My Lao Christmas: God gives good gifts

{WARNING: this post is super long...if you want, I give you permission to just look at the pictures, but I wanted to put the details in for my curious parents and grandparents}

Well, one thing is for certain: this was a Christmas to remember!

The fun started Christmas Eve. After thanking God for the Christmas gift of a gorgeous sunrise run, I scurried over to school for the Jingle Bells sing-a-long (see previous "Nita Christmas" post). I taught my usual two Friday morning classes (well, if by "taught" you mean sang Christmas songs and played Christmas charades...then, yes, I taught two classes). The Nita teachers were all especially friendly and joyful that morning - just the Christmas Spirit, I suppose ;) They were laughing and joking, taking pictures with me, and saying really nice things, like how they were going to miss me when I left. I even got to share what I think was water chestnuts with two of the teachers during my midmorning break! (I started humming "chestnuts roasting on an open fire"...I don't think they meant this kind of nut...but, really, that's pretty close.) It was very meaningful to have so many positive interactions with my fellow teachers, giving me a little reminder of how far I'd come in the three months I'd been teaching at Nita: this was my second Christmas present.

Christmas Eve dinner was a very western affair. Wendy (the MCC boss) had a little part for us, complete with a white elephant gift exchange and Christmas cookie decorating! The MCC Lao "mae baan" (housekeeper/cook) make hamburgers and French fries...not the typical Christmas food, but it definitely was a fun little piece of home to share together with some of the MCC Lao staff.

Finally, at 7pm a few of us headed over to the Christmas Eve service at Na Sai, the Lao Evangelical Church I've been attending. It was so fun to see the Church all decked out in Christmas lights and pageantry! I've been attending this Lao church for quite a number of weeks, so I've gotten pretty decent at reading along and actually being able to sing the songs in Lao, even though I can't understand exactly what I'm singing about. The Christmas Eve service was great because I already knew the songs so well that I could feel like I knew what I was saying, even as I was singing the Lao words! We sang Joy to the World, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, O Little Town of Bethlehem, and Silent Night. I just LOVE singing in a different language! And I also take great joy in picking out the few words I do know in the songs. This time my favorite "ah-ha!" moment of Lao language understanding was when I read the first line of the next song (before the music had started) and understood what song it was!! "o baan noy noy suu betleeham" (literally "o very small village named Bethlehem"): my third Christmas present.

I took some neat videos of parts of the service, but seeing as it might take an entire day to upload them,I'll have to share those later. Maybe even next Christmas!

On the way home, I stopped by a food stand to get myself a treat: a taro drink-in-a-bag! I also enjoyed a nice little conversation with the lady who ran the stand. It was a great little boost in confidence to be able to buy my food with ease and even chat with her - I love these little language successes! Yet another little "Christmas gift" moment. =)

OH I almost forgot! I had another little surprise present when I got home that night! My host sister, Puna, had put up this sparkly maroon and silver tinsel around the door and window in my room! =)

Phew! And that was just Christmas eve! Christmas Day was eventful too, but I'll try to be brief and let the pictures do more of the talking...

In the morning, I woke up early to run (another great sunrise!) then made breakfast for my host family - French toast! They seemed to like it (and actually, I got further confirmation that they did a few weeks later when they requested that I make it again/show them how to make it)
but it didn't turn out like home, possibly because I was cooking in in a wok...
After breakfast I gave my family the cards I had made them (with little notes written in Lao! oh it was really hard but totally worth it). and I had printed off some pictures I had taken during my first few month living with them that I gave as presents, oh except to the little ones, they got coloring books =)

Then, off for the big adventure of the day - a trip to Nam Ngum!
This is the name of a lake that was formed by the construction of a hydro electric dam 90 km north of Vientiane. (that's the dam behind my head in the pic...but the water you see there is the river on the other side, not the lake). It is HUGE. 250 sq km. The dam was built in the 1970s. The dam has been a huge part of the Lao economy. 70-80% of the electricity from Nam Ngum is exported to Thailand. Hydroelectricity (from this dam and others) is the number one export of Laos.

I LOVED this trip! The dam flooded so much space in this valley that it has created a landscape that really reminded me of the Puget Sound, aka HOME! All the little hills in the valley have now become little islands. I thought they were all deserted but was informed by Peng (the Lao guy who came with us) that one of the islands actually has a prison on it! But the prisoners aren't locked up; they just live in a little village, stuck on this island in the middle of the lake. The Lao Alcatraz looked a lot nicer =)


We took a boat out to a picnic lunch on an island! We brought along our own fish, but Peng helped us cook it Lao-style over a fire on the beach. It was so wonderful to have this peaceful setting (soooo quite out there in the lake!) to just eat, play UNO, and enjoy the beauty of this sunny Christmas Day (it was beautiful clear skies and about 80 degrees).

