Mays End

As the days grow longer and my time here dwindles I have had some interesting new experiences.  Most of my days are the same with waking up checking the internet then heading out for lunch.  I will normally spend a few hours at the library each days trying to sell books for CLI and work on my Lao.  Sometimes this awards me with new and interesting opportunities, such as yesterday.  Yesterday was the first day of a two day CLI activity volunteer training session(sorry about the awkward language not sure how else to write it).  This means that for about 6 hours each day the CLI staff will be training volunteers on songs, dances, and other learning activities to perform at the Khmu School.  Chanta took photos and put some up on here website.  Her favorite video she took was of musical chairs.  She tried to show it to me about 4 times over the afternoon.  I went out to lunch with Brad and Yoxa and then came back to do a puzzle and play some chess.  I am room next to the library there is a Cafe that Chanta started and over the past few days we have helped rearrange it.  La, Chanta's husband, was over in the Cafe drinking with some friends when Chanta told me I have to go over and try some worms.  I was naturally intrigued by the "worms" so I walked over to see what the fuss was all about.  In actuality I am pretty sure it was caterpillar larve but they were huge.  Imagine half a roll of quarters.  At first I thought it was a joke but after Yoxa ate one I had to try it.  You eat them by peeling the skin (unless your a local lao kid) and then eating the insides.  They were cooked and very greasy.  Not much to eat but they werent bad.  I was proud of my exotic eats as I chased it down with some beer lao.  Over the next few hours I drank and ate with La and his friends.  I even started an english  lesson with them over the next few weekends I am here.  After Chanta kicked us out I head out for some food.  Tom wasnt feeling great so he headed home when I was mid meal.  I followed shortly there after.  I sat home for about 20 minutes before taking my next adventure which was a trip to ice cream with Lanoy and Chanti, two of my english students.  To my surprise we were biking to ice cream.  I got on one really old bike that was too small and they shared another.  We biked through the city as kids on motorbikes raced around us.  Almost died once.  They kids seem to travel in roving gangs and the motorbike driving age must be about 6.  We got ice cream and had a good conversation about how I am going to buy Lanoy a car and a trip out to America.  I was pretty intrigued by this because I wasn't sure what I was getting out of this deal.  We got home and sat outside of Chantas moms house and talked before I was so lost and not even included in the Lao conversation I went home to bed.  I cant believe I only have two weeks left.

Library Blog First Post

With Chanta sitting over my shoulder I helped write the first post for the Library Boat Blog.  She will now take over posting when she remembers. Take a moment and get acquainted with Chanta and her staff.
http://lpblibraryboat.blogspot.com/

Coming To America

Just two days ago I got my visa renewed for the last time.  This maybe the last time ever because upon returning I should have a sponsored 6 month visa from the sports committee.  Or I wont.  The meetings were had and Somlath(I will finally spell his name correctly) is picking up photo copies of our passports.  Presumably to give to the sports committee and not to sell our identities. 
I have my exit date established, with a little chaos and much help from my mother in America.  On June 13th I will leave these shores and arrive two hours later in LAX.  This sounds like a great trip when worded like that but in actuality it is a 17 hour and 5 minute flight from Bangkok to LAX.  I am then lucky enough to get to spend a night in LA because no flights would dare flight the 1and a half to Phoenix any later than 9, I arrive at 9:30.  Thus giving me the time I was really hoping for to be alone with my thoughts for one more night.  Kidding I would much rather be at home in my own bed with my family.  All of these thoughts of going back to the US has got me thinking about the future and what I will actually do with my LIFE (cue the ominous echo life life life).  This stay so far has truly opened my eyes to the wonderful culture and people of Laos not to mention the great work that CLI is doing.  They are changing the lives of so many with relatively little on the NGO scene.  The perpetual uphill battle is something to be admired but can also take many years off ones life.  The support of readers like you help make it all possible.  I am just not sure if I could be able to sustain the constant fight for life/livelihood of so many who depend on it with so many forces fighting to slow things down.  All I know is that my second tour of duty will be an interesting one.  I have tried to prepare things to keep myself up with my Lao knowledge.  I have made some flash cards and even tried to start learning how to write.  I will give you all the first lesson on how to write Lao/Thai.  First you will need a pen, a lined piece of paper, and a handkerchief.  Next roll the handkerchief until it is two inches wide.  Next tie the handkerchief around your head slightly above your eyes.  Pick up the pen and the piece of paper.  Place the pen at the beginning of one of the lines, with your non writing hand pull the handkerchief over your eyes.  Start writing but if you make a single character that looks latin in origin start again...you failed.  Open your eyes and look at what you have written.  There is a possibility that you are one of the thousand monkeys, on a thousand typewriters, writing for a thousand years, who wrote the Lao Constitution.  All kidding aside I decided to start this needlessly difficult venture by walking to one of the many college students living in dorms around the house and ask for help.  I started slowly with a book of all the consonants. HAHA.  Little did I know that they all sound the same. Follow this link for a really good picture of the letters: http://www.seasite.niu.edu/lao/LaoLanguage/LaoAlphabet/lao_consonants_poster.htm. Then come the vowels which surround the consonants.  Let me give you an example the vowels are in green:
The first is a short vowel the second is long one. Logical right.
With this information in hand I had my teachers write down a few important words and key phrases.  This went well but the one who did the writing for me said that this was a more formal way.  The next day I went to another group of will tortures and took more phrases.  They were very kind while mocking my inability to read or pronounce what they were writing.  I then compared some words between the previous days writings and the more current version.  I established that its all a lie.  They make it up at they go and I am pretty sure no one in the country can read anything written by anyone else.  The words written by the two different people looked similar but not enough so that you would perfectly distinguish it was the same word.  Now in a state of disbelief I kept comparing words and arriving at similar responses.  I have now resigned myself that I better move here permanently if I learn how to read and write because that much brain space being taken up cannot help many other aspects of my life.


