*Kristian and I worked as volunteer English teachers for a German non-profit organization in Laos from April 2012, until August 2012. For more information, see previous post.*
“Ab nam king! Ab nam king!”
chants the crowd. They’ve convinced me to go for a swim in the creek, and their
joy at having accomplished this is evident in their ecstatic faces and their
little limbs jumping and whirling with the inexhaustible energy of childhood.
It’s like being in the center of a hive of absurdly affectionate bees, and I
wonder how I will be able to keep up with them for the next four months.
Someone grabs my hand and drags me down the dusty yellow road of
the village, between the bamboo walls of two houses, and then we’re hurtling
down a steep, leaf-littered trail under the shade of a teak grove toward what I
presume is their favorite swimming spot in the Nam King, the creek after which
the village, Sop King (Mouth of the King) takes its name. Children are shedding
garments as they run. Tattered t-shirts, probably handed down through several generations
of siblings, fly off; children pause as they near the creek, hopping on one leg
and jerking off their shorts, smiling with anticipation. They throw their
clothes into a pile and hurl themselves off the four-meter rock outcrop into
the water in one quick motion, shrieking with joy.
One naked brown body after another flies into the deep green water
below. They gesture toward the high rock, smiling encouragingly at me. I peer
over the edge. The ones already in the water shout at me, waving, palm-down,
with the ubiquitous Southeast Asian signal for, “Come! Come!” The creek is not
that big; how deep can this water possibly be? It occurs to me that the nearest
hospital with an English speaking doctor is over seven hours away, three hours
by river boat, and then at least four hours more on bumpy mountain roads. Sop King
would not be a good place to break a bone or get a concussion by jumping into
an unknown swimming hole onto a shallowly submerged rock. No, I smile and
gesture, no, I can’t, I’m scared, I will climb down another way.
As I pick my way down the steep rocks towards the water, I meet
children hurrying up, all smiles, ready for their next jump. The surface is
slippery with the water they are dripping. I make it to the level of the creek
and lower myself in. I am instantly swarmed and can hardly keep afloat. The
water churns with frenetic limb-flailing and joyous shrieks. Naked and
half-naked children cling to my back, neck, arms, jostling for position. I’m
pretty sure that in the United States, I’d be arrested for swimming alone in
the forest with a dozen naked schoolchildren, but, in this situation, I
certainly feel like any onlooker would have to acknowledge that I am the
victim, not them.
I make it to shallower water where I can stand comfortably, and
start imposing a semi-ordered system of turn-taking on their chaotically eager
desire to climb all over me. One after another I go underwater, a child climbs
on my shoulders, I emerge, count to three, and, launch! Dunk, scramble, one,
two, three, launch! After a while, I employ a scrap of the little Lao I have
learned in my first few days in the country. Muay—I’m tired, I’m tired! Am I pronouncing it incorrectly? It
doesn’t seem to register. Eventually, though, I start denying turns, though the
flash of disappointment on their faces pains me. I like to think I’m a fairly
energetic person. But keeping up with the energy of a kid is always a
challenge. Keeping up with several dozen Lao kids, I realize, is going to be a
very special challenge indeed.
Lao children: their character and
habits
I’ve had some experience working with kids. From my teenage days
of volunteering at after-school programs with elementary schoolers, I went on
to be an experiential educator on tall ships, where I occasionally found myself
confronting fairly daunting kid-related challenges—keeping the morale of
eighteen nauseous high school girls afloat on a ten-day trip out on a rough,
cold sea; shepherding twenty sassy and mischievous at-risk ninth-graders
through La Guardia Airport on my own; and, of course, the daily challenges of
simply trying to teach on a boat, with the deck rolling, leaping dolphins hogging
my students’ attention, and, of course, the constant possibility that the
staysail club could fly across the deck and knock off a fifth grader’s head. I
felt that working with kids on tall ships was a fairly adequate training for
whatever Laos could throw at me. And though it was certainly more help than if
I had spent my entire educational career yapping at some sleepy students in a
windowless classroom, there were, of course, plenty of surprises.
