Many of you keen readers of these bulletins will remember the somewhat odd story of how I gave my Meiban (housekeeper) a cat which impressively is both afraid of rats and now kills chickens. Though the cat is dearly loved by her household, I foolishly believed that such a crime had been atoned for. But this is Laos, and Lao people do not really usually forgive very easily at all.

As I found out, on Monday morning at 7.36am, when my Meiban told me that she had something for me, and produced a white puppy called “Moo-Flee”; this appropriately translates as “Free-of-Charge Friend”. The puppy will stay with my Meiban for a few more days. I never told her I wanted a dog, actually I am a cat person (just not cats which are afraid of rats) and I never had dogs in my life plans.

As stunned as I was, I got over it all, until at about 7.36pm on Tuesday evening when my Meiban knocked on my door to tell me that the house that I planned to move into on March 1st is now available and the Landlord is there now ready to give me the keys. I came and made a new inspection and accidentaly noticed some lose wires; the Landlord kindly pointed out that these various switches turn on the disco lights wired into the living areas of the house. At this point my Meiban was telling the Landlord that if he ever sells the house, she wants to buy it because of the disco lights and left me feeling un-cool. The new house will be great, so much more convenient than my current house (which has road construction in the garden, and a bar opposite).

And strangely I met the Son of the Prime-Minister of Laos this past week and spent much of the week in government meetings hoping to transform Vientiane and its surrounding area.

Moo-Flee will be a big new part of my life, and rather conceringly on Wednesday my Meiban came into work looking shattered; she told me that she was woken up at 4.00am by Moo-Flee and then on Thursday he woke her up at 4.30am, and on Friday your dear reader was starting to wonder if this is not how wars start in Laos. Incidentally the next move is mine, so I did ask someone here if you can buy racoons in Lao PDR; I have to think of a new animal gift of shocking proportions (but snakes seem a little cliched).

Moo-Flee incidentally is likely to grow into a huge dog, but that is a problem for another day; meanwhile he is a cute intelligent puppy (predictably). And as his brother was named “Oven”, I think I did quite well getting the one named Moo-Flee.

So next week it all changes, and the clock starting ticking as to how long it will take Moo Flee to chew through all my shoes; nuclear puppy syndrome has arrived…

lots of love,

Ned and Moo-Flee

So I moved house this week, into my 5th house in Laos and by far the nicest in terms of design and quietness and privacy. However, my puppy got out and someone picked him up and sold him. My neighbours know who it was, and on Monday they will all sort it out. I’m leaving it to Lao people to sort out, as these disputes are not great to get too involved in as a foreigner. Usually in Laos, if something gets stolen, everyone knows who did it as the communities are small and I’ve only had 2 pairs of swimshorts and a puppy stolen so far in my time in Laos. I’ve had so little stolen perhaps simply because I don’t have a lot of steal’able stuff, it is hardly like someone will steal my pig castration pliers if they knew what they were.

My new house is already a really good move for me, as it is far nicer than my previous house; as it has a concrete yard, a kitchen, and curtains. The downsides are that it is almost unbearably hot, and full of mosquitoes.

Work has got a little overwhelming at the moment, and so I’m sorry again for email delays etc. At the moment I’m leading the Lao side of a water purification project using carbon funds; in coming years it could be a way to bring clean drinking water to many thousands who would otherwise not have access to it by using carbon financing systems to largely pay for the systems. Also I am the Lao-based lead of a project to re-work Vientiane’s drainage system with aquatic plants, to provide a cleaner environment, gas for vehicles, and lots of natural fertiliser for local farming. Also I’m working with colleagues to develop clean buring cooking stoves made in Laos to reduce the death toll from cooking smoke here (around 2000 people per year); we are looking at some quite radical options here. And we are developing some elements of a low-carbon clean village development program (such as low-emissions charcoal production) Also I oversee some parts of the biofuels program, write lots of articles (for people such as Bangkok Post and various journals), and develop new projects and a few other things too. Outside of the office I help various groups too; so I have a fairly full program fueled largely by huge quantities of “Tesco Finest Earl Grey Tea” and coffee.

