Cultural misperception #238

Lao people can't pronounce my name. Whenever I introduce myself, they say back to me, "Lor-en." I try to correct them, but they just say Lor-en again, like I'm some exile from Krypton. I'd thought that the 's' sound was simply not in their language, or else they just couldn't hear it. But in my Lao class the other day, I learned something that made me re-evaluate. In fact, the 's' sound shows up in plenty of places in the language, but it's never, ever seen at the end of a word. So when the Lao say my name back as Lor-en, they're not mispronouncing, nor are they mis-hearing me. They are, very simply, correcting me.

Going deaf at a New Year's party

Laotians are often very shy around me, especially the data entry folk (aka operators) at DDD. These are the people DDD has been set up to help, young people from disadvantage backgrouds who might not have an opportunity for a technology career otherwise. Many of them come from the countryside and have never spent time around a falang (foreigner) before. I've had some women literally turn around and run away from me when I try to explain something to them.

Get them into a group, though, and it's a different story. Last night was DDD's annual new year's party, attended by about 150 operators and the rest of the Laos staff. I was the only falang there, and I wasn't intimidating anyone - this was a rowdy, raucous bunch, with plenty of Beerlao loosening things up. Some of the new trainees put on skits, and though I didn't understand a word, they were hysterical. The skits were little morality plays, and the ones having the most fun, both in the skit and onstage, were the bad apples. The audience was pretty funny too - they have a thing here when something noteworthy happens onstage, the audience screams. Literally, high pitched screams at the top of their lungs. I had to get to the edge of the audience because when I was in the middle I thought my eardrums were going to burst.

And then there was the dancing. They started with traditional Lao style dancing - men and women dancing in a circle, men on the inside (so they can't scope out the other side of the cirlce), women on the outside. But from there it got progressively more modern, until they got to house music with lots of shaking hips. It's a new global generation here, and they're light years away from the old one.

As at any DDD event, there were plenty of disabled people, and just like a normal workday, there's no separation between the fully abled and the disabled. With all the wars, and all the UXO (unexploded ordnance), seeing disabled people is much more common, both here and in Phnom-Penh, than in the U.S. Seeing efforts to "mainstream" disabled people is at first very touching, and then, hopefully, if it works, entirely mundane. The presence of crutches or the absence of limbs becomes just a fact, and not a remarkable one. It's such a visible sign of tragedy, but it must be hard if you're the one with the disability, trying to get over it and get on with your life, to have people thinking "how tragic, how tragic," every time they loook at you.

Soylent Green is...

The creatures interred at the Lao Zoo are a sad looking bunch. Limping deer with matted hair, depressed macaques in cages that reek of urine staring off into space like they're stoned, a psychotic baboon pacing back and forth in an endless fury in its cage, angry cockatoos hellbent on pecking each other to death, and the star attraction, a geriatric Asian white elephant with what looks like a bad case of psoriasis.

It's a huge facility, with spacious, well adorned habitats, but many of them sit empty. With an admission charge of 2000 kip a person, or about twenty five cents, the zoo can barely afford the upkeep on the animals. There used to be two hippos there, but they both died recently, and the rumor is they starved to death because the zoo couldn't afford to feed them. There are a few signs posted that say not to feed the animals, but it's hard to take them seriously when they're outnumbered by vendors selling bananas and radishes to throw over the fences. Perhaps it's the zoo's way of dealing with their financial difficulties.

Because of the sanctioned feeding of the animals by visitors, the animals have become trained to trot up to the fence at the sight of any human, open their mouths, and wait. Deers, monkeys, elephants, ostriches, porcupines. They all do it. Even the crocodiles. And let me tell you, you haven't experienced creepy until you've stood on a walkway over a crocodile habitat and looked down at ten perfectly still crocodiles in the water below, all of them with their jaws propped open, waiting.

Yes, ten, and there would have been more had there been room in the water. There are at least three huge crocodile habitats, maybe more, and probably over 100 crocodiles resident at the Lao Zoo. There are so many they're literally crawling on top of each other. It was weird. Here's a zoo with this tragic collection of decrepit creatures, except for the crocodiles. Maybe that's what happened to the hippos.

