More Pics of Home/Family

Here are a few more pictures of my host family/the house.

Me and Kat! She is super cute, and for the first week or two made me feel very loved by becoming my little 12 year old shadow! She went everywhere with me and took me everywhere she went too! She doesn't speak English, but we are still able to communicate pretty well: she's good at playing "charades" with me and is patient with my limited Lao vocab. Our biggest shared interest is DANCING! she loves to dance and is really good! When we put on those Thai music videos - there's no stopping us! We have a blast together! She also drew me these two pictures/notes! She slipped them under my door one night and I found them in the morning! It was such a cute surprise - especially because I didn't think she knew English...and then she wrote "I Love You" to me!!!!

Here is my host Mom, "Maeh" (the Lao word for Mom). She is very nice to me and is really fun to talk to because she gets very annimated and has this really funny high-pitched voice she uses when she's telling a story about "so and so said..." that kind of thing. Sometimes I help her make sticky rice in banana leaf wrappers. You also usually add another ingredient in with the rice: banana and sweet potato where what we added in this picture. When we make them, we eat some and then we take some to the temple to give to the monks as an offering.

Speaking of going to the temple...here is a pic of my sisters Bah and Puna (Puna left, Bah right...girl in the back = their friend) at the temple one Wednesday morning. I got to go with them to help give the offerings for this special Buddha day. Notice that we are all dressed up in our sinhs and carrying the offering in littel bowl/basket things.

Besides the banana leaf wraps, we also gave some money, some sticky rice, and some black gelatin cube dessert things in little baggies as our offering. To do this you get in line and walk along a big table at the front of the temple and drop one thing from your basket into each of the baskets on the table. Before you put it down, you bring it up and touch it to your forehead and say a little prayer for good health, happiness, etc. All the people sitting on the floor are listening to the monk at the front chant off some of Buddha's teachings. Unfortunately, Bah and Puna could not stay because they had to go to school, so we left right after doing the offering table and pouring some water over a bush in the temple courtyard while saying a prayer.

Here is a picture of my room! It is on the first floor of the house, next to the living room. The thing on the left is a dresser/closet/bookshelf unit with a built-in mirror. It's great! I'm glad I took some of the free posters from MCC at orientation; they really help make my room feel special (you can see two of them there on the right, but there are two more as well). There is also a fan in the upper-left corner by the door - that is probably my most prized possession, since the thermometer on my alarm clock reads between 82-86 degrees during the night! (and that's with the fan on too!)

And here is a very rare shot - a picture of our dining room area with nobody in it! I can hardly believe it! (when did I even take this?) This is usually the most happening room in the house...well, next to the house, technically. This is that area that is covered by a tin roof and is open air on one side, connected to the sauna area on the right. We eat all our meals here at the table - in shifts, usually, since there are so many of us!! (our numbers have increased to more like 15 most days - one of Kat's friends is always over, as well as a mysterious "uncle" person and Puna's parents). It's funny to me to sometimes think, "wow it's kind of quiet around here today, where is everyone?" and then count and find that there are still 8 people in the house!

Week 3-4: The 5000 kip game

My week two schedule was starting to seem a little dull by friday - hang around at home or at MCC office studying Lao, go to class, go home - so I decided to play a new game during week three to give a little adventure/excitement/anticipation to the day...I called it, the 5000kip game, and it totally made my week! (well, more like my life actually - i still "play" quite often...)

It works like this...everyday on the way home from school I would stop at a new food stand and get a snack, something different every time - but it had to be 5000 kip or less.