In living here I try to keep to a couple of simple principles which hold me well; I don’t do late nights (basically ever), I do strongly try and avoid any office work on Sundays (and even Saturdays for that matter). I do pay any Lao staff I hire, such as my housekeeper, ludicrously well and throw in lots of benefits too (such as 2 extra months salary per year bonus). I work hard to be nice to all animals (the office dogs get treats from me everytime I come and go); I like animals and I love how people see that as you love animals so you must love people (I know it is not always the case but it breaks down barriers for me constantly almost everywhere I go/work). Also I try and be funny, rest properly in the quiet weeks, and come into the office 20 mins late on Friday mornings…

In running the projects I do, I love the analogy of how an aircraft needs to be set up properly to take-off; so work hard to try and get the projects set up well with the right people and atmosphere on the team, and then let the team really fly; the project flies itself when set-up properly. I’m not very good at this, but I’m trying to learn fast.

But back to real life, I’m realising once more that I really am a cat person as cats sleep much of the day so don’t mind me being at work all day (and I’m often at work long hours) and cats are superb alarm-clocks too.

So sorry again for the lack of emails etc, I’m trying to get my life more down to size. I’m helping more people than ever before here in Laos, at higher and more influential levels, and loving life.

lots of love,

Ned

My house in Vientiane is incredibly luxurious, indeed so luxurious that it has a swimming indoors; actually where the kitchen and spare bedroom used to be. Yes, it is flood season again, and the lower part of my house (the old kitchen and large spare bedroom on ground level rather than on the concrete pad the rest of the house is on), regularly fills with water. Recently it was up to about 15 cm (1/2 ft) but sometimes it has been at least double that. Vientiane is not getting more rain, instead it is simply that the old rice paddies impressively in the centre of town are being built on; so the water doesn’t go anywhere anymore except into my kitchen. And it is merely muddy water with no foul thing in it.

Meanwhile I was on a routine hospital run last weekend; the nurses there now recognise me very well and I’m something of an involuntary regular (but not because of the nurses). They love hearing me speak Lao so they ask me incessant questions including last time “how do you feel?”, I told them I felt ill but thankfully this was a hospital. In the X-ray department the host asked me if I was a student, unfortunately I replied that (amongst other things obviously) I’m a biofuels expert in Laos. Which proved to me 2 things: 1) this new haircut makes me look really young, and 2) anything in the world would have sounded better than telling someone I was a biofuels expert in Laos…

Meanwhile back in Laos, I was recently given a white teddy bear by a Lao friend. This was firmly in the no man’s land between “nice and cute” and “not nice at all”. Anyhow I asked my friend what the teddy bear was named and I was told firmly “Mii”; so I replied “wow, Mii as in yellow noodles?” (I didn’t get into Oxford using by that line, just for the record). Obviously that was a no, so my next attempt was “Mii as in Lao for “I have”?”, apparently that was a no as well, and so my friend got frustrated and said firmly: “No Mii as in Mii as in the Lao for a bear”. So I have a teddy bear called bear. And an annoyed friend.

Life here is going fine enough, with this hard end to the rainy season it is all a little frustrating with nothing ever staying clean for long and after 5 months people here are running out of rain jokes (:I’m running on vapours too in that department too, see above). The challenge with working on projects supported by other organisations outside of Laos is that people don’t understand the Lao calender: from mid may to mid September/October it is rainy season so getting around was hard and even the made road between Vientiane and Luang Prabang was closed for more than a week this year. Then it is rice harvest season until around November/December and then it is New Year Season with “International New Year” on January 1st then Chinese New Year towards the end of January and the Vietnamese New Year around then too. Then there is a short gap until the Lao New Year in early April and then people take 2 weeks to get back to work because the holiday lasts officially 3 days which almost takes you through to Mid May and rainy season. And with rice field preparation season just before Mid May, the only season they appear to be lacking amongst a formidable set is the working season…

Some jokes seem to work well with Lao people (not that one, see above): for example I actually bought some herbal tea for the office called “Happiness Tea” so I told the office that I tried to find some “unhappiness tea” but they must have just sold out and they really liked that. So I thought this is going so well, I’ll push the joke thing a little further so I told them that I tried to find “arrive at 8am unto the office Tea” (when our office opens) and instead I got longer faces than at a horse show. But after 4 years here, I’m still no closer to learning how to get action from the sweet lao people.

