A quick trip to Vientiane: Ken Gibbs

AN A-DOOR-ABLE BEAST ?

The date was early October, 1984, when I was asked – at very short notice – to travel to Vientiane in Laos, to assist the local UNICEF office there which had somehow managed to be provided some US$ 1 million for a water programme by a generous donor. There was just one difficulty in this matter in that the local office in Laos did not have a single watsan programme officer. I was allocated just one week in Vientiane to make the donation fit the needs of Laotian children.

This is not the place to launch into technical details about establishing what water facilities existed for rural communities, and what should be provided and how. Memory doesn’t even allow me to remember whether the State of the World’s Children (Laos) was in French or English, and what it had to say about the needs of women and children, but, on arrival, I found some staff who were delighted that they didn’t have to craft a water programme document, themselves.

For the duration, I was quartered in an old French colonial building which was serving as an hotel, and as with any new place I visited, I wrote a diary of my first impressions, this time in the guise of a letter to a brother of mine in the UK whom I hadn’t seen for some years.

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The local office staff were very helpful in briefing me on Laos, and what to do in the very few spare moments I might have available to me, so what follows, came out of that briefing.

“Laos”, I wrote, “appears on the surface to be a very ‘gentle’ place. People smile. The women are very feminine and most modest. The children can be devastatingly beautiful. Vientiane is old French colonial in style – buildings with very large rooms and high ceilings which are cool. When you eat out it is inexpensive and always ‘haute cuisine’ à la mode Français. Prices are, except for the local silver, very cheap – though I haven’t bought anything at all, as yet.

“Laos should not be an apparently happy country. It is very poor indeed. There are less than 4 million in an area roughly the same size as England, Scotland and Wales together. During the Indochina and Vietnamese wars, two million people vanished from Laos, the vast majority killed. And now they fall in the Russian sphere of influence; the TV starts every day with a message of goodwill from Moscow showing tanks, huge numbers of aircraft, troops, missiles --- presumably as a reminder that they are available to sort out any disagreement between the two.

“Then there are the MIAs (people who went Missing in Action) from the Vietnam War. There are – according to local rumour – some hundreds still in Laos who are alive. They were said to have been seen from the air (well, at least one group was) by a former colleague who went public – and was removed hurriedly. The United States is still desperate to settle the matter and has made an allocation of 5,000 tons of rice on the basis that they can investigate the site of an air crash which happened in Laos in 1972 - presumably someone flying the Ho Chi Minh Trail which ran through Laos, and who didn’t make it back.

“I can’t help but wonder about the MIAs themselves; as to how many of them after their ‘re-education’ were allowed to live with the locals and have, effectively, been absorbed into the society. Remembering the total trauma that some of the US war veterans faced on their return to the US, I wonder whether some of the MIAs might have preferred to stay --- after all, it has been some 15 years for some; and some will have taken up the opium habit (fairly widespread here, I am told) which might be less than acceptable back at ‘home’. I suspect we will be kept wondering for some years yet.

“Then there is the Golden Triangle --- Laos, Thailand and Burma meet at one point in the tough countryside where the poppy is grown easily. The Thais, because of their alliance with the USA, are trying to control the area, but only with limited success. Burma doesn’t like to be told anything – by anybody – and Laos is in a ‘different’ camp. Opium abounds and a small, very well organised group makes huge sums of money from it. Unfortunately for the country, this money is not recycled at all.”

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Back to the present.

I do not need an alarm clock to wake me because at approximately 5 minutes to 8 a crash sounds as someone slams his door on his way to breakfast. Then another, and another, and yet another. The whole building positively shakes each time. They are a group of Russians staying in the hotel and it would seem that correctly fitted doors are not common in Mother Russia, and they have developed a system of door closure which works best at home and they are intent on exporting their appropriate technology.

I can see why the use of vodka is so widespread – you need it from earliest morning to dull the headache from the door slamming routine.

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Sadly, I never made it to the local market in Vientiane as I would have loved to take back a small piece of silver, but the programme was so frantic that I left the market visit as one more item on my bucket list.

Life is not long enough, I’ve always thought. While working in Bangladesh, we met and befriended a Swedish couple with whom we stayed in touch thereafter, even to spending a short holiday break in their holiday cottage on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago where we met an academic relative who was undertaking a study of the Vale of Jars in Laos. A visit to The Vale of Jars is definitely on my bucket list, too.

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