Now, a quick lesson on Lao finances: $1 US is equal to roughly 8,200 Lao kip. For ease in calculating/because the smallest Lao bill is a 500kip, I round down to the mental math of 8,000kip = $1.00

So, like I said, "the 5000 kip game" could be roughly translated as "the 60 cents game." Unfortunately, I usually forget to take pictures of these foods because it is kind of awkward to always be the dorky tourist who takes pictures of everyday things, like buying food from a street vendor, but I do keep a very detailed accounting book so I can share a few of my 5000 kip or less finds (which is pretty much anything you could want for a snack - and often more!):

2,000 kip - small, personal-sized baguette/ 2,000 kip big dumpling thing / 3,000 kip large sweet roll with some red jam-like thing on the inside/ 5000kip bag of fried banana chips/ 1,000 kip a piece assorted "dougnuts": or you can get 6 for 5,000 kip (one is kind of like an american donought, but other ones aren't quite the same - they're WAY better!! My favorite is this one that has custard stuff inside, but the outside is kind of crispy...actually, funny story, from the outside, it looks just like this other thing they sell there that has a little hotdog-like sausage on the inside! that was a shock. i should try to take a picture next time I get donoughts...)

here's something I DO have a picture of...but I have no idea what it is called. it is quite possibly my favorite thing yet, though. It's hard to describe the taste: sweet, yet savory (note the bits of green onion on top), doughy, warm, thick, yet also light, with a kind of melt in your mouth goodness...sigh. I included the pic that shows the inside so you can hopefully see the consistency a little.) You can get 1,000 kip a piece, but I discovered that "one piece" is actually two of these that you see pictured here putting the flat sides together so it makes a round ball...so really...5,000 kip buys you 10 of these heavenly treats! The one pictured here we got plain, but the following week a different vendor gave us a packet of sugar to put into the bag and shake them in a light coating of sugar. it was just too good.

Also, most of the "drink in a bag" things I think I've mentioned before (again, I need to take a picture of the stands that sell them to give you a better idea of what they're like) are either 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000 kip. On my second day of the 5000kip game I discovered a stand that sells Taro flavored drink, and they put a little coconut milk in with it - heaven. There are also many fruit shake stands that you can mix and match your flavors and add little jellies, etc also for the low low price of...5000 kip!

Finally, one day, Whitney and I discovered....Sidamdoun Ice-Cream Happy Shop. with a name like that... plus, I was craving ice cream! so we broke our usual street vendor style and took the game to an actual permanent establishment with tables and everything (that is actually the hardest part of this game - where to eat the food! there are absolutely no park benches anywhere in Vientiane, not to mention hardly any parks, so I often end up eating the food straddling my bicycle on the side of the road!). We were quite pleased to discover that even here at Happy Shop 5000kip goes a long ways! 1 scoop = 1,000 kip. So Whitney and I each got 5 scoops! Then, to our surprise, they came with toppings too! We didn't get to pick - they just added them. I lucked out and mine (the bottom one), three scoops Taro, two scoops coconut, came with some little red and white jelly things. Whitney's - three scoops chocolate, two scoops banana - came with....corn! We could not stop laughing! It was fun to try corn and chocolate ice cream! We spent the rest of the meal trying to decide what their decision process was about who got corn and who got sweet jellies - was it the chocolate? the banana? just random?... =)

I love Lao street food! =)

Field Trip! Distributing School Supplies in the Sang Thong District

(warning, this is kind of lengthy...and it is not exactly new news from me, as it happened two weeks ago now...but I felt it was a trip/story that I should tell about)

The first monday after moving in with my host family (which was two weeks ago by now - yikes im far behind!) Whitney and I were invited to skip language school to go on a little field trip with Wendy (the Program Administrator for MCC Laos) and two other Lao MCC workers to the Sang Thong district. This rural district is just north along the Mekong from Vientiane and consists of 37 villages. MCC has an office in the region that works primarily to train community health workers, although there are a few agricultural programs and a minor role in supporting district education. It was this final activity that we were assisting with on this day trip. For the past few years, MCC has helped out some of the districts poorest schools with school supplies, funded through the MCC Global Family program.

Now, this picture with the water buffalo is not a true reflection of the nature of the trip. For one thing, it does not really show the amazing beauty of the rural, tropical scenery we passed along the way - the quiet Mekong River on the one side, densely forested small hills and valleys on the other. Secondly, it doesn't show any of the little houses or rural communities we passed through on the way (I did take another couple of pictures out the car window, but this was the only one that turned out alright).