But at least it is funny here. The cat which I gave to my Meiban (housekeeper), the one which was afraid of mice, is coming along well. I asked my Meiban had the cat changed his views about rats. She told me eagerly that he nows plays with the rats, so I asked if he then eats them and she gave me a longer face than at a horse show, and strongly explained that the wasn’t that kind of cat. Yes indeed, not mine…

lots of love from Laos,

Ned

Dear All,

Almost every morning when I wake up, I wonder how did I ever end up in a comfortable bed in a plain house in a small poor obscure corner of South East Asia. After pondering that, all the other problems and questions that the day brings seem to be easier than answering that particular question.

About 4 years ago, just a couple of days after moving to Laos, I was staying with some friends while I looked for a house to rent and I was invited around to dinner by some other friends (now in Uganda). And your author bravely decided to use for the journey a seemingly pre-korean war honda scooter kindly lent to him by his hosts. It was only a short way and obviously nothing could go wrong so obviously I got desperately lost in dark getting home. So lost indeed I ended up past a golf driving range on a road trying to swallow me up with its mud in a alternative part of Vientiane and eventually I turned around and miraculously found a lao who could read a map (living here one sometime feels that perhaps 20 people here win the lottery every year but only perhaps 10 can read a map). Eventually, without headlights on because an Oxford Geography degree does not teach you that you have to find the lights switch and actually push it to turn it on, I made it back to my hosts.

And now I live exactly where I turned the scooter around, give or take a hundred yards or so, and the mud still tries to get me. But I have now found the switch to turn on the headlights.

So after some 4 years here, so many things seem to be coming full-circle. I adore the Lao people more and more, but managing them has proven to be a great adventure. The problem is that you are meant to, as a boss, bring in lots of snack food to show how much you love your Lao staff, but too much and they do nothing but eat and do apparently no work (:facebook is not officially work in our office). And so the story goes on, this age may solve Fermat’s last theorem, and even the one before that, but these pale into insignificance with trying to motivate sweet Lao people to sweetly do lots of sweet work and still be sweet (sometimes I’ve seen staff work amazingly hard but afterwards look like hung-over dried-fish-eating vampires).

I love the challenge of managing Lao people,  and strangely getting arthritis has made become a dramatically better boss: as now I have no choice anymore but to really build people. They have to go to the meetings I’m too sore to go to. They have to be my eyes on the necessary field trips, and I have to hand over work to them. After a few days in our office we give our new staff work they are not trained to do in an area they don’t know much about and they almost always will do amazingly well; because we know what we are doing. So I have to invest in them, even as my own workload grows; indeed there is never a more urgent task than getting others to shine; though my boss might think otherwise.

Meanwhile we have the new internal office tradition of “Durian Fridays”; when we bring in some peeled Durian fruit on Fridays to wake up those who hate it and to satisfy the longing of those who love it (such as me and an administrator disarmingly called Newt, and a few other people with aparently no sense of smell). This is on the basis that we dont live in the office so our homes can still smell sweet despite us eating Durian fruit. So while it can be the closest fruit taste to heaven (and more addictive than crystal nicotine) the smell is more distinctively septic-tank’ish than anything else I have yet discovered (and I have been down part of the Amazon).

Living in Laos is a very sweet deal, this is not torture at all just very very odd. I never had the ambition to live here, the capital is so little known that it could be in the final 1 million dollar question on who wants to be a millionaire, but being obscure is kind of fine with Lao people and so it has become fine with me.

Next week there won’t be a Bun Tai Bulletin as I will head over to Thailand for another routine set of tests, Starbucks, and a fresh sack of medications. I am always nervous about these visits, and curious too, as this is one of the major factors in my life that I am not really able to do anything at all about. I’m not holding on to Laos, if for medical reasons I have to leave then obviously I will but I’ve never yet met a specialist doctor who has told me to leave Laos nor nothing but great praise for my fine Thai doctors. I don’t worry about quitting, 4 years here has put paid to that emotion, but I do have much more I want to do here and many more people I want to see grow.