It wasn't until later that I heard a plausible explanation of what the hell is going on. I have no idea if it's true, but the rumor is that the Lao Zoo, in order to stay solvent, has surreptitiously turned itself into a crocodile farm. They raise the crocodiles to slaughter them and sell the meat and skin. It's like a zoological version of Soylent Green. Crocodile meat gets good money here, and the skin can fetch a good price too. I can't see how they can afford all those crocodiles otherwise. It's not like it's cheaper to feed them than it is to feed the monkeys.

The dangers of being tall in a short country

I keep whanging my head against door frames. The first time it happened I was going to the restroom in an Internet cafe, and I didn't notice the door was built for someone half a foot shorter than me. I saw stars and fell down, more stunned from the surprise of it than anything else. The proprietor had to help me get up.

The second time wasn't against a door frame, but against the rusty tin metal cover of the food stand outside of DDD. I was leaning in to choose a banana and smacked my head against the sharp tin edge, leaving an L shaped divot in my forehead. Now whenever I go to that food stand the Lao lady who runs it makes sure I stand well away from her roof.

The third time was the worst. At DDD, they have these metal roll-down gates that they lock at night, and when it gets late but people are still there, they roll them part way down, to just the perfect height for knocking out tall foreigners. I was in a rush to leave and I was wearing my glasses, which take out my peripheral vision. I smacked into the door at full New York walking speed, once again knocking myself down, and leaving a sizable bruise right in the middle of my forehead. The night watchman, a jovial sort, reacted like he was watching a replay of a soccer accident on TV. He whistled at my forehead and started retelling the incident to the passerby who started gathering around me, with full pantomime. Now, every time he sees me, he points at my forehead and looks at it with concern for a moment, then breaks into giggles and starts telling the story over again to anyone who happens to be nearby. The pantomime seems to get more animated every time. He especially seemed to enjoy telling the part where I fall flat on my ass.

The fate of the Gamla vultures

I had a post from last summer about dead vultures in the Gamla, a nature preserve in Israel. The Gamla at one time hosted the largest group of Griffon vultures in the world, but last summer, almost all of them mysteriously dropped dead. Turns out that there were ranchers who were doing battle with either each other or with the wolves. They fight wolves by laying out poisoned carcasses for them to eat. And they fight each other by poisoning each other's cattle, which in turn kill the vultures.

I learned all this at a restaurant called Suki Soup on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. I was at a DDD dinner, sitting next to an Israeli who happened to be the head of the forest rangers in the Golan.

Laotian basketball players: short but fast

One of the sons in the family I'm staying with introduced me to a pickup basketball game here in Vientiane, usually attended by about half Laotian and half Westerners. Yesterday I went there with a colleague from work and an Israeli-American he'd met traveling. It's a great workout, and an interesting place to compare Western and Laotian cultures. The Westerners are always the ones complaining about calls and about unfair play. The Laotians are very competitive, but abhor confrontation. They never contend a call or claim mistreatment. The typical Laotian saying is "Bo pah nyan", no problem.

After the game, I went for Chinese food with my colleague nad the Israeli. Adam and I were on bikes, and Chuck had walked, thinking he'd get a tuk-tuk after. We finished around 9:30, and of course, none of us had thought about the fact that Vientiane shuts down at 9. There wasn't a tuk-tuk anywhere -- anywhere! We were about 3 miles from Chuck's guesthouse, so we started to walk our bikes back with him. There was almost no one on the road. One woman on a moto passed us by and smiled, but that was about the only interaction we had. We got about a half-mile along, when the same woman came up behind us on her moto. She spoke English, and she'd come to give the Israeli a ride, wherever he wanted to go. Just cause she saw we were stuck. This was not an atypical experience here.

Type-safe Traffic

I imagine that someone looking down from a great height onto the tuk-tuks, motos, and Lexus SUVs buzzing around the streets of Phnom-Penh would be reminded of a bee-hive -- a seemingly random, crowded press of motion which in some incomprehensible way allows the participants to get where they wanted to go. I, being the computer nerd that I am, came up with a programming metaphor.

