Project Phongsali: Days 15 to 21

Project Phongsali

Daily Log: Week Three

Day 15

PCL is still looking for a replacement truck for our project. (The company is one vehicle (and a driver) short due to the road accident in which Om, Noi, and Vonna were injured.)

I decide to have a copy shop make a hard copy of the “UXO Reference Manual” published by Handicap International, a Belgian non-governmental organization (NGO). It’s a comprehensive guide to the 300 different kinds of ordnance that have been found in Laos. It has photographs and diagrams of everything from tiny “toe popper” mines, to two-ton bombs. I have a digital copy on my computer but a hard copy will be essential for those times when my computer is drained of juice.

The May District in Phongsali was heavily bombed by American planes during the war, but that’s only part of the story. Bombing data supplied by the U.S. Department of Defense, while a helpful starting point, only accounts for about 60% of the ordnance to be found; it doesn’t account for all the weaponry used in ground combat, such as artillery shells, rockets, motors, flares and grenades.

The village we’ll start in is just a few miles from the Vietnamese town of Dien Bien Phu, site of a huge battle between the French and the Vietnamese in 1954. Since some of the artillery used in that conflict could project shells over 30 kilometers, our village may very well have ordnance dating from that battle. In addition, the Vietnamese forces were carrying weaponry supplied by Russia, China and various Eastern European countries. It’s even conceivable that we could encounter ordnance dating to the Japanese occupation of Laos during World War II.

Of course the best rule when traveling in Laos is, “If you don’t recognize it, don’t touch it. If you don’t know what it is, assume that it’s UXO.”

Day 16

Turns out that a couple of the deminers who are slated to go with me to Phongsali showed up in Vientiane with all the kit they need for the trip, but without their Lao identification cards! Chalk it up to fellows who are not experienced travelers.

In many ways, the Lao ID card is a kind of internal passport. Lao citizens who want to leave their home province and journey to another part of Laos should have their official ID with them or they could be vulnerable to the whims of local police. I have a Lao ID card that I carry and present to the police in every village I work in. I’ve learned that it’s always better for me to make the police station my first stop in a new village, rather than have the police come looking for me (after they learn through the grapevine that there is a foreigner in town).

For foreigners traveling in Laos, freedom of movement has greatly improved since I first started traveling here ten years ago. At that time, a foreign visitor traveling from one province to certain others (i.e. Xieng Khuang and Hua Phan) met the kind of passport controls you would expect to find at international borders. I’m told by people who have a much longer history in Laos than I do, that foreign travelers once had to apply well in advance for permission to travel between provinces.

In any case, every guy on our team without his ID was sent back to his home village to get it. (It wouldn’t save the fellows any time or effort to claim that their cards were lost. All cards, new or replacement, are only issued in the hometown.

Just another glitch, but not a big problem as long as everyone hustles home and is back before we finally find a truck.

Days 17

“Defendant Harris, you have been charged with the crime of chronocide in the first degree. How do you plead?”

“Guilty, your honor. I’m ashamed to admit it, but the painful truth is that…while in Laos… I did indeed kill a lot of time.”

While waiting, and waiting and waiting we check on our friend Om, the hospitalized truck accident victim, and get good news. His workmates have been stopping by the hospital regularly but never saw much change. It was always the same report: “He acts like a drunken man. Doesn’t make sense when he talks. Can’t stand up.”

Then, last night his wife called in the monks from the temple to conduct a ceremony. This morning when she woke up from her place on the floor beside him, his bed was empty. She found him outside the building, walking the grounds, stretching to get the kinks out after nearly three weeks in a hospital bed. Go figure.

Day 18

Yai is back working full days and claims to be feeling fit.

We gave up trying to locate a driver-owned truck. Not that we didn’t consider a few candidates. Either the vehicle was a beater that we didn’t think would stand up to the rigors of the project, or it was new and the owner didn’t want to see it worked so hard. We finally settled on a smaller vehicle, a four-wheel drive Ford Ranger that we’ll drive ourselves.

The downside is that this truck’s too small to carry all the gear we need. We’ll have to leave our motorcycle behind, and have it delivered in about a week when the deminers drive up in a bigger truck.

No more hurdles that I can foresee. We should finally be on the road north tomorrow.

Day 19

Three of us are headed to Phongsali. Yai’s driving. I’m riding up front to keep an eye on both Yai and the speedometer. I remember watching him learn to drive two years ago and remember the pleasure he took in learning to accelerate through curves. He’s so taken with that technique (and so trusting) that given a series of three or four steep curves, with no braking in the straight-aways, he’s soon screaming down the mountain. My verbal warnings only last a few miles or a few curves, which ever come first.

In addition, we’ve got Oratai, the team leader of the deminers with us. He dashed home, found his Lao ID card and was back in Vientiane in a day. With Oratai along from the start, we’ll be able to include him in all the introductions we make and he’ll see all the early ordnance that villagers show us. Then, when the full team arrives Oratai will already have everything in his GPS unit, sparing Yai and me from having to lead the team back to items we’ve already seen.

The plan is for the three of us to spend the next week establishing a working relationship with villagers and surveying the area for ordnance. With luck, we’ll be well ahead of the team when they finally arrive. Once they start destroying the ordnance we’ve located during our head start, Yai and I will keep moving and attempt to stay ahead of them.

We’ll try to hold our lead for as long as we can. We know that, eventually, the demolition team will catch up to us. That always happens because it’s a lot faster to bang stuff away than it is to hump through the jungle looking for it.

We got a late start out of Vientiane so tonight we’re a couple of hours short of Luangprabang, our original destination. On the bright side, we’re in a town along highway 13 that has nothing in it to tempt us into lingering in the morning, and the guesthouse is budget friendly, only five bucks a night.