Indeed once I was lost in the dark, but now I live there and now it is home and now brightly lit…

love Ned

Last week marked my 4th year in Laos and with it the happiness of remembering that this time has not been a failure. The work up-country, in Phongsaly Province, was not amazing but it was good and it helped many people. And now, in line with the vision when I left up-country; the work that I am doing is helping even more people in even more places. From policy work to project work, the goal has not changed: to help and do good to as many people as possible. Everything else has changed, except those goals. In any fair analytical measure, Laos does not matter with even less people than London draped over some craggy slopes somewhere in SE Asia, but that is the reason that it does matter: because if we don’t care about it then who will?

Meanwhile our office smells. Last Friday we struggled to work out why. One of our staff came back from taking samples from the site that the septic tanks from Vientiane are emptied into (the same samples which later in the week got held up by confused Thai Customs officials in Bangkok’s airport, presumably wondering why someone would be so stupid to send samples of that to Chiang Mai). But we were not sure that the samples or the (soon-to-be) senior project assistant were the cause of the smell. Then the office dog strolled in having probably rolled in something that didn’t quite make it to the dumping site. Then right on schedule, our (very) senior administrator opened her favourite pack of chili dried squid snacks to the sound of gasping noises from the foreign desks in the office, even from those who smoked. And to finish this off, someone bought in some freshly prepared Durian fruit; though the smell is of sweet rotten bacon the taste is more addictive than concentrated nicotine. Indeed there is a great difference between the high and mighty “visions and dreams and plans” and the more strange reality of actually operating projects here.

After 4 years here I have learnt 2 really big lessons. The first is that if you don’t change as fast as the country, you instantly become a dinosaur with a laptop. The economy in Laos is growing at 8.5% per year so it doubles in size every 9 years; that changes everything in the country and every mindset too. Most companies and government departments in Laos are simply struggling to cope with growing this fast but if they don’t adapt they will become instantly dinosaurs (with or without the laptop). And the second is more intellectual: that you can’t wait for your life to get better here; it is not fair to think that in a couple of months life will be fun here and the country will be easier to live in. I don’t think Laos is any easier or harder to live in than any other country; just different things are hard. But my commute door-to-door is 15 minutes in Vientiane, when it used to take me, in the UK,  2 1/2 hours to get to work in west London.

The sweet cat that passed through my house, afraid of mice, is doing from all reports exceptionally well in my Meiban’s house; he has kind of become the centre of their family. I asked my Meiban if he ate sticky rice, and it appears he won’t eat it but will eat non-sticky rice which makes me wonder if he is a Hmong cat or even a Thai (Siamese?) cat.

lots of love,

Ned

So I arrived back from a dreary hospital trip on a wet Saturday night, made some tea, and heard a strong and persistent miaowing from outside my back door. I opened the back door to find a young cat eager for some kind soul to let him in. His face was scratched and bloodied and he was very hungry indeed, even wet tot. So I quickly sorted out some food for him and he explained in great detail that night the trauma he had been in. And the next morning. And the next afternoon. Indeed this was a cat who was singing so much that I very almost was forced to name him “Caruso Cat” (after the great Italian tenor).

But on the plot of land my house is on, my landlord keeps a team of eager dogs and I could not find a way to prevent him being mauled by the dogs. His wounds were healing up very well indeed, and my housekeeper was desperately looking for a cat to sort out the endemic mice problems in her house. So with a heavy heart, 2 cans of Whiskars and a bag of dry cat food, I let her take him home with her and promised I’d support the looking after of the cat.

So two days later, I saw my housekeeper again and very nervously asked her about the cat; she was delighted with the cat but mentioned that he is afraid of mice. I offered humbly to take the miscreant kitty back but fortunately her family had fallen in love with him. Indeed it emerged that he is so afraid of mice, that when he hears a mouse he runs as far away from the sound as possible even to outside the house. And so it emerged that his wounds were probably caused not by another cat, but by a mouse or rat and he was desperate for me to understand just how violent this rat was (hence the explanations, which mercifully for my housekeeper have now stopped).

