Laos: Day 4 - Worship and Farewell

I sat in the lobby of my nice Hotel having noodles, little butter sandwiches and tea this morning before getting together with some local folks and savored the experience. Wednesday I leave this nice place for a guest house or apartment closer to where I will teach and I fear no one will make noodles and cut the crusts off my sandwiches there.

Po Vang and P. Manning (aforementioned Computer Angel) picked me up at 7:15 and we were off for worship in the outer province. We picked up a student and some local leaders on the way. Everything in Vientiane is very far, it seems to me; we spend a lot of time in the lorry or the van traveling from here to there. Everyone is very patient with this. I am learning to be patient, too.

Gatherings are small, so Po Vang is in charge of several small groups. This small group seemed pretty typical. Nineteen families with children too numerous to count (when I mentioned Planned Parenthood, Po Vang laughed). The talk lasted an hour-and-a-half or so and the children were remarkably attentive, singing the songs with gusto.

After dropping some people off, we had light lunch and sodas on the bank of the Mekong River, then dropped P. Manning at the airport. I will miss his comraderie and comprehension of English nuance. Now the Lao immersion begins in earnest--glub, glub.

Just a word about the Mushroom Project of my last posting. Local folks are always looking for projects which will help employ and feed the people, hopefully eventually getting them out of a subsistence situation. The Mushroom Project is perfect here. The climate, the available hard workers, and the minimal expenditure for supplies suit it well to Laos. Plastic tube-like bags are filled with a mixture of mulched wood, rice, hulls, and plaster, then they are compacted, covered and steamed (using an ingenious arrangement of empty oil drums as steamers). After steaming, they are stacked for a period of time (one to four weeks) in thatched bamboo huts, during which time they gestate mushrooms, which can then be harvested for 3-4 months. Each individual pod of the project requires $345 and pays enough to employ several families. The mushrooms have been so successful that they have all been purchased by a Thai company before they have even made it to market. It was great fun to see several pods at work, from the compacting through the steaming through the nursery tubing and finally the mushrooms thrusting their jaunty beige coolie caps through the burst tubing tops.

American Embassy visit, orientation and maybe some teaching tomorrow