Time is counting down and I already cant wait for my second tour.  Thanks for the support and I will keep the updates coming from my remaining weeks in LP.

Chompet and The Rocket Festival

Monday this last week I took the perilous journey across the mekong to Chompet.  This is the first time I had been to Chompet since a few months ago when Bob and Sirivan were in town.  Chanta and I went over to check the progress of the dormitory and the library.  We had known the library was finished but CLI was still working out finishing the dormitory which had run into to some political problems.  The school had no supplied everything they needed to and so CLI had to buy them in the interim.  It was purchased with the expectation that the school would have to pay CLI and then finish building the dormitory.  The school had not paid CLI yet so thus our journey.   The progress was amazing.  The library is up and running and it looks great.  The dormitory looks great from the outside but has no beds inside.  Chanta and I sat down the school number two and explained the problems.  She will get back to Chanta after discussing with the higher ups.  While over at the school I saw three of the athletes and worked out that twice a week, starting next week, I will go over and train them.  I am excited to get too keep coaching.

Tuesday we got up early..well early for me and headed out to Nan district.  The goal was to head to the rocket festival which happens once at year in Vientiane and some of the other districts but not in Luang Prabang.  On our way we decided to stop at some waterfalls and some caves.  The first time I had seen either on this trip.  The crew of tourists included Tom and Myself, Chanta, her husband, Lanoy (the girl who lives with them), 3 of the library staff and Brad and Yusa an american couple from boulder who moved to Laos.  Her parents are Lao. The first stop not related to some minor car sickness was at the caves.  These are not the famous tourist caves that most people who Visit Luang Prabang go to but they were pretty amazing.  At the base of the mountain were two caged monkeys.  They are being killed off at alarming rates because people eat them.  The caves were about 100 meters up a mud hill with some assorted swings on the way up.  The pictures will help the description.  The cave was 400 meters deep and about 300 meters in it got to the point where you had to squat walk for about 25 meters.  Times like this I am not a huge fan of being one of the bigger people in the country.  After about 30 minutes walking through the cave we played around on the swings and then headed on our way to a waterfall.  Like the caves we were the only people there.  We took of our shoes and walked up the waterfall.  I left my camera behind because I was not sure what we would see or how wet it would be but many others did and I hope to have some photos soon.  Taking steps cautiously we arrived to the top where the main drop was and it was a very beautiful spot with the drop being about 20 feet.  No pools to swim in sadly but it was beautiful with water spiders jumping around feeding on something I couldnt see.  Not nearly as scary as it sounds.  We got back into the car and headed for Nan.  We arrived at someones house where a party was going on.  We doubled the size of the party and is custom started drinking.  The music was so loud Brad smartly had to walk away for a while to save his hearing...he was the only smart one.  On the menu was duck blood soup which was one of the spiciest things I have ever tried and I didnt try very much.  Chicken Laap and chicken feet soup filled out the rest of the eats. I just kept wondering where all the good parts of the chicken went.  I never got that answer Tom and I assumed it gets thrown to the dogs.  Drinking and dancing ensued with the CLI staff from Nan and then we walked to the rice fields. In the terraced rice fields were two bamboo stands which were about 15 feet high.  People would climb up with their homemade rockets and then light the fuse and run off.  Very few were truly successful.  The ones that failed were the most fun to watch.  The successful ones flew about 2 hundred feet into the air then came diving back to earth.  As we stood standing one of the guys from the party who had taken a liking to Tom got seats for us in the VIP section.  We couldn't see the flight very well so we moved.  As we were standing around we were offered drinks by some people who were picnicking near us.  They eventually invited us to sit down but as we did we received a phone call beckoning us back to the camp to head home.  On our way back we stopped at the CLI learning center in Nan and looked around.  It was another nice building.  We got home and I passed out for the next 13 hours after dinner.   We got internet back at the house so I woke up and I am writing this post.  Hope all is well elsewhere in the world.

