An Apology and a Preface

Wynne Hedlesky
1214 local time
Düsseldorf, Germany

Beloved readers, I am deeply sorry for my extended absence from the “blogosphere”. I will apologize for Kristian as well. Sadly, he is currently working on a novel and may not post here again for a while. One might think that hitchboating around the world is basically an extended vacation, but you would be surprised at how busy a person can get. We have also been in some fairly remote places, where even electricity is a luxury. Hard to blog if your computer is dead. As for the internet—well. When we had it, I was frantically trying to complete graduate school applications so that I could submit them before I got on a sailboat to cross the Indian Ocean. Turns out there’s not internet out there, either.

Excuses, excuses. I have been burning to say something about the eight months we spent in Asia, and only now, in the comfort and leisure of a snuggly first-world Christmastime, am I finally finding an opportunity to post some words on our experiences there, the highlight of which was, by far, the time that Kristian and I spent living among the emerald mountains and kind-hearted people of northern Laos.

As a preface to the post that follows, I would like to briefly describe what we were doing there. Kristian and I spent four months volunteering for Bambusschule, a German non-profit organization that focuses on improving education and health care along the Ou River in northern Laos. We lived with a Lao family, in a Lao village, three hours away by boat from the nearest town with automobiles or the Internet. In most of the villages where we worked, we were the only English speakers. Our job, roughly, was to teach English and carry out some maintenance projects on the buildings—three schools and a boarding house—that the organization has built in the region. 

  
For the first few weeks, we had some small degree of guidance from the organization’s Field Manager. He acquainted us with the key figures in the villages where we would be working, and helped us plan the summer’s maintenance projects. He provided next to no guidance about the English teaching program, however, other than showing me a box full of paper, pencils, and other school supplies and telling me this was what I had to work with. No book, no syllabus, no notes from previous volunteers, nothing. He seemed completely unconcerned at the lack of structure or guidance—“Bo pen nyang, relax, this is Laos!” he said. He was never particularly interested in that part of the organization’s work; he focused more on plumbing projects. He had a love for building things out of little blue PVC pipes. After about a month, he went home to Australia on vacation. Shortly thereafter, he was fired.

So Kristian and I were left more or less alone for three months in rural Laos to find the best way to accomplish the organization’s goals and represent its values. For the building maintenance projects, we had to get by with our meager knowledge of the Lao language—we had no translator while purchasing and transporting supplies, or negotiating with village leaders. We were also supposed to incorporate as much English teaching into our schedule as possible, but with the added complication that school was out of session for most of our time there, and so we had no scheduled time for English class, and no classroom in which to teach. And yet it could hardly have been better.

We took advantage of our lack of direct supervision and the open-ended directives to begin designing a new English program for the organization, based on the knowledge of second language acquisition that Kristian gained during his university studies in linguistics and his participation in a research project about the subject conducted by the university of Cologne in cooperation with the Max-Planck-Institute in Nijmegen. Throughout everything we did, we worked closely with the organization’s founder in Germany (or as closely as you can when you can only communicate every two weeks or so). The core of our new program is informal interaction—that is, play. It was not difficult to convince the village kids to get involved. By the end of the summer, some of the kids we worked with had gone from robotic repetition of “How are you?” “I’m fine, thank you” to the ability to express their likes and dislikes, ask questions, explain aspects of their daily life, and open up the all-important highways of communication between people from vastly different worlds.

I hope that the opportunity to interact with us ends up playing a positive role in those children’s lives. Learning about their way of life was certainly a valuable experience for me. More than anything, I continued to be struck by how so many aspects of Lao daily life stubbornly remained unexplained, regardless of the fact that I had lived in such close contact with Lao people for several months. The richness of cultures is such that people as different as me and my Lao hosts can find vast areas of common ground, while there always remain differences that make each group unique, and incite in us curiosity about our fellow human beings. I hope that the exposure to foreign people and language both instills in the children I interacted with a desire to learn about the world outside their village, as well as an understanding of the value of their own unique way of life.