But the main issue I have with this picture representing the trip is the road - it's way too flat. We left Vientiane at 6:30am and arrived at the first school three hours later, however, I would guess we hadn't gone more than...oh, i dont know, im really bad with distances, but like, 40 miles. It was the bumpiest, craziest dirt road I have ever been on! I wish I could describe it better than that...when this picture with the water buffalo was taken, it was on one of the very few, very precious moments of peace and smooth, flat dirt road. It really added to the adventure of the day - we were really leaving the city!

Now, this picture here to the left was our first stop - the first school. It was just a local, P1, P2 school (the "P"'s are like grades), so the fact that there were only three small dividing walls in the building was alright - there were only two grades being taught here. But still, it was definitely quite a shock to pull up to this dismal structure and find happy school children inside. They were all quite excited, as you can imagine, to have their school day interruptedd with three foreigners coming to visit! Their excitement mixed with nervousness was an almost palpable emotion in that little classroom, once we had all piled in.

At every school we visited we gave every P1 and P2 student a packet of notebooks and pencils. Some students also received a bigger package that included a school uniform and a few other school supplies. These students were selected based on their need (as established from community income surveys done during the summer). Wendy was telling us that this might be the last year they give away any of these larger packages, at least by this "pick and choose" method. They have been running into the obvious problem of unhappy parents who think - why didn't WE get that stuff? We are struggling too! That's not fair!" etc. Over the past few years they have been doing this program they have found that as much as it helps those who do receive it, it also creates an equal amount of tension in the community and school. Wendy says they are in the process of trying to come up with an alternative. This year is the first time that they have combined the packages with the distribution of notebooks/pencils to all students, so they hope this will help, however, even this is a temporary fix. Next year it is likely they will have to choose only one school in the district (the poorest) and give all the P1 and P2 students the entire contents of the school kit packages. Oh, and each school we went to also received some sports equipment to use at recess! (i thought that was a nice gesture)

(ok, so i feel really silly, but i tried to rotate this picture like three times and just could not get it to upload once it was rotated, so i know it looks silly, but here it is anyway....the picture to the left is a super cute example of Lao culture. Lao people do not wear shoes indoors - not in homes, not in offices, not in schools - even in this concrete floored classroom). So outside of every school we visited you would see piles of the cutest, smallest shoes!!!)

The second school was quite a bit bigger and nicer than the first, and housed several more grades. The best part of this visit was the warm welcome we received: as you can see from this picture, when we pulled up, all the school children were lined up on the hill along both sides of the driveway leading up to the school. Our driver dropped us off and the bottom and we were able to walk up the hill through this "tunnel of welcome" as I guess you could call it. It was fun and rather awkward too! Because that was a lot of times to say "Sabaidee" in a row! and they were all standing with their hands in the greeting position (palms together, fingers pointing up, with the tips right about level with your mouth) and if you were just meeting one of these students, you would be expected to say Sabaidee in return while doing the little hand motion and maybe even a small bow. But can you imagine trying to do this walking up the path that is lined with students on both sides?! it was impossible to properly greet everyone, no matter how slowly you walked! (which was quite slow, I must say). It was quite the experience.

The third school was about equal in size with the second, although not nearly as nice, even though Wendy told me it was a new building. Also, according to Wendy, this was one of the poorest villages in the district. What really struck me most about this school (well, all the schools, really. the top pic is from this third school, the bottom from the second) was the bareness of the classroom. Walking into an American elementary school is always a "sensory overload" experience, at least for me. Not only are there small children everywhere, running around and being...well, small children, the classrooms are also jammed with visual stimulus of every sort - posters, art projects, books, toys - there is hardly an inch of free, unoccupied space in the room! These classrooms were, by comparison, completely deserted. There was, in some cases, literally NOTHING on the walls. Nothing. In one of the schools there was a classroom I saw that had a couple of sad looking posters half hanging, half falling off the wall. But they were just white butcher paper with some Lao script in blue marker. Nothing glossy or even a picture. I think this was the biggest shock to me. I just could not imagine going to school someplace so...barren, and learning with so few extra things - props, visuals, anything! - to help you engage with the material.

