Laos is an incredible county. Most people call it “Lao” (without the S) which is short for the “Lao People’s Democratic Republic.” It’s also one of the poorest countries in the world. The people here are friendly and always have a smile ready. They work hard and most earn or grow just enough to stay alive. My very short time here has been incredibly impactful.
My first crystal clear window into the enormous privilege I carry with me as a first-world citizen came yesterday morning. I read about a project called “Big Brother Mouse” in my guide book. It describes the venture as a place you can go and volunteer to help Lao people practicing their English. I missed the morning practice session, but learned about the depth of what the organization does over lunch with the staff.
Most Lao children have never even seen a children’s book or sometimes even seen a book at all. Most Lao children have never known anything beyond the few bland textbooks (sometimes only five or six for a whole village), and don’t get excited about reading. For the most part, their schools don’t even have pencils or paper. Education and knowledge hold the key to many doors in this world, and so one American man teamed up with a Lao man to create a publishing and distribution company for children’s books.
After the labors of developing and training a Lao staff to author or translate and adapt children’s stories, more and more children’s books are being published by Big Brother Mouse. (The Lao word for one who takes care of another translates as “big brother”). Because there is no distribution system, BBM holds book parties. A group travels into the rural countryside, sometimes hiking for hours before they reach a village without children’s books. They spend three hours playing games, doing puppet shows about how books can be fun, singing songs about books, and leading a creative writing and drawing lesson – often the first a child has ever had.
At the end, each child gets to choose a book – nearly always the first book they’ve ever owned and a great source of pride. They also leave a mini library of 50 books so the children can trade in their books for new ones. I can imagine the children who were enthusiastically shouting “hello” and high-fiving me on my bike in the hills two days ago pouring enthusiastically over books savoring an education that many first world children take for granted. It’s only $250 to give a village a book party. I’m saving my money already.
At Big Brother Mouse, I picked up a tourism publication called “Stay Another Day – Laos.” The publication promotes sustainable tourism and encourages tourists to do more than just visit the temples, waterfalls, and markets (the only things listed in my Lonely Planet Guide Book). In reading my guidebook regarding treks and hikes to waterfalls and other sites in Laos, there is a warning about “unexploded ordanances” (UXO for short) littering the countryside. I’ve never heard the term before, and assumed UXOs were like land mines. A scary thought for an adventurer like myself who loves to escape the crowds in search of the authethic, solitary, peaceful experience.
The “Stay Another Day – Laos” publication covers three cities in Laos – the first I’ve just come from (Luang Prabang), the second I’ll miss this time around (but I can’t wait to come back!), and the third I’m in now. I had planned on going to Vang Vieng first to do some tubing, cave tours, and a rock climbing splurge with my “Flying Fifty” from a rowing friend of mine. However, as I spent my post Big Brother Mouse hours reading about all the opportunities to really get to know the people of Lao in “Stay Another Day” (and I as reassessed my visit to a place that Lonley Planet Guide says has a few gems left ‘despite its reputation as a sullied paradise’ and fellow serious traveler Barbara says is overrun with the worst types of tourists), I changed my mind. The bus I was on was long distance to Vientiane (where I am now) with a stop in Vang Vieng, so I just stayed on the bus all night.
Top on my list was a visit to this branch of Big Brother Mouse to see if I couldn’t volunteer a few hours of English practice. Second was “MAG” – Mines Advisory Group listed as having a photo-essay slideshow, displays on the history of UXOs, and a Google Earth program that shows all the known UXO sites in Lao. Third on the list, taking priority over the Buddha park, was COPE – Cooperative Orthotic and Prosethetic Enterprise providing artificial limbs and physical therapy to those “lucky enough” to survive UXO accidents.
Unfortunately, this branch of Big Brother Mouse is still in its fledgling stages and has yet to expand beyond publishing to provide a site for English practice (not their main goal, but a by-product of their daily functioning). So, on to MAG! The building is located in a compound-like piece of land next to a brand new apartment building on an unpaved and pot-hole ridden riverfront road. The first image panel that greets visitors is “Neua” – a farmer whose arm was blown off by a UXO when he accidentally struck it harvesting sweet corn. His neighbor accidently struck one with a machete and was killed.
From the rest of the panels I learned that the Lao people are stuck in a cycle of poverty and danger thanks to the UXO’s. Lao is the most heavily bombed country in the world, per capita – mostly a U.S. campaign. More bombs than the U.S.’s campaign on Germany and Japan during the WWII combined. Wow.
So why are UXO’s unexploded? About half of the bombs are cluster bombs – a big torpedo shell (about four feet in length and a foot in diameter) filled with tennis-ball-sized “bombies.” The shell is dropped, rips in half in mid-air, and the flutes on the bombies cause them to start spinning, activating their detonation cycle. However, if the torpedo opens too low, the bombies don’t spin enough to complete their cycle. Or, they land in mud or water where the impact isn’t enough to detonate them. Then they lie in wait to be stepped on by an animal, struck by a farm tool, or picked up by a child who thinks it’s a toy (many bombies are bright yellow and just the right size for small children to play with). 30% of all the bombs dropped thirty years ago did not explode and are lying in wait.
