walk where the road takes you
text straight from Rach’s journal, illustration from Jboy12’s
Luang Prabang, Laos
The children are all sitting on a huge mound of dirt in the shade of a tree, journals open in their laps, pencils sketching the rice paddies, banana palms and mountains rising up before them. A couple of dozen Lao school children pile over the bamboo fence and crowd around. We exchange greetings in pah-sah-Lao (the Lao language), and then one nervously tries her English. “What is my name?” she asks, pointing at Tgirl4. I tell her, and add in Lao that she is four years old. The oh-you-speak-Lao/no-only-a-little conversation ensues.
The big kids continue drawing, the little ones have food pressed into their hands as they solemnly reject the many offers of cuddles. We talk back and forth, trying out languages obviously foreign to all our tongues.
One girl offers to show us a different way back to the boats “same same”. She heads off in what looks like the wrong direction to us, but we follow her anyway. We pass wall-less classrooms that are full of fairly rowdy children, and then wind our way along a dusty, stony, bumpy road over the hill and back to the boats. (NB road does not mean asphalt with markings down the centre line – no siree – dirt track would perhaps be a more accurate description, but it was wide enough for a car to drive on).
It was both a longer and a steeper route than the one we had taken on our own through the village and rice paddies an hour earlier.
The village. It was a tight grouping of houses made from a mixture of concrete, timber, brick and bamboo, each one sitting on a patch of brown icing-sugar-like dust. The paths between houses were hard to distinguish, being made of the same dust. We wandered between buildings, the children chasing chickens, being gobbled at by turkeys and barked at by dogs, stopping to greet an old woman sitting beside a weaving loom under a raised house. A girl stood beneath another floor cross-stitching the popular local geometric design on black cloth. A middle-aged woman waited in front of her house with a table full of basic necessities available for purchase.
We walked through an everyday small village in virtually rural Laos, just ten minutes across the river from the fairly sizeable town where we are based.
We talked with an elderly man tending his blackened rice paddy before bounding off in numerous directions over the raised dirt paths between the currently-dry rice paddies, past some snuffling pigs and small bamboo huts to that spot, which looked just right for journalling.
Tags: craft, housing, postcard: Laos, recreation, tradition
rayres
Jboy12 is VERY good at drawing 🙂
Great journal! Are they water colour pencils? Love the photos too … again 🙂
Gouache from a tube – but we have brought watercolour pencils too.