I have told this story to many foreign people, most of which can never understand that a cat can be afraid of a mouse. But every Lao I have spoken to has believed the story completely.

Indeed Mickey Lao Mouse has got his revenge….

love Ned

I am safely and happily back in Laos after a genuinely special trip to Netherlands and the UK. Last weekend was my parent’s 40th Wedding Anniversary, so my sister invited them to a anniversary lunch, and she invited about 80 other people (obviously without telling my parents). The event proved to be better than any Christmas I have ever been at; classless yet classy and so brilliantly put together (even a childcare team for the young children there, and a lavish cream tea too); and 40 years on the Best Man and three Bridesmaids were all there too. My parents have been a great blessing wherever they have been, my father perhaps the most generous person I have ever met (in every respect), and being kind to animals and people just flows from them without them usually realising it.

Coming back to Laos on Wednesday, I had been warned by a friend who checked on my house when I was away, that there has been some minor styling change inside my house; so as I opened my door I was concerned. Fortunately it appeared to be just a new small table had been added to my living room. But there are no false alarms in Laos. And a few minutes later I came to put the chocolate I’d bought in my fridge in my kitchen, only to find my fridge was not in my kitchen. And my kitchen was not in my kitchen, I tracked down both shortly afterwards to a spare bedroom. The kitchen had been built on ground level about 4 or 5 steps beneath the main part of my house and when I was away the low part of the house flooded (about 30cm/1ft). It does not look like I lost anything though it appears the “outside of a U-boat” interior styling is very much “in” at the moment (at least in Laos).

So the next day my housekeeper arrived as normal and was worried that I would be significantly angry, but I explained to her that as opened the door I feared I would see swathes of pink curtains so I was happy to see actually it was only that 1/4 of my house had flooded. Anyhow I like the new layout much better, as the house has a more intimate feel and step-free access to my fridge is really helpful.

Meanwhile, the hectic work program continues, but I actually enjoy my work and enjoy working with and for the really remarkable Lao people.

I picked up the local business magazine yesterday, and on their front cover was a great big yacht; for a landlocked Asia country that seemed a little unusual if perhaps technically accurate…

yours swimmingly,

love Ned

It is my great pleasure to be writing this bulletin from rural England, briefly back at my parent’s fine cottage for a few days, and it is my even greater pleasure that it is even sunny outside (which is rare in Summer in England).

Last week was a predictably long and tiring week, though hugely useful professionally. As I told people in clear and uncertain terms when I came to give my presentation at the training: “as you can tell by my accent, I am from the Lao People’s Democratic Republic”. Indeed, I am also from the bit of England opposite the Netherlands, but I thought that might just be too much information for the people listening to my fairly dismal presentation.

On one interesting morning, we visited a modern dairy farm. It was an organic farm, and allowed the cows to chose if they went outside or walked around inside (there was a field for them to roam in attached). The conventional thinking is that cows should be at grass at least 120 days per year, but they obviously had not asked the cows as only 4 out of the 100 cows were outside and this was summer. The cows there were milked automatically by a robot; they just walked in to the pen and were automatically milked and given feed to eat; and they could be milked any time they liked 24 hrs per day (it was their own choice). The cows were waiting in line themselves to be milked and looked incredibly happy; indeed it appeared Dutch cows like Dutch robots more than they like Dutch (non-marijuana) grass.

Cows aside, I’m in good shape. My parent’s house is almost like a nature reserve (with the wildest and most dangerous animal there being a certain small dog, but for diplomatic reasons that is all I am at liberty to say). With a fabulous kitchen garden, and with endless tomatoes, fresh almost translucent new potatoes and endless birds and fat cats (the two aren’t actually linked); it is the scene change I need this week. Being here feels almost like eating a fine and magnificent delicate desert; it will all be over too soon but if it would be any longer it would not be so memorable.

Early next week I head back to the other land I love, to the special land of the Lao people and the exciting and happy work and projects that I am involved in. It is always a happiness to be back there, just as it is a happiness to be briefly here in rural England.

with kindness and tomatoes,

love Ned