December 9, 2007, by Karen from Los Angeles
Back in town after the elephant and biking adventure with Tiger Trails, I stopped into the office to look into other trips.
One of the guides, Sengkham, happens to mention that he works for Big Brother Mouse when he isn't guiding and further confirms my sense that they do fantastic work. We start chatting and he explains that he's a writer and poet and he's been writing short stories in both Hmong and Lao (and translating them into English) to be published by Big Brother Mouse. He's totally committed to fostering literacy throughout Laos and even though he's just out of college, he's taken it upon himself to try to improve the libary in his home province.
There actually already is an existing pathetic excuse for a library in the main village in the province, which is meant to serve the surrounding ninety villages, three primary schools, two junior high schools and high school. The room and shelves are there and there's even a "librarian" who gets paid some paltry two dollar a week salary by the Office of Culture and Heritage or some such bureaucracy. The problem? The only books in the place were all provided by the Soviets in the sixties and seventies. Musty hardback tomes of Marxist-Leninist ideology in Russian and Lao. In what is perhaps one of the grander understatements of all time, my new pal explains, "the people don't find these things very interesting to read."
In his enthusiasm for his project, he shares with me a sheaf of letters that he's drafted to demonstrate the validity of the library's need for inventory in the hopes that it might become an official recipient of Big Brother Mouse's largesse. When he returns home next week for Hmong New Year, he'll get this or that district official to sign it and stamp it, which should clear the way for this extremely humble institution to one day get a parcel of books or two. (Laos is still officially a Socialist People's Republic, which means they love themselves some bureaucratic paperwork to keep them peeps employed. Passport control and immigration involves no fewer than eight individual bureaucrats per incoming passenger and I suspect library regulation is no different.)
A fellow traveler commits to buying the first thirty children's books for the new library and I commit to buying the balance to get the place up and running. Sengkham cannot believe we are willing to do this at all, much less without all of the official stamped paperwork.
He and I take off to the central market where there is a bookseller and gather what he knows to be the most critically-needed books. Many of them were high school level math textbooks, which didn't make much sense to me until he explained that every student has to buy his or her own books and most of them can't afford them so they have to share. This is particularly problematic with subjects that are innately difficult like math because only one of the kids can use the book to study for homework. This leaves even the most ambitious students at a complete disadvantage in the borrowing roulette. A central repository will solve this problem. (Yes, the Lao government should be doing this for its own people, but, needless to say, that's not a problem I have the energy, interest or resources to solve.) We gather several dozen other titles and a slew of dictionaries and hop back in the tuk-tuk. Mission accomplished. You've never seen a happier camper than this guy: Lao's own aspiring beat poet in the company of more books than he's likely ever to own personally. A happy camper indeed.
Later that night, I ran into him and his wife at the night market, where they sell Mouse books to raise money to keep the publishing effort going. His wife doesn't speak English, so I asked him if he had told her about the new books. "Yes," he said, "she did not think it was possible for these kinds of things to happen."
