Project Sekong 2012: We’re living among subsistence farmers who have no surplus food to sell.

January 27, 2012
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This small clinic serves several villages in the area. We set up our camp on the clinic grounds, making it easy for people to find us, and giving ourselves access to water piped from a mountain spring.

Report 3

Our camp is in good shape.  Our tents are on flat land next to a small building that should protect us from the prevailing winds and the dust they carry.  We’ve found a safe spot to build our cooking fire. (It’s dangerous to build fires on uncleared land.  Less than two weeks ago several children here in Laos were killed when a bomb exploded under the fire their families had built for warmth on a chilly morning).

There is a small river just fifty yards away but since the water buffalo wallow in a spot upstream we probably won’t use that stream for bathing or laundry.  Luckily, there is a plastic pipe running up the hill behind our camp that must originate in a spring because water trickles through it twenty-four hours a day, never varying in volume.  We have no way to test the water’s quality but it looks clear and smells fresh.  We won’t drink from that source, or even cook with it. but it should be fine for bathing and, once boiled, for washing dishes.

Villagers here in Dak Dor are friendly and welcoming.  Many have stopped by simply to thank us for being here.  I hope in the next several weeks we are able to provide services that will earn the respect and appreciation they are now showing us.

The village of Dak Door has two small shops that sell soap, candles, nails, batteries, rope and other necessities of village life, but not food. The closest community with food to sell was nearly an hour away.

We have a problem here in Sekong that is similar to the situation that we found ourselves in two years ago while working in Phongsali.  The village we are living in is populated entirely with subsistence farmers who consume everything they grow and have no surplus to carry to market.  There is, in fact, no market within ten miles of this village.

Dak Dor has a couple of tiny shops that sell cigarettes, laundry powder, cooking oil and a few other essentials.  But, apart from a hand or two of bananas, and a few tins of sardines, no food.  We probably could buy food from the villagers, but that would only reduce the calories they have to sustain themselves.

We’ll have to make up a week’s menu and then combine food shopping with our fuel runs to more distant towns.  In between runs, if we haven’t properly provisioned ourselves and our stores run low, we’ll have to tighten our belts and exist on short rations.

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