P.S. If you are interested in volunteering with Bambusschule (Bamboo School), contact Bodo Peters: info@die-bambusschule.de, or visit die-bambusschule.de

 

Same same, but different

May 21, 2012
Nong Kiau, Luangphabang, Laos
1736 local time
Wynne Hedlesky

            I have neglected to post a blog entry for several months. My reasons (otherwise known as excuses) are many. First, I was studying for the GRE. Now, as a volunteer English teacher, when I’m not trying to entertain several dozen highly energetic Lao children, I’m working on grad school applications. But, really, the reason is that I have not been able to think of how to condense four months of experience being geographically and experientially on the other side of the world into a thousand words.

            The answer is that it is not possible. So I won’t try. Instead, I’ll write a quick summary of the emotional arc of my time in Asia, alluding to experiences and interesting anecdotes which I will not share. I hope that many of them will come out in later blogs.

            It’s quite a collection, all together. Truly, I’ve gathered an embarrassment of brief tales of the odd and unusual. Not a day has gone by that didn’t present some curious sight, some enigmatic event that left me scratching my head, laughing out loud, or scraping my jaw off the ground. The people who live here would say, “welcome to life”; I tend to say, “What the hell is going on?”

            I will describe our first twenty four hours in Asia. Even after what I have seen since then, that immediate impression is still strong. Never had I experienced such a sensation of bafflement at things that presented themselves as ordinary.  Perhaps it’s a bit like falling on your head, coming to, and no longer being able to recognize your own friends and family, though they smile at you familiarly. It was surreal from the moment we stepped out of the taxi from the airport into the general neighborhood of our guesthouse. Kristian and I spent our first night futilely trying to sleep in a room right on the raucous, nocturnal booze trough that is Khao San Road, where drunk tourists come together from all over the world to suck down “buckets” of the world’s cheapest cocktails until they entirely forget they are in Bangkok. In the morning we sallied forth for our first daylight stroll in Asia.

            We soon got marvelously lost among the busy streets, shady canals, and tiny, winding alleys of Bangkok. Everywhere people went about their business. You could tell by the comfortable looks on their faces, the casual jokes shared with neighbors. But what was their business, exactly? That I could not determine, try as I did. They all bustled about, or sat and did what they do, in a world which, though it contained people and streets and motorized vehicles and buildings just like the world I came from, made very little sense to me. What’s the deal with these dollhouses on pedestals, covered with fruit and rice and flowers and opened bottles of orange soda with straws? The second floor of that house is about to fall off, and the walls are made of random bits of plywood. Do they not have building codes? Shit, I didn’t know you could fit a moped there. It’s hot, let’s sit in the shade. There’s a bench. Wait, that’s in front of a house…no, a store. What if it’s a private bench, here on the public sidewalk? Well, it’s not really a sidewalk, I guess. People are driving mopeds on it. That bench is right next to that rusted-out, abandoned car full of trash…Let’s find a park instead. Oh, there’s one. No, it’s a trash dump. I mean, someone’s back yard. No, trash dump. What’s that mass of gold and sparkly stuff over there? Ah, a temple. Let’s go in. Oh, wait, I’m wearing shorts…I can’t go in, right? Where am I not supposed to point my feet when I’m inside? Oh well. Let’s get some lunch. Wait, is this a restaurant or a house? There are people sitting inside at some tables. They don’t look interested in helping us. Maybe they’re just the residents. Maybe it is a restaurant, but it’s closed. Is it because it’s Sunday? Why would it matter if it’s Sunday, they’re Buddhists. Ok, right. Ok, let’s try the street vendor. Yeah…can’t read the menu. Let’s just say, like, “noodles,” or “rice,” and see what they make. We could point to the stuff in the case. What is it? I don’t know. Intestines?

            And on it went. Everywhere was strangeness. Every basic activity had to be relearned, in some way, at least. Drinking water, going to the bathroom, crossing the street, buying things, it is all done significantly differently in Asia. Or so it seemed to me.