UXO’s keep Lao and its people in the “poorest country” bracket. They can’t develop infrastructure like roads, bridges, or anything that requires digging (one man lost an arm and a leg while digging post holes in his home). They can’t farm new fields without the severe danger of disturbing the bombs in wait, and often the fields they’ve “cleared” still harbor unexpected surprises. Not being able to grow more food leaves many families starving. Horrifyingly, the next available option for a source of income is to harvest scrap metal from the unexploded bombs that litter the countryside. If the scrap collector is lucky enough to disarm the bomb without being killed, they are paid 15 cents per pound of metal and $1.50 per pound of explosive by scrap dealers. Collectors use poorly made metal detectors that cost $12. If villagers don’t have enough money to get started in the collecting, the scrap dealers will let them “work to own” the detector, taking a portion of the proceeds from what they collect until the detector is paid off. One of the saddest photos I saw was a village’s “savings account” – a piece of an aircraft wing they will hold onto until they need to sell it to get through a bad harvest season.
Children are in the most severe danger. They get mixed messages about UXOs. (There are more than just bombies.) Because the Lao people are so poor, they use every resource available to them. As a result, homes are full of dismantled UXOs that have been turned into water jars, lanterns, decorations, planters, and more. Children know they are supposed to stay away from UXO’s, but their presence in every day life combined with the possibility of helping provide for their families if they can get one home without detonating it causes many young Lao to fall prey to the bombs. An 11 year old boy lost an eye, has metal fragments permanently lodged in his body, and his penis was severed when he accidentally triggered a UXO. I saw a photo of a dead 17 year old boy who had been collecting for years. Pieces of his body hung from the trees. They dug his grave in the side of the 15 foot crater created by the bomb that killed him.
So what did Lao do to deserve such secret carpet bombing by the U.S., in spite of the Geneva Accord we signed promising not to attack Lao? Wrong place, wrong time. If you take a look at my route map, you’ll see Laos is a neighbor to the infamous Vietnam. Vietmanese troops used land and water routes in Lao to move supplies to South Vietnam. Also, the communist political faction of Lao (a minority party) was bunkered down in caves in the north. Without the knowledge of congress or US citizens, the CIA waged an execution campaign over the majority of the country. They dropped bombs with entire regions as targets, instead of specific military installations (about which they had no information). Sometimes, Lao’s number just came up when primary targets in Vietnam couldn’t be reached. Aircraft carrying “ordnance” would be directed to a secondary “target” on the way back to base in Thailand. Since Lao separates Thailand and Vietnam, it was often carpeted by bombs meant for elsewhere to save pilots the safety check process required if they landed with un-deployed ordnance. Many American pilots gave testimonials citing this as one of the many things that haunted them in dealing with their post-war PTSD.
At the COPE (the prosthetic and orthotic organization) visitor center, I met “Nam.” He’s my age, and very worldly. He comes from a village heavily affected by UXO’s. His cousin lost his legs to a bombie. Nam eagerly approached me and offered to guide me through the displays. He shared many of the Lao ways of life with me, including a frog catcher and a mice catcher (for use in soups), a crossbow, a creel for storing fish, and an inventive hanging device that utilizes water to keep ants out of the food. Nam also opened my eyes to the following:
***1. There are 80 million UXOs remaining among Lao’s 6 million people today.
***2. 15 of the 17 provinces in Laos were carpet bombed.
***3. An exploding bombie will maim or kill everything in a 90 square foot area.
***4. Of the many types of bombie, one of the worst was a time delay. People often picked them up (before bombies became a big no-no) so they would have something to throw back at the planes that were bombing their livelihoods away. Usually villagers hid in caves and took the time delays with them for safe keeping, ultimately destroying their only salvation from the carpet bombs.
***5. The spider bombie was another horror. Instead of detonating on impact, it has eight 3ft. tiny trip wires extending in eight directions.
***6. The acid bomb was one of the worst. The Lao still have no knowledge of how to deactivate an acid (how many of us know?). Nam described to me the experience of a boy who tried to wash off and rub off the acid with water, “but no matter what it just keeps burning.”
***7. Many people have heard of the bombs, but some have never seen them. Since they often look like fruit (the yellow ones) or rocks (metal covered in mud), people pick them up to investigate or to learn more about them. Curiosity kills people just as easily as the collector’s desperation to earn enough to survive.
***8. The red dots that show where cluster bombs were dropped don’t indicate a single bomb, but rather a bombing mission. So even the lone dots outside the areas so thick in dots that the dots melt into one another represent thousands of bombies from tens of torpedo shells.
***9. Because the living floor of Lao homes is built above head level, those surviving explosions with disabilities end up with even smaller worlds as they are stuck inside the house (really just a 10 x 10 platform with three walls) all day while others go to work in the fields.
I’ve tried really hard not to cry yesterday at Big Brother Mouse and all day long today. The COPE visitor center has four films that you can watch in “the cave.” I almost cried during the story of a man fishing with his sons. He tried to get the UXO to the pond so he could throw it in and bring back a feast for the village. Instead his children are now fatherless. I almost cried when an inventive old man used some of the metal from the bomb that took his leg to fashion his own crude prosthesis. And I teared up during the “bomb education” segment about a poster contest in school. The only poster contests I can remember from my childhood were for t-shirts. The scene that broke me was a room full of school children singing the “bomb” song. I sang songs about the months of the year and the muffin man as a child. These children sing, “we must take care not to disturb bombies so our country’s people can be great and good.”
Why are we, as Americans, so sheltered? Why didn’t I learn about the awful carpet bombing of Lao in school? Why didn’t I know until I was 22 that we “lost” the war in Vietnam? (not kidding.) Why don’t we have more in-your-face information about politics instead of the newest pop star? Why does so many Americans’ political knowledge begin and end with their stances on moral issues? I am reeling with more questions, as I’m sure you are if you made it through this whole experience. Thanks for reading and learning about the Lao people!
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