Dear All,
I’ve got so much better this past week, it has been quite amazing. For the first time in months I’m really sleeping deeply. For the first time since September I’ve been able to swim normally. Getting well is fun.
I’m able to get a lot of rest at the moment, and rebuild my strength. My new medication is working amazingly well, though at times it leaves me a little zonked. My back is still inflamed, which isn’t awfully fun, but I have much less pain anywhere else.
It has been a good year, getting dysentry really wasn’t any fun (:all things will pass), but good has come out of everything else.
Rather than this disease being a negative, there is so much positive to take out from all of this. I’ve had a chance, after a few years in Laos, to really think about what I’m doing here and think about the future properly. People have been ludicrously lovely to me over the past few months, even when sometimes I haven’t been very lovely back to them. The community here has carried me, sometimes actually carried me, and been amazingly supportive. Somehow Laos seems to attract quite the nicest people in the world, yours truly obviously excepted.
Spiritually things are going well, I find myself in almost constant prayer and my faith more than ever is the central joy of my life. Being single does give me a lot more time to pray and praise, even as I sleep I find myself doing one or the other. I do still feel very vulnerable emotionally, which is really so boring.
The atmosphere here in Vientiane is tense, the number of police on the streets has yet doubled again, as there is a very big but very sensitive sporting event happening here over the next few weeks. There are no real curfews or anything, it isn’t really crazy bad, but being here you get used to seeing very nice army people with machine guns from time to time on the streets. It is never a wise idea here to be out and about after 10pm, but that is cultural and because the night police are a little underpaid. Laos is one of the least violent countries on earth, but there are still complicated issues from the past that makes the government rightly a little nervous.
I adore being here, really I do, and that kind of stuff no longer bothers me much. You have to be massively respectful here, indeed to gain respect here you have to respect others and show it. But there is a young and vibrant generation emerging who really bring fresh perspectives and ideas and they really are open to new ideas.
Laos is really an anomaly as a nation, it shares borders with 5 other nations who have a combined population of around 1.55 Billion people (or roughly 1/4 of the world’s population)* yet Laos has only around 6 million people, only Cambodia comes close to the population of Laos and that has more than twice the population. And it actually feels smaller than it really is, Vientiane has a small town feel about it that is still lovely. I like to think of Laos as a “Bethlehem of nations” but that is because I drink French mineral water and read poetry as a child. It is a very romantic nation, which is probably why the French liked it so much, indeed the French stayed here just long enough to teach the locals the French way of driving (:anarcie agreable).
I head back to hospital again next weekend, in typical Thai fashion a massive shopping mall has just opened opposite the hospital I visit, so it will be more fun heading there. The rapid development of the area of Thailand close to the Lao border really is making living here much nicer.
lots of love,
Ned
*Data:
[world population 6 692 030 277 -source World Bank
China population 1 334 510 000
Vietnam population 85 789 573
Thailand population 63 389 730
Myanmar population 50 020 000
Cambodia population 14 805 000
Laos population 6 320 000
number of people in countries that border Laos: 1 548 514 303
Therefore 1 in 4.32 people in the world live in a country that borders Laos
which is more than the population of Africa and South America combined
-source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population) ]
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