There are, roughly speaking, two types of programming languages: type-safe and non-type-safe. In a type-safe language, if you create a variable that's an integer, it stays an integer. If you try to stick a decimal number into an integer variable, the compiler will wave it's finger at you with a nasty tsk-tsk-tsk. It's constraining, but it forces you on a basic to be organized in your thinking.

Non-type-safe languages, on the other hand, don't pay attention to variable types. Any variable can carry any data. Programming in these languages is a liberating experience. You want to be an integer? You're an integer! Wanna be a string? No problem!

Phnom Penh traffic is totally lawless in the same kind of liberating way. Want to go the wrong way down that street? Great! Need to turn into oncoming traffic? Go ahead! In Phnom Penh, the shortest route to your destination is always the best route. And if you're in a tuk-tuk and late to a meeting, it's a happy experience.

Non-type-safe languages are more efficient to work in and you get faster results. The only problem is, if you don't impose your own discipline, the applications you write tend to crash a lot more often.

Teaching XML to the hill tribes

I was staying Luang Prabang, a city in the mountains of Northern Lao, and after a delicious meal at a restaurant called Tamarind, I wandered into what I thought was a simple photo gallery next door displaying the work of Lao adolescent and teen photographers (another Kids With Cameras-type project). Though the place does indeed display the work of budding Lao photographers, its primary function is to serve as a library and free computer center for Lao kids who normally wouldn't have access to computers or books. The place is called @MyLibrary, and I had a really interesting conversation with the founder about teaching kids who have absolutely no context for what you're trying to teach them. Everything you might take for granted when teaching Western kids has to be thought through again.

For example, @MyLibrary is creating some tutorials in Lao made by kids for kids. One of the first videos is intended to teach how to format a list in Microsoft Word. Turns out teaching the formatting part is easy. Teaching kids what a list is and why you'd want to make one is the hard part. These people, many of whom are hill-tribe people like the Hmong, have never needed to make a list before, have never thought about it. So well over half the video is a brilliant little animated story showing someone going through a very inefficient shopping trip, and then showing how the trip could be made much easier with the use of a list. Only after they've established that do they go into the details of how to create and format a list using Word.

I'm faced with similar issues right now developing training materials for DDD. Except instead of having to teach folks about lists, I have to teach them about XML, Unicode, and binary numbering systems. Finding stories anad metaphors to explain these concepts to hill tribe villagers is going to be an interesting challenge.

Scars of the Khmer Rouge

I don't think you can spend a day in Cambodia without encountering the wounds left behind by the three-year reign of the Khmer-Rouge, whether you notice it or not. It's even more pronounced now that I'm in Laos, and I can compare the easygoing openness of the Laotians with the reserve of the Cambodians. The Cambodians I met were all extraordinarily warm, friendly, giving people, but you don't have to dig too deeply to hear about their trauma.

Two examples. The first week I was there, a boat racing festival was held which brought a million Cambodians from the countryside into the capital of Phnom Penh. They have fireworks every night for four nights, and pedestrians pack Sihanouk Road, one of the main streets in the city. Conveniently enough, I happened to sit next to a Cambodian who taught English for a living, and got to hear much of his life story. He's in his mid-30s, so he lived through the Khmer-Rouge as a child, and he told me much of his life story in reverse, starting with his recent divorce and going backwards. He didn't show much emotion throughout -- not when he talked about his wife leaving him, or about the difficulties of dating at his age in Cambodia. But when he spoke about working in the fields under the Khmer-Rouge, his eyes filled with tears.

I went to the Cheoung-Elk fields, the infamous "killing fields," with a Cambodian guide. The fields are a mind-wrenchingly disassociative experience. They're beautiful. All the buildings were long ago torn down, and now the fields are lushly green and peaceful. It's quiet and serene, and as you walk along the path, you occasionally see slight depressions in the ground with a string tracing the perimeter. It's easy to miss what they are if you don't notice the small signs in the corner that read, "Please don't walk on the mass graves."