At two of the schools I got to help physically hand out the notebook/pencil packets to the children as the teacher called their name off the list to come forward. This was super cute. Whitney got a couple of good pictures of me doing this, but she is not with me right now so I do not have access to them. The most memorable part of this experience was just how small they all were!!! and how cute and excited some of them were. Several girls, after putting their hand together and bowing low, grabbed the notebooks from my hands with great gusto and then hugged them tightly to their chest as they scampered off back to their seats, clearly delighted to have gained this new possession and determined to keep a good hold on it. I just hope they will be able to have the same excitement and enthusiastic ownership over the material they learn and copy into those books over the course of this school year.

Finally, as we were leaving this last (poorest) school, we were overwhelmed with gifts. All the parents had come to us with bags of fresh produce, fruits and vegetables of every kind (most not available in the states). This picture is of us loading their generosity into the back of our truck - look how much there was! This a fantastic way to end the day - a true testament to the nature of giving in development: we try to give them the things we think they need, but the
"poor" always seem to end up giving YOU an overwhelming amount in return, displaying generosity that far exceeds their monetary means.

oh and one final, hilarious sidenote....I saw several very western little kid backpacks at these schools. There was a mickey mouse bag, several barbie bags and several of my personal favorite: the hannah montana bag that said "Barbie" over the picture of hannah! haha!! i laughed so hard - yet, part of me was actually very sad too - that Hannah and Barbie and all these white, blonde faces were the only things that seemed to decorate these children's little plastic backpacks, one of the few pictures they would see at school, it seemed. I don't know. It was funny, but also just seemed...so wrong. (oh and PS - that blue bumper sticker on our truck there is the equivalent of a "don't drink and drive" sticker in Lao)

This final pic I'll leave you with was one I took out the car window as we were leaving the third school. It is a mom walking home with the bag that her child received, carrying it away in that plastic blue sack on her head.

Week 3: My new home

Saturday September 4th. Hot, humid, overcast. I had been in Laos for exactly 2 weeks. It was time. I was ready....to move in with my host family.

Now, I wasn't going into this totally blind. We had stopped by to visit the previous saturday, I have to say, there is a lot of things you don't know until you move in! Well...first, let me tell you about where this is. It is in the village (Baan) Tong Bpong. (i think...I actually forgot the book where I wrote that down...but it's something like that). All of Vientiane is divided into little villages. To get here you have to go clear across town from where I had been staying at the MCC office, past the airport (which you can tell is the edge of where any tourists go) and out into what you might call "suburbia." Now the little neighborhood roads are dirt instead of paved (which is actually more like "mud road" this time of year, in the rainy season - the pic here is of a road just up the street from my house) and there are a lot more cows, chickens, and rice fields are not too far off the main road, behind some of the clusters of village houses. It is quite a ways away from the downtown/MCC but it IS very very close to Nita School, where I'll be teaching come October 11th, so the location is actually really perfect. And I love that there is a lot more vegetation around (not quite as city-ish) : as seen here in this picture taken from my fence looking out down the driveway.

Okay...I know the suspense is killing you...here is my house!!: It is a quiet spot, right at the end of a little dirt/gravel driveway that leads to about three houses, including ours.

