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.