An entire village joins in the vigil as men search for a drowning victim.

The new lake formed by the dam has been the site of drownings as villagers continue to use traditional boats on the vastly widened body of water.

Nakai Tai Village – Khammouan Province - Lao Peoples Democratic Republic

A guy from Nakai Tai drowned last evening. We didn’t know about the accident when we stopped by the village to inquire about unexploded ordnance reported in the area, and to make a social call on my friend Soon, but when we stepped out of our truck we immediately knew something was amiss. The village was unusually quiet. In fact, deserted.

Soon is an upper-leg amputee who doesn’t venture far from home. We found him and his wife sitting on their veranda.  They were just about the only residents remaining in the empty village.

Soon explained that the previous evening, at about 5 o’clock, two young men were out on the newly formed reservoir in a wooden boat when a second boat, equipped with a powerful motor, roared past creating a wake that swamped the smaller craft.  Observers heard screams and looked in time to see two men struggling in the water.  Their boat disappeared beneath the men and, having no life preservers, they had no choice but to make a desperate try for shore.  One made it; the other didn’t.  The victim was just twenty-three years old.

Often, while leading us to see old ordnance villagers will cross swollen rivers. Yai and I have no choice but to follow along.  We’ve tiptoed over flimsy bamboo bridges, clambered across partially submerged trees, waded through chest-deep streams and even floated across waters while clinging to logs or boards. Rarely have I considered a village boat to be a safer alternative.

Most boats are not owned by anyone in particular.  They are communal property.  As such, their care and maintenance is everybody’s responsibility; which is to say, no one’s responsibility.  The boats sit aground throughout the dry season, baking in the sunlight and shrinking in the dry air.  Eventually boards curl and seams split.  Then, the rainy season hits. Streams fill, rivers surge, and for the first time in months, people think about the boats. With time in the water, the boats swell and their seams close up a bit but, as a rule, they leak so badly that people have to alternate between rowing and bailing.

The boats are flat bottomed, with absolutely no hint of a keel.  That’s probably an effective design for travel over sandbars and rocky shoals, but the boats are treacherously unstable on open water.  Riding in one is like floating on a plank.  You dare not lean even a few degrees left or right or you’ll tip the boat.

The boats have, no doubt, evolved over the centuries as suitable craft for navigating rivers and streams, bodies of water that deepen during the rainy season but, being confined to narrow canyons, don’t widen much.  In the past, a boater cast into the water had only to swim a short distance to one shore or the other.

This year, where the Nam Theun River once freely flowed, there is a wide lake forming behind the newly constructed dam.  Unfortunately, people have yet to build new boats better designed for open water.   While not absolving the operator who swamped the village boat, the honest truth is that the unlucky men should never have been out in the middle of the reservoir in that particular boat.

After learning about the accident, Yai and I drove to the lake to size up the situation.  Most striking about the scene that we encountered was the complete unity of purpose demonstrated by the assembled villagers.  Nearly every man, woman and child from Nakai Tai was present, perhaps two hundred people or more.  If my buddy Soon had had two good legs he’d have been among his neighbors.

Most of the people standing on the shore had spent the night along side the grieving family.  People were provisioned with baskets of food and bottles of water.  Family groups had erected a colorful assortment of tents and canopies to protect people from the weather, which this time of year can switch from scorching sun to torrential rain in a matter of minutes.

Yai and I were the only spectators there.  Everyone was a participant.

Although there were more willing hands than available work, it was clear that everyone was there with a purpose.  If people didn’t have boats to row, draglines to cast, or bamboo poles to probe the soft bottom of the lake, they simply sat in unity and silent fellowship with the grieving family.  I was reminded of the poetic line about spouses in wartime: “They also serve who only stand and wait.”

Yai and I returned to Soon’s house to fill him in on events at the reservoir.  We described the many varied search techniques that we had observed and listened as Soon evaluated the likelihood of quick success. He predicted that if searchers didn’t snag the body today or tomorrow, they would surely find the man the day after tomorrow, since common knowledge held that bodies always floated to the surface after three or four days underwater.  Soon told us that most villagers would remain at the lake, along side the victim’s family until the young man was found.

I asked Soon about the motives of the people at the lake.  He was confident that everyone in the village must surely feel that they needed to be on the scene.  Yai gave me a knowing glance, as just yesterday I had led him through an informal English lesson on the difference between “wants” and “needs.”

“If everyone in the village did not go to the river, then the family would be alone,” Soon said.   “Everyone must go so the family will not be lonesome.”

Soon explained that when he was trampled by a water buffalo in the accident that cost him his leg, nearly one hundred villagers accompanied him to the hospital and sat with his wife while he was in the surgeon’s hands.

Soon’s wife said, “I would have been too lonesome if the people in the village had not been with me.”

I thought of an article that recently appeared in the Wausau Daily Herald.  The reporter identified a funeral home that is located on the outskirts of a nearby town that has become the area’s most popular site for Hmong funerals.  The reporter explained that the home’s semi-rural location provides an appropriate place for large numbers of ethnic Hmong to congregate around-the-clock during the three-day grieving period that has become the standard Hmong-American funeral.

Thoughts ran through my mind of “wants” and “needs” and “community support” and “the grieving process.”  I concluded that there is something powerful among the people waiting patiently on the shoreline in Laos that is akin to the force that draws Hmong to three-day funerals in Wisconsin.  In both cases people may want to be someplace else, but they know where they need to be.