Arrived! Again.

We've decided it's okay for me to blog while i'm in Laos... so here i am again! 

As I bounced, jerked and slid around in the very back of the beat-up 15 passenger van that was taking us through the night to Laos, I realized this could be the first time I considered throwing up from motion sickness. I felt like a nomadic stow-away that snuck into the back of a vehicle to find some sort of restless sleep and un-luxurious transport. My eyes wanted so badly to sleep, but the bumps and jerks were way ahead of that longing to rest. They would barely give me enough time to think about it. To be honest, it was lonely. I wondered what my parents and siblings were doing. I thought about how many people who never had to experience this same sort of unknown and lost sense of location and time. And then I thought about the people who have.

I thought about the illegal immigrant trying to reach America for a better life for his family, not even having enough money to pay for a visa and forced to stow away in the back of a van. I thought about tribal refugees from Burma trying to flee to a safer country. At one point, I woke from my restless sleep as we slowed down, only to find that we were surrounded by police and construction. I thought about the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan refugees attempting to escape their genocide-stricken country but were stopped along the way, only to be ruthlessly slaughtered. No person should have to go through that, I thought. 

After a very long night of interrupted ‘sleep’, we finally crossed the boarder, and the night got lighter. In our van were two British girls backpacking around South East Asia, one quiet but quirky Israeli girl, and one man who seemed to be Laotian. After crossing the boarder, we were waved over to a song teaw (like a truck with seats in the bed) and drove off – only to be dropped off on the side of the road twenty minutes later with no cell phone reception, no language skills, and no sense of where we were or how to call anyone (our cell phones only worked in Thailand). We finally borrowed a cell phone from a Laotian man and called Kipp, the director of ARDA (where we are interning), and found out we never were suppose to get into that song teaw. Whoops.

As we waited for him to find us, Christine and I sat down with the Israeli girl for a nasty cup of sweetened-condensed milk coffee. Finally when Kipp and Jaime found us, they took us to an over-priced American style coffee shop to get coffee and scones. We stopped at Kipp’s house, groggy but attempting to be perky, to meet his family. Kipp is a Hmong man who lived much of his life in America and Malaysia and married an American woman. They have five very outgoing kids who were eager to show us their exotic pets: a leopard kitten, a black panther cat, two hedgehogs, a green iguana, turtles, fish, a dog named Pup, and a bunny. They showed us where we would stay at the ARDA campus and let us get settled in. 

After living abroad a lot of my childhood and college-career, I have found a love for the word ‘home’. Home is such a wonderful thing; that sense of comfort and knowing. It is where one finds peace and rest. Moving around a lot of my life and college career, I can’t wait to experience home again, not always feeling like a stranger wherever I go. Because no matter how long you live in another country, you’re still white. You're not African, you're not Asian, you're not Arabic, you're not Bohemian. But more importantly, I can’t wait to experience a home where there is no suffering and there is no pain. That home will be the best one.

Speaking of home, one of my good friends is working at ArgopointLLC on Beacon Hill

No place like this home