Project Sekong 2012: Meet more of our team. Bounphasith Xayavong (“Yai”) is our interpreter.

No matter what corner of Laos we travel to Yai always makes friends and through those friendships helps our team solve problems that might otherwise hinder our work.

Report 21

Our interpreter’s full name is Bounphasith Xayavong but he prefers the shorter nickname, “Yai”.  Even his oldest friends would have a difficult time conjuring up his real name.  Yai is our main man.  Usually, the guy who makes it all happen.  The man who puts things right when the wheels fall off the wagon.  The steady force when the ship hits the sand.

Yai and I have worked together for seven years, always in harsh environments and, occasionally, under life-threatening circumstances.  (See our blog entry for September 29, 2008: “Boy Rolls Bomb Under Yai’s Bed.”  Or, view our video from August 31, 2011: “Don’t Bring That Here!”).  On only a couple of occasions have we been at each other’s throats.  Given the intensity of our work and the nature of our living conditions, that’s not a bad record.  In all honesty, our positive working relationship and our lasting friendship are more a credit to Yai than to me.

Yai’s big hearted, good humored and, most importantly, forgiving of the bonehead mistakes that we falang often make.  For lack of a more imaginative title, I call him my “interpreter”, although “project manager” is closer to the truth.

Yai will turn forty later this year, but he looks much younger.  He’s been married for eleven years and is father to twins, a boy and a girl, now ten years old.  His wife runs a beauty shop in Vientiane where she works a chair herself, ten hours a day, seven days a week.  Yai’s a bit bothered by the fact that his wife brings more income to the family than he does, but he doesn’t want to leave his current career.  So, he lives with bruised pride and frustrated ambitions.

He’s tried other jobs over the years but each has left him at a dead-end.  He started college as a Russian major, only to have the Soviet Union disappear and with it, Russian presence in Laos.  He then changed his major to architecture, but never found work in that field.

He eventually parlayed his gift of gab into a job as news anchor at Lao National Television.  He enjoyed the stardom but discovered that in Laos news anchors are like cicadas: they “sing for free”.  In search of better wages he left television and took employment with the UXO clearance company where his brother was working as an administrator. (In Lao, family connections often trump education or experience).

One of Yai's greatest strengths is his effectiveness when teaching children and adults about the dangers of unexploded ordnance.

Yai’s found his calling working with UXO removal; his specialization is community awareness.  He’s poised and at ease in front of any audience, whether it’s comprised of powerful government officials or the poorest, least-worldly villagers.  I’ve observed hundreds of teachers in my years as a school principal and I can attest to Yai’s ability to teach anybody just about anything.  He has intuitively arrived at a skill level that many teachers study and strive for, but never obtain.

Between Yai and his wife, his family has acquired assets that most people in Lao can only dream about.  They’ve built a nice home, and own an air conditioner, a television, a car, and two motorcycles. What worries Yai is that he has no resources that would carry his family through unemployment, illness, or old age.  (Or, injury.  Remember, Yai spends every workday in the presence of old ordnance!)

He feels his family is fine as long as he and his wife can both work but living in a county with no entitlement programs such as Social Security or Medicare, he fears that his elder years will be insecure unless his children obtain good jobs and are able to look after their parents’ needs.

Yai has faced and conquered challenges in life that he is too modest to talk about, and he would be embarrassed if I discussed them here.  Suffice it to say that he started life with absolutely no prospects.  The station in life that he and his wife hold today is one they’ve earned entirely through their own labor: no gifts, no inheritance, no luck with the lottery.  Only their own efforts.