Let Them Breed Frogs -- Lao PDR (3)

THE  HMONG

There are certain things one should avoid when traveling in Asia: Malaria-infested jungles, intoxicated taxi drivers, earnest NGO workers and, top of my list, hilltribe home-stays.

But on my latest trip to wonderful Laos on a video shoot last week, we had little choice accommodation-wise.

The remote Hmong village of Houay Ha, high in the mountains of Luang Prabang province, has no Holiday Inn, no faux eco-resort, no private bungalows. In fact it has no electricity or running water. "No Water! Oh my god, my skin will flake and my beautiful hair will be ruined," I attempted to convey in seven ethnic dialects.

A local family graciously put us up in a storeroom at the back of their rudimentary house where we slept on a back-breaking wooden structure  above the dirt floor, along with all manner of insect life, the family’s 18 children and a large rat.

Outside, magnificent stars shone down into the blackness that enveloped the village.

The surrounding hills were alive with the sound of --- no not music – the sound of my cameraman projectile vomiting, the result of our lunch of minced innards that evidently didn’t agree with him.  

Diva producers like myself may be accused of being city wimps, but when it comes to roughing it we are usually way more robust than our macho cameramen, although I wouldn’t exactly classify my good friend Mikael as “macho.” Delightfully, he’s also not sexist, racist, rude or culturally insensitive like some in his profession, which is why I like him. He is open-minded, enthusiastic, intelligent and easy to work with. Just don’t feed him innards!

MIKAEL POST-POISONING

We are here to film a meeting between a Japanese-funded NGO and representatives of four villages about – you guessed it – alternative bloody livelihood programs.

Shifting cultivation or so-called slash and burn farming methods are destroying Laos’ forests, agencies and think tanks have declared. Odd how this has only just occurred to them given it’s been going on since Buddha was a boy. They are a bit slow on the uptake these agencies.

From what Mikael and I could see, the impact was minimal compared to the damage caused by large scale logging, both legal and illegal, and multi-billion dollar infrastructure projects that have destroyed tens of thousands of hectares of Laos’ pristine forests

So now the folk in this Hmong village are being encouraged to stop farming and are being offered a range of fabulously interesting alternatives like goat, frog, pig or fish breeding, pineapple growing – at these altitudes? And 'food processing.”

We had witnessed the ‘food processing initiative’ some days earlier.

Mikael and I had envisaged factory production lines with teams of women sorting and packing hundreds of boxes of canned grasshoppers as they spilled from the conveyer belt, singing to pass the time aka Laverne and Shirley.

In fact there were four women in a smoky, dark bamboo structure slicing bananas and deep frying them to sell for a pittance at local markets. Boy did we have the wrong idea. And they bore no resemblance to Laverne or Shirley, which was heartbreakingly disappointing.

I watched with interest as the Hmong men crouched on the soil politely listening to the NGO’s forest-saving initiatives.

“Most of them don’t understand it, it’s beyond them,” one of the NGO-ers remarked condescendingly.

That’s not the impression I got. Being able to understand a reasonable amount of Lao, I heard them ask sensible questions while watching attentively, although with an air of bemused detachment.

Sure, they could raise goats and plant turnips, they nodded, but I suspect what no-one is allowed to talk about, yet is rather obvious if you peek behind any of the ramshackle houses at the beautifully colored poppies, is that their main cash crop continues to be opium! Good on them.

The people in this village are among the lucky ones not to have been relocated – (see previous blog entry.)

But most of the other villagers we filmed in had been. Hideous cement structures had replaced traditional wooden houses and the new ‘bans’ (villages) had been built along side dirt roads that with each passing vehicle, stirred up huge clouds of choking, eye-watering, designer-gown and Jimmy Choo shoe destroying dust.

This is improving their lives?

Aid agencies and other international institutions continually associate ‘poverty’ with, among other things, the “inability to break free from reliance on subsistence farming.” It’s such a fucking Western ‘rich’ nation notion. I have been to many far-flung places in Laos and can state, or at least opine, that from what I have observed many people don’t want to ‘break free’ from it.

People grow enough food on which to survive, or if they fall short, a neighbor will help out. They utilize all manner of forest nutrients, and are adept at slaying wild animals, felling birds with blow-pipes and tossing in everything from ants to worms to garnish their broth.

(NOTE to Animal Rights Activists: I'm not sanctioning this, merely stating the facts so please don't bombard me with threatening emails or firebomb my apartment, I do not want a repeat of the fallout from when I mentioned dog meat was quite tasty). 

Village women may not be able to read or write, but they are adept at setting up and maintaining complicated irrigation systems. The children may be on the grubby side, but in many villages they have enough to eat and are remarkably strong, compared to their western counterparts, from helping carry firewood, climbing trees, fishing and hunting.

In our Hmong village, classed as “extremely poor”, many people used a barter system instead of cash, which they have done for generations. They are close-knit communities where three generations of families live under one roof and all help with daily chores.

I’m not trying to idealize it, many people do indeed struggle. But it continually bugs me, as you by now have no doubt gathered, that they have these livelihood initiatives imposed upon them amid accusations THEY are destroying the land on which they have lived for generations.

To quote Irish author Dervla Murphy, in her wonderful book One Foot in Laos:

“The modernization of ‘backward’ countries like Laos is in no sense a benevolent enterprise: it is undertaken to enrich the developers and turn everyone either into a consumer or an ill-paid laborer. That may seem too obvious to need saying, yet an astonishing number of well-meaning folk remain convinced that ‘we’ are helping when we initiate and implement modernization. Our faith that the West’s way of doing things is the best way has been so firmly implanted that even now, when the evidence that this is not so has piled up on every continent (including the Antarctic), we find it hard to question our own superiority.”

Well said, Dervla.

MY BEAUTIFUL HAIR RUINED!

After our two days in the Hmong village, tripping over potholes, falling on my arse down slippery forest tracks, deprived of my shower gels, Issey Miyake fragrance and my 76 skin creams, terrified I’d be attacked by a rat or bitten by a snake, I neither looked or felt remotely superior to these kind, generous people.

However, next time I’m demanding to stay in the ‘superior’ ‘non-rat’ storage barn digs. I’ve heard they  have their own en-suite, a hole covered in twigs half way down a mountain that a local has to guide one to in order to ensure us pampered, puny, pathetic white folk don’t go hurtling down a cliff. 

Darn those alternative out-house initiatives!