As we walked through the fields, my guide told me his story, in a soft voice and with a nervous smile. He was about five when the Khmer Rouge came to power. He was taken from his parents and had to work in the fields. The Khmer Rouge set impossible quotas for the rice production, and the penalties for missing them were severe, so what people would do would be to lie about how much rice they produced and give most of their harvest to the government to sell to the Chinese. If they had actually produced what they said, they would have enough left over for themselves, but of course they couldn't, so most people starved. My guide's brother, who was nine years old, worked day and night to try and produce enough rice. He died during that time, not because anybody shot him. He simply worked himself to death.

I also went to the Tuol Sleng prison, but didn't ask the guide to go with me, and I'm glad I didn't. The killing fields were hard enough. Tuol Sleng wasn't dissociative at all - it was the most vividly horrible place I've ever been to. It's a former high school turned into a prison cum torture center. There are three buildings placed perpendicular to each other to form the school courtyard. The buildings have been left exactly as they were found when the Khmer Rouge fell and the prison was liberated. Coils of barbed wire cover is everywhere. The torture chambers on the first floor, former classrooms with institutional tile floors, still have the wrought iron beds that prisoners were bound to, with the shackles still attached and blood stains on the floor. They have pictures of the bodies that they found there, still chained to the beds. The only thing that they changed was to take the bodies away. Of 17,000 prisoners that passed through Tuol Sleng, 12 survived.

I'm starting to understand the reaction many Cambodians have when I asked them about the movie "The Killing Fields" (which I watched on the plane over, and highly recommend). They generally say that it only begins to capture what actually went on.

My colleague Ben Magarik has a great blog where he captures his observations of Cambodia and politics. Here's an interesting post comparing the genocides in Cambodia and Rwanda.

Cambodians for Obama

There's a very large expat community in Cambodia -- it's the NGO capital of Southeast Asia, and there are a ton of westerners working there. If you want to hang out with expats, the place to go is the FCC, a riverside bar with a full of menu of hamburgers, spaghetti and lasagna. On the day of the election, it was packed wall-to-wall the entire day, climaxing with Obama's victory speech. The entire bar, focused on the video playing against one wall of the bar, and many people cried as Obama talked -- not just Americans, but Cambodians, Thai, Laotians. It's a few weeks later now, and I've had the same experience a number of times - people from Southeast Asia, India, China ask me if I'm American, and when I say that I am, they extend their hand and congratulate me.

Clubbing in Cambodia

Whatever expectations I had of this trip, it did not include doing the Macarena in a Phnom Penh riverfront nightclub with my Laotian and Cambodian colleagues.  The organization I'm volunteering for, DDD, is having its board meeting this weekend, so a bunch of the Laotian managerial staff is in town, and they instigated the idea of everyone going out clubbing after dinner.  About twenty people ended up at a dance club that could've been anywhere, really, except that beers were$2 apiece.  About half the crowd from DDD were expats and half were Laotians and Cambodians, and at one point I was the only expat on the dance floor with about six Laotian women doing the Macarena.  I joined in, quite badly, but judging from the reaction, I think I provided good comic relief.

In the car home, I cramped myself into the front seat and five people stuffed themselves in the back.  After the subject turned to Karaoke, I found myself being taught a Laotian song, in Laos, by a very drunk Laotian project manager, who was impressed enough by my abilities that she quickly graduated me to Laotian tongue twisters.  I didn't do so well on those.  I had her try English tongue twisters ("Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers"), which she did fine on, and then graduated her to French ones ("If these six sausages are six pence, it's too much").  They of course made me try a Laotian one ("When I stick a sweet potato in my mouth it sticks to my gums").

All in all, a promising harbinger of my stay in Vientiane.

Bike truck

Seen as I was walking around Phnom Penh yesterday sans camera: a rickety truck carrying a tremendous pile of bicycles stacked on their sides about thirty feet into the air. I couldn't even tell what they were until I got closer - they looked like a pack of metal pipes. They dwarfed the truck they were stacked on top of. There was a colorful dilapidated apartment building in front of them, and the two men perched at the top of the pile, looking out over the city, looked cool as cats on a refrigerator.