Last month, we spent nine days in the field with Jim Harris’s team in rural Phongsali province. We camped at the local dispensary and showered with cold river water, which was piped uphill to the village. The team hired two young women to cook, clean and launder. Our meals were served communally, outside, on an old red table. There weren’t enough benches and chairs, so we stood around baskets of sticky rice and the plat du jour. Each person paid 30,000 kip ($3.50) for three daily meals.

In those nine days, I kept a diary of what we ate. With a few small exceptions (late meals, off trekking), I managed to record almost every meal. I present that diary here because I find it a fascinating telltale of village life, its limitations, its repetitions and routines. Villagers bestowed the team with little gifts of homegrown garlic and backyard tamarind. But after the novelty faded (Sophoon is unaccustomed to foreign guests), I don’t think our cooks quite knew what to do with us. I would have loved more of the roots and vegetables that villagers collect in the forest, as well as the greens they grow in their garden. I offered to pay extra for fresh lettuce, spinach, herbs and other greens–but the residents of Sophoon almost never sell their vegetables, so the concept somewhat confused them. When something new appeared on the table, it likely had come strapped to the back of a dusty moto, driven by itinerant peddlers who make the daily trek from Dien Bien Phu, not far across the border. These sorts of travels make me a more appreciative person. The surprise of a fresh mango or mustard leaves tickled my palate with delight.

I’m a lover of simple, spicy farm food; homegrown and homemade. But it didn’t take long for my tongue to tire. By Day 3, I was sick of fish (and egg, which neither Jerry nor I eat). Of course, repetition is a matter of life in Sophoon. Villagers eat what’s in season, what falls off the tree, what pops through the soil in the forest, or what comes through on the occasional truck to Vietnam.

On the other hand, Sophoon is an organic locavore heaven. When a cook walked into the kitchen hut with a chicken, we ate it for dinner that night. And Michael Pollan would approve: nothing on this menu contained more than five ingredients. With a couple of canned exceptions, absolutely everything originated in the hills between Sophoon and Dien Bien Phu.

So goes our week of village sustenance (with comments in parentheses):

DAY 1

Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow (or jeow—spicy paste made with toasted chiles. More on this to come.)
-Minced fish with chile
-Plain boiled cabbage
-Green & yellow beans with tomato, onion, chile, garlic

DAY 2

Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Fried egg with green onion, garlic, tomato, chile
-Boiled cabbage with garlic and chile

Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red Jaeow
-Boiled cabbage
-Fried small fish

Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Fragrant fish soup with lemongrass (which team leader Vilaisack plucked from a field after a bomb demolition)
-Fish laap

DAY 3

Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Very garlicky red jaeow
-Boiled cabbage and tomato with garlic
-Small fried fish

Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow, super garlicky and juicy
-Omelet with tomato, chile, onion
-Spicy slightly bitter fish (from Dien Bien Phu) stuffed with lemongrass in a soup of tomato, garlic and local sour fruit

Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Omelet
-Fish/tomato/lemongrass soup
(This is getting old and the team is griping. Only fish and egg, egg and fish. We lobby for more vegetables.)

DAY 4

Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Omelet
(This is really old. And skimpy. We try to get the cooks to buy vegetables from the locals. It costs 3,000 kip, 35 cents, for a kilogram of any vegetables. We offer to pay extra if necessary.)

Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Pork with boiled garlic, tomato, chile
-Mustard greens soup with chile and black pepper
(Variety! A distinct improvement.)

Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Steamed cassava leaves (which the team collected after a demolition)
-Dried salty crispy beef
-Pork with tomato, yellow beans, chile, garlic

DAY 5

Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Dried toasted buffalo skin strips (hard as rock)
-Yesterday’s leftover pork cooked with garlic, chile, spinach
-Minced pork fat cooked in tomato garlic broth for a Lao khao soy-style sauce
-Bowl of fresh raw lettuce leaves
(A pig was purchased before yesterday’s lunch, and we’re still eating it).

Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Fresh green roasted chile jaeow, super hot
-Pork fat with shredded tomato and cabbage
-Mustard green soup with hunks of pork fat

Dinner 
(Jim succeeds in organizing “Mexico night.”)
-Raw cabbage leaves to use as tortillas
-Canned black refried beans cooked with fresh garlic
-“Salsa” of cooked tomatoes, onions, chile
(Jim uses the cabbage to wrap the ingredients like a taco. It works. The guys each try one and declare it sep, meaning delicious. Then they eat their sticky rice, pork fat with greens and green chile jaeow and deer meat of mysterious origins.)