Here for the photos.

 Lanoy and a library staffer at the lunch.

 Walking to the fields to see the rockets.

 The stands with the rockets just after one went off or atleast tried to.

 Brad sitting in our VIP tent.

 Yusa and some staffers looking at the Nan learning center.

 Lanoy passed out on the way back.

 The Library in Chompet.

 The dormitory in Chompet.

 Inside the library in Chompet.

 Inside the dormitory in Chompet.

 A view from the road of the cave.

 Tom, Brad and Yusa at one of our pit stops with the girls taking photos on a broken truck in the back.

 The monkeys.

 Inside the cave

 Tom and I on the swing.

 Me on a different swing.

Climbing the bottom section of the waterfall completely unable to see what would be coming.

News?!

Sorry for the lack of updates.  Recently the weather has been somewhat schizophrenic.  There is normally atleast one daily downpour and it can last from about 5 minutes to a full hour plus most of the time they are only 30 minutes.  This has cause our internet to fail at the house.  We had speculated that Chanta hadnt paid our internet bill and they cut it off because it happened so abruptly around a week ago.  She claims she paid the bill.  If we get it fixed soon I will try to keep the updates regular. 
I have spent some serious time at the library lately using some sparse internet and doing some teaching.  I started with teaching english to Lanoy who lives in chantas house.  I also taught one of the library staff how to play chess.  I am not very good but I understand how to pieces move so after his third game he beat me.  Actually not but he wasnt too bad for a first timer.  I have also set up a blog for the library which I included a link to in the helpful links section.  I just taught Chanta how to use it so the first post should be up in the next week or so.  This way after I am gone the people who care about the library boats and the great work CLI is doing can keep following.  I am thinking I may start trying to have an open hour or two a day at the library for people to come and work on their english with a native english speaker.  I may not be fluent and any of you who read the blog know my grammar is terrible.  But that being said conversational help is a big one plus I can give some simple spelling help.
On the coaching side of things Bob met with the sports committee and established that they didn't hate the job we did.  They should have a full sport committee meeting discussing the games and the year ahead next week.  The will try to hire a new Lao head coach and that person may or may not be amenable to using us the way No did.  The game of politics is an interesting one.   Tom is currently giving workouts to Tia who was our star pupil and ended up being to old to run at the high school games.  He will be running at the National Games. There are no sprinters training right now so I am just working out for myself. 
I was sick a few days ago and just weighed myself this morning down to a slim 60.5kg I will let you do the math on your own. The reason I weighed myself is because Justin (a falang who is a science teacher doing a project at the library) wanted to start a health class of sorts in the library.  I said I would help so we are calculating weight height and BMI.  The BMI is pretty dumb because Lanoy weight her self and thought she was huge at 50kg which is about 112 and she is 5'3.   She thinks she is fat but BMI for all of Laos would say they are probably under weight.   Who knows if anything its a good intro into health related issues.

Thats all I got for now if new things come up I will blog it.  Remember to check out lpblibraryboat.blogspot.com