Meandering in Mekong: March 2013

On Thursday at two pm, I left my internship in Laos for the long over-night bus ride home. It was so hard to leave the people I had come to know and adore so much. As I road back to Thailand in the dark bus, my ears were filled with the sounds of an older Australian man talking - very loudly at that - to a younger amateur German traveler about how awfully arrogant, ignorant, liberal, drunk, and disrespectful Americans are. I wondered if he knew how disrespectful he was being, talking so loudly on a bus full of Thai people who were attempting to sleep through the night. Their conversation was centered around how "poor" Thailand was, and how awful it was that Americans think they can come to this country and impose democracy on it's oh-so-poor citizens. I wondered if they had forgotten about the colonial era, when dozens of European countries invaded African and Asian indigenous people groups and dominated their culture and ways of living, leaving the indigenous groups impoverished and exploited. I wondered if they knew that the Lao word for foreigner "falang"is a derogatory word which means "French man" because of their dislike towards the Europeans who induced war on their country. I wondered many things that night. After our bus ride was over, I told the German traveler that not all Americans were as arrogant, drunk and liberal as he thought - including a kind smile as I turned to leave. Kill them with kindness right? Generalizations and stereotypes are never a good thing to be yelling about in a bus full of quiet people who are trying to sleep.

But my thoughts that night were not dominated fully by European voices. I thought about the friends that had become so special to me that month. As I was reluctantly leaving the bus full of students waving goodbye with tears rolling down their faces, one student said with a quiet smile "see you in Heaven". I wanted to cry and rejoice all at once. He had it. There was no need to make these goodbyes any harder by saying, "I will see you again one day, I will come back to visit". Because reality is, I've said those same words to everyone I have left behind in different countries. I'm going to have to get a lot of plane tickets to visit everyone I wish I could. Reality is, I probably will never see those students again; because even if I do visit Laos again, they will all be back in their villages in the mountains, already having graduated from ARDA Skills. This makes me want to cry. But knowing I will see them in heaven one day makes me rejoice with gladness. That's the power of the Truth.

My month at ARDA was unforgettable. My days were spent roasting coffee beans, teaching English, eating with my hands on bamboo tables on the floor, editing school curriculum, painting murals, and just spending lots of time with the students at Skills - but more importantly, my days were spent learning from the people who so kindly let me into their lives for that month.

But enough of me rambling about Europeans and tears... pictures say a thousand words right?

the market near ARDA - which supplied my unhealthy obsession with coconuts

This is the Patuxai in Vientiane, built to replicate the Arc de Triomphe in Paris. It is dedicated to those who fought in the struggle for independence from France in WWII. It was built with American funds intended to build a new airport for Lao. Instead, of course, the Lao government used the money to build this monument which has a nickname "the vertical runway"