The biggest surprise was Lao kids themselves. To beat again on the
old “same same but different” drum, they were, of course, similar in many ways
to their American, or European, or generally non-remote-village-dwelling
counterparts. Kids are kids—they run, they play, they make messes, they love
attention, they don’t like being scolded; some of them are shy, some of them
are bullies; some of them will follow every instruction you give like it’s the
word of God, some of them are too cool for school. For the most part, my
previously acquired kid-skills were transferable. Yet it would be entirely
false to claim that Lao kids were basically equivalent to their
video-game-playing, soda-slurping, bug-fearing Western equivalents. Every day
someone did something that had you scraping your jaw off the ground.
Picture a three-year-old, wobbling about on his chubby little
legs. Now picture him wobbling about, pantsless, on a dusty village street,
holding a ten-inch machete, no adult in sight. This was a common sight in Lao
villages. On another occasion, an excited ten-year-old approached me,
brandishing a broken prop from a small boat engine. Later, down at the swimming
hole, I understood the function of this toy. Standing on the rock outcrop, he
chucked in his big chunk of jagged metal, and jumped in after it. After he’d
retrieved it from the bottom, I saw him dragging it through the water,
fascinated by how it rotated when he pulled it forward. He swung it close to me
to show me. Though I was enthusiastically in support of his fascination with
the laws of fluid dynamics exhibited in this phenomenon, I wasn’t particularly
keen to get closer than a few feet from his new toy.
These examples perfectly illustrate one prominent difference between
Western kids and Lao kids. Lao kids seem perfectly content without shiny plastic
toys and elaborate gadgets (probably because they’ve had no exposure to them).
They seem able to find entertainment in the everyday objects that nature and village
life put in front of them. They manage to turn mundane, ignorable objects into
fascinating playthings—an old plastic spool attached to the end of a bamboo
pole becomes a car. The unwanted bamboo strips from basket making become
sunglasses, pinwheels, and elaborate headdresses. An ear of corn becomes a
doll, its silvery silk long, luxurious hair. Even chicken feathers tossed into
the air become the center of attention during a rare windy moment before a
towering thunderstorm hits the village. Entertainment seems to be everywhere.
In addition to demonstrating their creativity, the examples of toddlers
with machetes and kids learning science with jagged cast-of boat props speak
volumes about Lao parenting philosophy. Some would say that letting your
three-year-old wield a large knife is egregiously irresponsible on the part of
the parents. I say, this is Lao parents letting their kids learn how not to be
idiots. Though I occasionally raised an eyebrow or two when I saw toddlers
running around with sharp things, pointy sticks, and fire, I never interfered.
In my opinion, that was the job of their parents, and if they looked on
unconcerned, then so would I. Considering the number of unattended kids who
were climbing trees, doing back flips off of cliffs into the creek, driving
tiny canoes around on a rushing river, and dangling off a fifty-foot-high
bamboo bridge like it was a jungle gym, very few kids ever seemed to get
injured. Lao kids seemed, for the most part, to possess a shockingly high
degree of common sense, which I imagine comes from their parents’ letting them
learn from their own mistakes.
Another quality that I suspect helps them avoid injury during
their wild and dangerous play is their incredible degree of coordination and
athleticism. Playing with Lao kids was an extremely physically demanding job.
My weight-loss regimen included Lao food (not always the most savory), and a
daily game or two of tag in the Nam King. I had to eventually give up trying to
catch some of the kids. Anyone over age ten was pretty much too fast. They
would dive under the water, and pop up twenty feet away before I’d even turned
around. Too bad they didn’t understand, “Hey, teleportation is cheating.” This
insatiable desire to play tag extended to land as well. They would have
Kristian and I run around and around the toe-breaking, uneven village streets,
even at night, until our hearts threatened to explode and we were soaked with
sweat. “Hot,” “tired,” “finished”—these were English words the kids learned
fairly early on. I’m sure sometimes it seemed to them like these were the only
words in the English language, judging by how often Kristian and I repeated
them.
The most popular team sport in Laos is by far ka taw, which is basically volleyball—except that you can only use
your head, and your feet. Teenage ka taw
players frequently spike the ball over the net with the bottom of their foot. I doubt many American thirteen-year-olds,
aside from trained gymnasts, would be capable of such feats of flexibility and
coordination. It’s certainly hard to imagine enough Americans being fit enough
to play ka taw for it to become the
national pastime.