There are now (including me) 11 people who live here. Yes, 11. Actually, often more. 12-14 is common. But I will describe the 11 main folks who I call family. There is Maeh and Paw (the Lao words for mother and father). They are in their late 50's and are super cute/speak basically no English (I am going to say that "hello" and "mommy" and maybe a couple more doesn't count. this family has hosted two other SALTers in the past, so everyone has remembered a word or two). They have one grown daughter in her early thirties named Pauntip. She is the assistant director of Nita School, where I'll be teaching. She speaks quite a bit of English. She and her husband are in the process of building their own home so they are currently living in our living room with their three children: Nina (7), Anna (4), and the new baby Fanta (1 month!!!). These are three of my sisters. I also have three more (because as you see, we are only up to 8 people right now). Puna (16?), bah (14), and Kat (12) also live here. From what I can tell, though, they are not related...or if they are, it is complicated. Puna and Bah have parents that come over sometimes to visit, but Puna and Bah always stay here. I think it might have something to do with the fact that we are so close to the local school?...I'm not sure, but let me tell you, it is super fun to have 6 nawng sao (little sisters)!!!

Other fun facts about the house: we have puppies!!! They were born (get this) the same day I moved in! That has got to be lucky, don't you think?! There are four of them. I am so excited to watch them grow up! There are also about 5 roosters (which I hear at 5am every morning), 20 chickens, and 10 ducks in the front yard!! Oh and a little cement circle, above-ground pond around back with fish!

Oh yes, and the most important feature - the sauna. Yes, that's right. It is a little family business to run the local sauna. It is so funny! It is right off the eating area (the covered but not walled in section of the house that's on the right side of the pic). The sauna (as seen in the pic here) is just off to the right of the other picture of the house I posted. It consists of a bucket for showering off (on the ground off to the left) and the two door in the cement hut in the back center of the pic are the two sauna rooms!! People from the neighborhood come over, mostly in the evenings, put on these sarong-like wraps and proceed to shower/sauna/spa (put juice on their skin, rub their skin with these special rocks), etc - all in fairly easy view from our dining room table! It is pretty fun. In the first week living there I had already done the spa routine twice with Puna. (it's soooooo hot, but the cool water bucket shower feels sooooo good after!)

Week 2

Well, even though i am already on week 4, here is a little recap of what happened on my second week in Laos. I have not been able to update because I only get internet access for short amounts of time about two or three times a week and I have been using that to check email/facebook because I never felt like I had enough time to blog and often could not put on any pictures. So I will do several little entries to catch up on what my life has been like these past few weeks.

Week 2

That second weekend I went to Lao ITTEC which is like a convention center/shopping mall and went to a little Insect Cuisine Festival that we had seen advertised in the Vientiane Times. It was quite the experience! It was really crowded and difficult to get to the free samples. But still I managed to stomach down: 3 crickets, 1 grasshopper (in two chunks), 1 maggot (? not sure, kind of looked like one of those rolly-polly potatoe bugs) and one unidentified bug that was chopped up in a spicy curry. The picture on the left is one of the grasshopper legs!! The bugs weren't really that bad. It was the concept itself that was more disgusting than the actual taste. The texture was...crispy.

On Sunday I went to a Lao church and sat in the back where they had headphones you could wear and someone would translate the sermon into English! It was fun to listen to all the Lao worship songs and try to follow along with the script displayed on the projector.

Week 2 was my first week of Lao Language classes at Candlelight, a small Christian school that teaches both Lao and English classes. There are 6 people in my class. (in the pic we are holding our vowel/consonants/tones charts!)
We start at 1:30 pm with an hour and a half of conversation class, take a 15 minute break, and have an hour and a half class in reading/writing. During this second week I was commuting via bicycle from the MCC office/Wendy's house with Whitney. It takes us about 25 minutes each way.

Typical day in week 2: lazy morning studying Lao/hanging out, bike to school, Lao class, bike home, dinner with Whitney, Wendy, and Justin, hang around the house and watch movies/play games. One night we went out to a night market - see pic - and got a tasty drink in a bag (my favorite thing to do!) and some steamed pumpkin filled with coconut custard for dessert (on the far right side of the table in the pic) - so good!!



It was a great week to start learning Lao in a relaxed way. Oh, and about Tuesday of this week is when I finally recovered from jetlag! I realized it when I woke up one morning and..felt like myself again! I was able to be talkative and happy all day! It was fantastic.