Call me superstitious, I pushed Yai to get us well beyond the town of Kasi before we stopped for the day. I’ve got nothing but bad associations with that town. It was along the road to Kasi that a series of brutal shootings occurred just a few years back. Over several months, “insurgents” shot up several buses traveling between Vientiane and Luangprabang. In the worst of the incidents over a dozen Lao were killed along with three tourists. Many passengers were wounded.

I did a lengthy interview with a university student who was on one of the buses; he is permanently disabled from his wounds. The interview includes the student’s chilling description of one of the shooters walking through the bus executing the wounded. (He survived by playing dead.) The young man was nervous about me posting the interview, for fear of retribution that could come from any number of interested parties. I’ve been sitting on that interview for several years now.

There have been no recent any incidents along the road through Kasi. (You never get much hard news you can trust in Laos, but word has it that the army set up a trap and ambushed the ambushers.) Still, the Kasi District has bad associations for me and I’d just as soon give the whole region a miss.

Day 20

Got an early start in the morning and headed for Oudomxai town, the capital of Oudomxai Province. As we roll along I’m startled by how many new homes are along the road. In the U.S. “new home” would imply nice construction, people achieving an improved status. Here, new home usually means temporary construction. Something thrown up in a hurry, to be used until their ship comes in someday and they can build something solid. New houses in that mode usually have woven bamboo walls and thatch roofs, all over a packed dirt floor. Windows lack glass and at best have crude wooden shutters.

People in these homes may live in them for a few years, or for the rest of their lives. They have the advantage of being built of local materials with very little in the way of cash investment. The men and women in every family, by adulthood, have all the weaving and carpentry skills necessary to build a house like that without having to spend any money on outside labor.

The reason for the increase in roadside housing? A few reasons.

First, perhaps, the road itself. People who used to walk miles and miles up and down mountain trails to get to a road to a market, now step out their door. They still have land in the back beyond where they farm, and they will have a “rice house” where they can overnight close to their field when they need to tend to their crops or take in a harvest.

But why move close to the road now? All along the road, a new power poles now run bring people electricity. It’s a strange juxtaposition, but some of the simplest homes have satellite dishes parked outside and small refrigerators in the kitchen.

People tell me that their children like being close to the road because they can get to school much faster and when they outgrow the local village elementary school they can attend the secondary school without having to leave home and board with a family in the town with a school.

The last reason I can cite may be the most compelling. In recent years the Lao government has been pushing mountain people to forsake “slash and burn” agriculture and relocate from the higher elevations. The government’s reason? Again, there are a variety of interests at play.

The government claims social and economic development of the mountain dwelling people, mostly ethnic minorities.

Others claim the government wants people off the mountain tops and relocated to places where they can be more easily monitored and controlled. Some claim that with the minorities relocated, the timber interest can harvest the forest resources that the villagers have been burning, and with the villagers gone, it removes one more interest group that might stand in the way of the country’s rapid development of hydroelectric power. (The rivers running down the valleys here, being one of the nations most important resources.

And finally, there is the poppy reduction program that is supported by many western nations and that receive broad international financial support. It’s a push pull situation. With mountain people moved from their poppy growing areas, the government has reduced the crop. And, with the prospect of income from an annual poppy harvest gone, people have less incentive to remain in their traditional villages.

Day 21

We couldn’t have had a warmer reception here in Sop Houn. We pulled into town at midday and sought out the village Naiban. He wasn’t home but his deputy greeted us and immediately started suggesting ideas for our comfort. Any number of villagers offered to take us into their home.

Funny thing was, when Yai explained that we were there to survey their need for clearance, somebody piped up that, “Last year some guy was here and did that already. We showed him lots of ordnance. But he never came back.”

Then, somebody in the group of onlookers (We seem always to draw onlookers.) spoke up and told the group, “Hey! I think it was this guy here.” I took off my cap to expose my baldhead and then, of course, everyone recognized me. I took out photographs that I snapped last year and everyone gleefully poured over them, laughing as they recognized people and places.

The Deputy Naiban came up with the best suggestion for our stay, at least until our larger truck arrives next week with our twelve-person army tent. The village has a small four-room clinic with a resident nurse. The nurse occupies one room. A female schoolteacher another. The remaining two rooms are for patients. Each of those rooms has three beds. So… we were offered one of the patient rooms.

We expressed concern that the doctor and nurse might need the space for patients but everyone thought that unlikely. Few people from the village would elect to sleep at the hospital when home was an option and, in any case, the doctor (not a “degree doctor” more like an EMT) will be gone for a week making visits to villages up mountain trails.

So… here we are bunked in the clinic. Very comfortable with my camping pad on what otherwise would be a mattress less wood-slated bed. We’ve got a water tap in the yard and a squat toilet with a door for privacy. Better digs that I expected.

We keep a wood fire going in the yard all day, to save the trouble of starting it up from cold coals. Our eternal flame also permits us to keep a kettle of water boiling all the time so we have drinking, cooking and wash water whenever we need it.

The one thing lacking in this village is a market for food. Since most Lao are subsistence farmers, consuming nearly everything they grow and having no surplus to sell, there is no need here for a marketplace. As a consequence, we’re quickly working our way through the case of ramen noodles that I brought with me from Vientiane. Eventually, we’ll work out a solution, but for the time being it looks like noodle, noodle, noodle.

The other problem, that isn’t really a problem, is the attention we’ve drawn. If I leave the window to our room open, I’ve got three or four children learning into the room to rubberneck. If I close the shutters, the kids simply walk into the clinic and lean in my door. I doubt that any of the kids would steal from us, but I’ve had to move have everything I value more than an arms length from the door or window. If I don’t the kids reach in to pick things up to inspect.

Already this first day, people have taken us to see ordnance. More hiking tomorrow. A lot more, I expect!