Along with Lao kids’ athleticism came what would be, by American
kid standards, a perverse insensitivity to pain. I hesitated to introduce the
game Red Rover, because I thought that, given their energetic tendencies, someone
might break an arm the way they would play it. But when I saw the Fight
Club-esque, village-wide games of kung-fu fighter that went on in the evenings,
I realized that Red Rover was far less likely to lead to bloodied faces. It
ended up being a huge hit, to the point of drawing impressive crowds of girl
sibling and adult spectators.
Which brings up an issue I have previously not mentioned—gender
roles. Not being able to speak Lao, it was hard for me to find answers to the
innumerable questions I had about Lao daily life, so I must admit that my
understanding of such elements of Lao culture hardly amount to rigorous
anthropological studies and are based only on superficial observations. That
said, I noticed that though Lao girls are impressively athletic—they outran,
outswam, and outclimbed me on a regular basis—they are far less involved in
rough-housing than their male counterparts. They also do not play ka taw. But the behavior of the village
girls highlights another striking difference between Lao children and the
children I was familiar with from back home—incredible independence,
responsibility, and work ethic.
It was not at all uncommon to see an eight-year-old, usually a
little girl, hunched over from the weight of her baby sister or brother, whom
she carried around all day long while her parents were working elsewhere. When
a toddler flopped on its face and started crying, it was almost always an older
sibling, often a sister, who came to the rescue. For the most part, these kids
discharged their responsibility with great consideration and care in between
chatting with their friends or playing whatever games could be played with a
baby strapped to one’s back. Additionally, I often saw girls (though rarely
boys) trekking in from the jungle, bent over with a load of firewood or
vegetables, helping their mothers with laborious chores from the age of six or
seven.
This precocious ability to care for one’s self and others was not
entirely limited to girls. When I heard that the organization had built a
boarding house in one village so that children who live far from the nearest
school can stay nearby during the school week, I immediately asked who
monitored the kids during non-school hours. Having gone to a boarding school
myself during high school, I knew that, at least in the Untied States, in loco parentis is taken very
seriously. My high school was basically a gigantic, overprotective parent. When
I went to boarding school, our day was meticulously scheduled so that we had
almost no free time to go looking for trouble. We were told how to dress, we
had a curfew, we weren’t allowed to go for rides in our friends’ cars, we were
assigned chores. Considering my experience of boarding school, I was
flabbergasted to learn that the boarders at this village’s primary school lived
away from home five out of seven days of the week entirely without adult supervision.
It being a small village, there were often adults around, sure; but,
amazingly, no one was directly responsible for taking care of these kids. They
gathered their own food, cooked their own meals, cleaned up after themselves,
and put themselves to bed entirely on their own.
This boarding house was built for the village’s primary school,
which meant that the oldest of these children was about fourteen. What these
kids were doing as pre-teens, many American youths aren’t expected to do until
college, at best. Even then, it is assumed they will probably screw it up;
hence the need for Resident Assistants, hall monitors, and such individuals
whose job is to make sure these sadly dependent eighteen-year-olds don’t get
drunk and trash the place, or burn down the building trying to make a grilled
cheese sandwich. I will admit that the grounds of this boarding house in Laos
were not in a much better state of cleanliness than most college dorms; but
these kids didn’t have the luxury of housekeeping staff.
At first glance, it might seem that their independence and wild
energy would make Lao children difficult to teach. And perhaps, if one thinks
that learning can only happen while sitting at a desk in a classroom, this would
have been true. Luckily, our method of English teaching didn’t require
classrooms or desks, or textbooks, or tests, and their energy, as well as their
warm and affectionate nature, made Lao children excellent students.
English teaching, English learning
I will acknowledge that Lao kids are not what one would call “good
students” by Western standards. They don’t spend much time on homework; they’d
always rather climb trees or play in the street. Most children seem to think
that class consists of sitting in a room and repeating what a teacher shouts at
them. However, when presented with a variety of informal learning activities
out of the classroom, they proved themselves to be interested and capable
learners of English.
Kristian had studied linguistics in college, and with his
knowledge of second language acquisition, he began designing a new English
program for the organization. It is based on the so-called “natural approach,”
in which the teacher’s job is not so much to teach a language through forcing
students to study grammar, memorize vocabulary, and learn to reproduce common
phrases, as to create an environment in which students can hear and analyze a
new language and learn to speak by synthesizing their own utterances based on
the rules they have inferred from the input the teacher gives them. This method
focuses on informal interaction—basically, play. We swam, played games, drew
pictures, all the time speaking only in English. We never made the children
take a test or quiz, or memorize anything. After only a couple months, the
results were quite impressive.
