing signs of life and the Swiss nurse said we'd done all we could do. Souk loaded me into a "Sam-law" (a "Three Wheeler") and for the two block ride home to feed me chicken and rice soup! That isn't just a Jewish mother kind of thing!

As I became coherent and aware of my surroundings, Souk angrily demanded to know why he was not dead yet! At first I couldn't understand. In time I began to see what his problem was. He had wrongly understood that the blood transfusion would amount to taking the life out of his body and and putting it into Thongdy's body! That's why his fear had shut down the blood pressure that had kept the blood flowing through the tube. Part of Souk's being had acted to protect his own life. Another part of his being had acted to do "what was right." That anybody would trust me to the extent of "laying down his life for a friend" at my direction even today leaves me breathless in awe! A lot of things were involved in this trust Souk had had, most of it related to a total trust in the Buddhist principles that permeated all of Lao culture. Souk had accepted me as his "father" for better or for worse (later, the Dean of Students at the school legalized our relationship, but at the time of Thongdy's emergency, Souk's informal acceptance was all he had to go on). When your father tells you to die for whatever cause, you just go ahead and die without complaining or asking questions. Also involved was the firm belief that you will have a next life and the quality of that next life depends mostly on the quality with which you lived the lives that preceded it. Karma! It's a Buddhist quality that is much more subtle than the crude understanding Western non-Buddhists have of the concept. Souk felt that obeying his new father in doing something as "virtuous" as giving his own life to my other son would surely lead to as fine a life as a kid from a humble background like his could ever have earned for himself. The question of why his new father would decide that his own life was forfeit for the sake of his brother's life had never even occurred to him.

I myself grew up in a violent family in which I almost ended up "giving" my life for no good reason except for a father's drunken rages and spent more than a few nights hiding outdoors to save my own miserable life. That a kid like Souk could have such faith in my "virtue" just because he had decided to consider me to be a father was a concept that even today blows me away emotionally!

During all of this turmoil, we made use of a communications tool that was common in all the extremely isolated areas I've worked in: the evening "Family and Friends" radio program. It usually runs daily on the local radio station for about an hour. In this case, we had requested a message, "Would any blood relatives of Thao Thongdy of Ban Khok Phu please hurry to Luang Prabang. He may die if you cannot give him blood." Because of fighting between us, the family arrived fairly late in the emergency, but we had his father's blood tested for type just in case. The "blood father" turned out to have type AB-positive. Thongdy was B-negative. When told that his blood could not be used, the father's only comment was "Well, now that his father is a foreigner, he has the foreigner's blood."

Then he insisted on a small "baci" ceremony, the universal sacrament of Laos. It involves tying strings on the wrists, along with something a lot like prayers. In this case, the prayers were that our families remain related in every sense of the word, no matter whose blood we carried.

VII. "Te Deum": a Vivid Flashback

2005-06-04T18:57:00.000-07:00

Originally posted September 18, 2005

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

yachts in the Mediterranean -- the Onassises, the Kennedys

... you get the picture. But my classes were 6 a.m. to 8 p.m 6 days a week.

And on Sundays, I took a bus down the road to Monaco,

just to get away from the pressure.

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."