            Kristian, on the other hand, frequently pointed out that, although the way things are done in Asia surprised us not on a daily but on an almost momently basis, a city like Bangkok, for example, is more similar to a city in the West than it is different. People hurry everywhere; there are streets packed with cars, buses, and other vehicles; people buy and sell their goods. They catch trains, buses, and boats. They work in shops, restaurants, in the tall buildings full of offices. They think about fashion, about money, what’s for dinner, about their friends and family. They sit and have drinks after work. The friendly ones greet strangers on the street. Beggars and bums curl up in alleys. Humanity pulses on, being human, as it does in every place on earth.

            The difference in our reaction to Asian life got me thinking about a couple of well-worn phrases in wide use across Southeast Asia. When asking for a price comparison between two food dishes, a vendor might reply, “same same.” When trying to convince a handicraft vendor that you don’t need their goods because you already have a bracelet like that, they will probably say: “But this different.” If someone struggles in their limited English to point out the subtle differences between two items, they might say, “Same same, but different.” So common are these phrases, and somehow so fundamental to the tourist experience in Asia, that they are plastered across t-shirts in every souvenir shop in every country we have visited. Even locals wear them. As much as a cliché as they are, they represent a patch of common ground, an idiosyncrasy of Asian English that exists neither in English, nor in any Asian language, but is a valuable tool for communication across cultures, as well as being humorous. It is recognized as such by people from both sides.

 I think neither “same same” nor “different” adequately describes my current impression of life in Asia as compared to my homeland. Not surprisingly, cultures resist being crammed into one or the other end of such a dichotomy. I’d describe Asia as a t-shirt with “same same” on one side, and “but different” on the other.

            Over time, though, the “but different” part stands out less and less. That original sensation of bafflement, of wide-eyed wondrous confusion has subsided. For some of the things I have seen, I have since found definitive explanations. For others, Kristian and I have inferred what we think to be a probable account, and have left it at that. For many, many other strange events and observations, I have simply not sought an explanation, or hardly even noted their occurrence, because to live in a state of constant wonder is impossible. This is not because it is exhausting, or difficult to maintain; to live every moment truly appreciating the strangeness of things you do not understand is contrary to a basic law of human existence, that we, as human beings, stretch and flex and adapt to our surroundings, without even needing to try. Now, I simply perceive what goes on around me as “normal,” even when I do not understand it. I notice an anomaly, shrug, and go about my business, because, at a certain point, what you do every day starts to feel “normal,” even if what you do every day is see things you’ve never seen before in your life. 

            What lies at the root of our ability to adapt to life in a different culture? Would I be able to adapt to life with space aliens who have tentacles and no faces, communicate telepathically, and get their energy from plutonium reactions rather than the combustion of carbon-based molecules? Probably not. What makes it possible to be less startled at the “but different” of life in another culture is that, as humans, we really share a lot. You could even say that the differences are superficial matters of etiquette or practicality. Even though we speak different languages, I can read the emotions of my Lao hosts here in Sopking by looking at their faces. Children here still like to play, love attention, and dislike being disciplined. Boys and girls flirt. People work during the day. Meals are central to the organization of time. At night, people eat, socialize, then go to sleep. Any human could get into that groove.

            But these observations, again, attempt to corner a culture into one end of the “same same but different” dichotomy by attempting to boil all perceived differences down into mere trifles, which they are not. These differences are precisely what makes traveling worthwhile and life-changing. Why travel if you don’t want to experience how things are done in other places? If you want the same food, the same beer, and the same company while you travel that you get at home, then stay home.

In addition to being inherently interesting and making a person feel like he or she is part of a vast and fascinating world, these differences provide a priceless opportunity, the opportunity to reset our eyes, to be able to view the familiar as something new, something strange. During that window where wonder is alive, before our ability to adapt turns the strange into the normal, I hope to learn from and think about my own homeland in ways I have never been able to before. I hope that in a year and a half, I’ll write a blog entry about my baffling first twenty-four hours back in the United States.