Watching them gradually develop the ability to communicate in
English was marvelous, like watching a plant grow, or watching the sun come up.
First, they would stare at us shyly when we spoke in English, but soon we
realized that, though they didn’t say anything back, they understood the
greater part of what we said to them. Before long, they were able to answer yes
or no questions—Do you want to play? Do you like mangoes? Then, they could
provide simple one-word answers out of their stock of recently absorbed
vocabulary—What is this? A dog! The youngest son of our host family, Sompit,
had an impressive understanding of English by the time we left. The three of us—he,
Kristian, and myself—had an ability to communicate that was quite amazing,
though not perfectly sophisticated. We were able, however, to talk in English
about most things that were relevant to a seven-year-old’s daily life, and
Sompit even began to act as a translator when our Lao failed us in
conversations with his parents.
Though it requires volunteers with inexhaustible energy and
dedication, I am convinced it is perfectly possible to teach children English
in the setting of a rural village, without the usual resources considered
necessary for a “proper” education—textbooks, notebooks, even classrooms.
However, after this experience, I was left wondering about the ultimate purpose of this English program. Within
a very few years, these children will certainly be fluent English speakers. But
what then? Will they simply become English-fluent rice farmers? What
possibilities does our presence open up in the life of a Lao child?
Laos is a country undergoing radical changes, very few of which I
understand. Subsistence farmers are moving to the cities to find wage jobs.
Chinese firms are negotiating contracts to plant vast teak forests across the
countryside. Massive road works, damn projects, and the spidery spread of
telephone and electrical lines are changing the flow of people, water, and
information. Some villagers now have television dishes, sound systems, and cell
phones. What are the causes of these developments? Who is set to gain by them?
What will be their ultimate effects on rural Lao people, on my students? And
can knowledge of the English language help them?
I cannot answer these questions after spending only a few months
in Laos. I hope that the organization I worked for will eventually come up with
carefully-considered answers and help its volunteers develop a greater sense of
purpose by understanding the role of English language education. Just from my
own limited experience, I do, however, think Lao children gain simply by
exposure to foreigners whose agenda is not to take advantage of them, but to
help them appreciate and preserve their own way of life, while developing a new
understanding of and curiosity about the world beyond their village—a world
which is rapidly coming nearer and nearer.
Part of me thinks, may the approach of the outside world not spoil
these children—in several senses of the word. I felt a twinge of pain when I
saw teenagers roaming the village streets in packs, hovering around one lucky
boy and his cell phone, transfixed by its ability to capture fuzzy images of
them posing in silly postures or squirt out tinny-sounding versions of
America’s or Thailand’s latest pop sensations. What if there comes a day when
village children no longer get excited about jumping into the creek, or playing
with corn dolls, or making sunglasses out of strips of bamboo? What if they
will begin to need kung-fu movies, music videos, pop stars, and camera phones
in order to find excitement? Though I have no right to stop anyone from seeking
what they see to be the good, I do not myself want to be the connection between
these children and the global entertainment network that will in short order
crush their creativity and make them addicted to mass-produced garbage. On the
other hand, there are certain tools that may be of great use to them in the
future—the computer, the telephone, the internet, the automobile—and perhaps,
as an educator, I should see it as my job to show how these things work and
what they can be used for aside from entertainment and frivolous short-term
satisfaction. The same things that can suck away creativity and absorb what is
unique about a people can also be a means to preserve and strengthen the ties
that hold people together.
Laos is changing, quickly, inevitably. All that one can hope to
do, as a concerned individual, is try to make sure that people are educated
about what is happening, and empowered to protect their own interests. Though I
don’t feel like I did this in a particularly direct manner, I hope that, by
simply spending time with these children and happily riding the wave of their
energy and creativity, by preferring to go swimming rather than watch TV, or
listen to Lao music instead of American music, I showed that I valued them and
their way of life, and that I wasn’t there to make them change, but to provide
knowledge that may help them protect what they have. Who knows what we
accomplished in those few months, if anything, really. But I hope to stay
involved, and, as much as possible, follow the lives of my students as they
grow up in an ever-changing Laos.