On the way home, we took a few detours trying to find Peng's uncle's house...after a few U-turns we finally found the house, just as the sun was setting over the nearby farmland. We were warmly welcomed by his aunt and cousins, but his uncle was actually not at home.

And what would a Christmas Day road trip be without some carols?! We took turns sharing our favorites, which ended up being an amazing opportunity to hear some Khamu Christmas songs. Khamu is one of the smaller ethnic groups in Laos. Both Peng and his wife, Dtum, are Khamu and Christian...and beautiful singers! Khamu language definitely sounds a lot different than Lao! It has a lot of rolled R's and in a way, kind of reminded me of this weird mix of Lao with a hint of...Russian? It was unlike any language I had heard before and it was so neat to hear Jesus' birth being proclaimed in such a foreign tongue. Another "gift"? Yes, I think so.

Just when you thought the Christmas day adventures MUST be over...no, it was time for the strangest one of all. We got back, changed into our Lao skirts (sinhs) and went to have dinner at Kong's house (he works for MCC). It was a very special Buddhist event - a relative blessing. Kong's family was honoring 5 dead relatives by building (buying?) 5 bed-like canopy things and then having everyone come and give offerings of money, fruit, candy, flowers, etc in exchange for a blessing from the family and some monks. Oh, and one of the sons in the family has to become a monk for a week following the ceremony - and it was our friend Kong's turn! Unfortunately, it is disrespectful to take pictures at this kind of ceremony, but here is a picture of one of these "offering beds" that I found online.


SO that meant that Christmas dinner was Lao food! I wont bother giving the Lao names but here is an "english-ized" version of the menu: Meat salad, sticky rice, spicy noodle soup, spring rolls, tamarind, and mandarin oranges.

Finished off the night in Western-style by having a sleepover at the MCC guest house with Whitney and watching Elf =)

It was a crazy, peaceful, wonderful, surprising, and one-of-a-kind Christmas.

"We wish you a merry chrit-mat" : Sharing Christmas at Nita School

Hello and a very belated merry Christmas blog entry!
I really enjoyed the holiday season here in Laos. For one thing, it meant getting to do fun Christmas activities in my classes at school! I taught them Christmas songs (Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas were the easiest, but I tried out Deck the Halls and a few others with M4A - they're one of my best, most enthusiastic classes!). I loved getting to play "music teacher" at the end of every class period all of December! The kids loved learning the songs and by the end of the month "jingle bells" could be heard breaking out randomly in the corridors and courtyards.

Also, it was just the cutest thing ever to have these tiny little primary school students come up to you and say "merry christmas" during recess and lunch times, because Whitney was doing a great job teaching even the littlest P1 and P2 students about Christmas. (or more like "melly chritmat" since the lao language doesnt have the letter/sound of "r" and the letter/sound "s" is not a final consonant (meaning you can never end a syllable with that letter. thus, the sound of "Chris-mas" would be tricky...)


I also had my classes make Christmas cards. Even though I told them to give it to a friend, many many students gave their cards to me! I have a whole section of my room decorated with their pictures and cute messages. Most just wrote the standard "merry Christmas and happy new year" but I did get a few more creative ones that included sayings like "i love teacher lisa" and "i wish you beautiful and happy forever." My favorite was a really sweet girl who wrote "we very happy have teacher lisa come teach us. want to teach us forever. you're very fun. you smile is very big and beautiful." =) I did the Christmas card activity just to let them have some fun and review some vocab (Christmas tree, snowman, etc.). Little did I know I would be receiving so much love and affirmation!! it was a great Christmas present. (unfortunately, I haven't taken a picture of the wall of cards in my room. i'll have to do that soon.)

Another Christmas-y activity at school was that Whitney and I baked Christmas cookies to give to all the teachers and staff! We had to do it one saturday at Wendy's house (the MCC laos country program administrator, aka my boss) because our host families both don't have ovens (very standard for Lao kitchens. they dont do oven/stove-top cooking. it's all over a fire or in an electric wok!)We had a great time baking the cookies (complete with cookie cutters and red and green icing)...and the teachers loved eating them! We we're really pleasantly surprised to see them so excited about the cookies!!
Most Lao dessert is really not very sweet, so we were a little concerned about how they would like sugar cookies with icing and sprinkles, but most of them really loved it!

And finally...the big day. Friday. Christmas Eve. Every friday morning Nita school has a little assembly time first thing, from 8 to 8:30. Since we still had school on Christmas Eve (remember, Vientiane is 90% Buddhist...so even though they know quite a bit about Christmas, they don't celebrate it (santa is known here...he just doesn't come...), Whitney and I asked if we could come up during the assembly to lead the kids in a sing-a-long with the two songs we had both been teaching in our classes: Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas. Everyone was very excited about this idea, so we did it! It was great fun! We both stood up on the little stage area, while the entire student body stood either out in front of us in the courtyard or some of the kids surrounded the stage from the balcony above too, as you can see from the pictures below.