DAY 6

Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Green jaeow
-Mild bok choy soup with chile and garlic
-Dark dried beef (we’re told beef, but it looks distinctly like the previous night’s deer) fried with bok choy, garlic, onion, a bit of tomato and pork fat

Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Dried beef pieces
-Beef, bok choy and garlic soup
-Fresh sweet mango

Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Fish soup (only fish and gingery broth, no vegetables)
-Watermelon (which I bought off a truck that stopped in the village and dumped its stash)

DAY 7

Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Green jaeow with added tamarind
-Cilantro and green chile soup
-Steamed cassava leaves
-Canned sardines and tomato
-Omelet

Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Green jaeow
-Papaya salad with peanuts
-Mustard greens soup
-Green beans fried with chicken, chile, garlic

Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Green beans with chicken

DAY 8

Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Boiled mustard greens soup, just a little chile and salt
-Plain boiled green beans
-Fried meaty bacon with little fat

Dinner
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Tamarind chicken soup
-Chopped “grenade” chicken with green beans
(In addition, I cook canned tuna, tomato, onion, garlic and chile.)

DAY 9

Breakfast
-Sticky rice
-Red juicy jaeow
-Fresh lettuce leaves
-Canned sardines in tomato sauce
-Sweet potato ginger soup
(This is good. Mild, young, fragrant ginger slightly sweetened from the potatoes. I think of making it at home: start with chicken stock, some small fresh garlic and garlic greens and/or chives, ginger, potato chunks, dried red chile, salt. If not using regular potatoes, add a pinch of palm sugar.)

Lunch
-Sticky rice
-Red jaeow
-Melon soup with green onion and grenade chicken
-Papaya salad
-Fried forest ferns with chile, garlic, fish (Borneo-style but these ferns have a leafier consistency… now why couldn’t we have had these sooner?

A retired Wisconsin principal now digs for explosives.

Jim Harris crouches on one mud-stained knee, gingerly probing the dirt around a fist-sized bomb. A boy found it while digging for insects in the southern Laotian village of Phonephanpek.  Harris is calm, but concerned. The hour is late, the sun painting everything ochre. “I hate finding ordnance this time of day,” he says.

Harris, a 60-year-old retired elementary school principal from Weston, a small town just south of Wausau, is a tall mustachioed man with a few wisps of gray hair. He towers over most Laotians, but retains the gentle, patient manner of a longtime educator.  Here in Laos, his lessons center on weaponry and survival.  Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dumped 4 billion pounds of explosives on this sparsely populated Southeast Asian country as part of its efforts to battle communist supply lines during the Vietnam War. U.S. bombers conducted one raid every eight minutes for nine years. “Bombies,” as the locals call them, were packed by the hundreds into canisters that opened in midair, scattering the load. Up to 30 percent of those bombs never detonated, and Laotian soil remains contaminated today.  Villagers are maimed and killed every week while farming their fields, foraging for food or searching for scrap metal. “Digging is dangerous,” Harris says.

After retiring in 2003, Harris went to work for a New Zealand-based bomb clearance organization, Phoenix Clearance Limited – hardly the usual retirement path. “I’ve never been burdened by practicality,” he says.

His interest in the country stems from the flood of Hmong

refugees who settled in Wisconsin (home to the

nation’s third-largest Hmong population). Harris began vacationing in Laos, meeting the distant families of his Wausau- area neighbors and returning with accouterments to educate students about Hmong culture.

Half the year, Harris goes village to village, teaching Laotians about unexploded ordnance. “This is my retirement,” Harris says. “I could be golfing.”

Instead, he and his Laotian partner Yai knock on doors, scramble through fields and forest – hurdling fences, tramping through muck, battling leeches, mosquitoes and a tropical sun – to find bombs that villagers have seen. He goes anywhere the bombs are – which is everywhere. “The first six months Yai and I worked together, we blew up 1,000 bombies,” Harris says. “Then I stopped counting.”

Back in Phonephanpek, Harris returns the next morning with a clearance team to take out the bomb. “It can kill you up to 100 yards,” he says. Team leader Khonesavan investigates the ordnance while four others blast the air with bullhorns, warning villagers to move out.

Khonesavan discovers a second bomb nearby, which complicates the procedure. He carefully moves the explosives into a hole, then places an old red brick of Russian TNT, the size of a soap bar, atop the bombs. A firing line leads several hundred yards to a small box with a crank and button. The entire village listens to the countdown: three, two, one – BOOM! The blast rattles the heart as red earth and gray smoke flies through the air.  Then it’s all clear.

Two bombs gone, unknown millions remaining. Harris rejoices in one more small victory.

“It’s a great job, really.”

Farming in the developing world is never an easy occupation, but for farmers in Laos there is a particularly grave complication.

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