Another Quiet American

by Brett Dakin

  Just as I was about to head home to recover from this uncommonly early morning activity, the sound of a gong reverberated through the loudspeakers. The crowd was being called to view the ceremonial teekhee ‘hockey’ game that was held on the grounds each year. Already, a procession of musicians, dancers, and city authorities carrying the sacred teekhee ball from inside That Luang to the plaza was underway. The ball, about 15 centimeters in diameter and made from bamboo roots, was guarded throughout the year by the elders of the village surrounding That Luang and taken out only on this occasion.

  In Souvannavong’s days, the teekhee match had been a highly ritualized affair between two teams: on one side had been Royal Lao Government authorities, clad in red, and on the other a group of commoners, dressed as they were able. The match was never much of a nail-biter: of three games, the “people” were always required to win exactly two. If they won only one game, or all three, it signified misfortune for the entire nation. And while a victory for the authorities would have been interpreted as an exploitation of the people, a balanced victory of the people assured peace and prosperity. Consigned to their inevitable loss, players on the royal team were rarely very enthusiastic. There were also fewer of them than the commoners—their numbers were limited by the availability of official uniforms, always in scarce supply.

  These days, the hockey game remained much the same as it had been before the revolution. Basically, the two sides used heavy bamboo clubs to try and whack the sacred ball into the opposition’s goal. But if the activity itself hadn’t changed much, its political significance had all but disappeared. In the wake of the dissolution of the monarchy, the match had become a simple sporting event between two teams from different quarters of Vientiane. And in perhaps the clearest sign yet of the New Economic Mechanism reforms, the two teams were now sponsored by the private sector. This year, the match was a contest between Nescafé and Beer Lao. I caught a glimpse of Sisavath Keobounpanh, the prime minister, calmly presiding over the match from his perch inside a shaded viewing tent. Whichever side prevailed this year, his government wasn’t going anywhere.

  ___

  When I returned to That Luang that evening, the monument had been fully illuminated. A beacon in the distance, the Grand Stupa guided my path as I approached the plaza on foot. Tens of thousands had congregated for the evening’s candlelit procession, or bientiene, around the stupa. At the west gate, I waited for Souksan, who’d suggested at the office the day before that we meet. I wasn’t surprised when he didn’t show up; Souksan’s name was Happy, not Reliable. I purchased my offering—a small bundle of orchids, sticks of incense, and miniature orange candles—and entered the temple alone. As soon as I stepped inside, I was swept along by the circling crowd. At the head of the procession walked That Luang’s resident monks and novices, led by the supreme patriarch. The crowd was thick, the procession slow. A pair of policeman, armed with whistles, attempted in vain to control the flow while I tried my best to avoid setting those walking in front of me on fire.

  Through the loudspeakers I could hear the prompts that preceded most prayers, uttered by the lay people and religious officials alike: Namo tassa, bhagavato, arahato, sammasambuddhassa. This phrase was repeated three times—just as the candlelit procession would circle the stupa exactly three times. After I had completed my own circuit, I chose a spot at the base of That Luang and knelt to present my offerings. Following the lead of those around me, I planted two burning incense sticks firmly in the ground, melted the bottoms of the candles and stuck them to the base of the stupa, and placed the flowers behind them.

  After bowing three times, hands clasped together in the traditional nop, I prepared to make my own silent wish. What would I ask for? Long life? Financial success? A better love life? As I began to consider what mattered most, the din of the crowd circling behind me faded away. I focused on the glow of the candles and the soft sound of the monk’s prayers. A calm fell over me and I felt quite at peace. And then it hit me. I knew that eventually I would have to leave Laos, likely heading back to the harried pace of life in the West, where quiet moments like this could be hard to come by. So in the end, my wish was pretty simple. I asked only that the beauty of this moment, and the sense of peace it afforded, would remain with me throughout my days.

  Once I left the stupa—through the eastern gate this time, just to be sure—I waded through the crowds back to my motorbike, parked in a makeshift lot near the spot where I’d given my offerings that morning. The November cool disappeared in the crowd, swallowed up by the mass of warm, excited bodies. I bumped into a young boy who clasped his mother’s hand and who had been silenced for at least a moment by the wonderment of the evening. He gazed upward, first to my strange foreign face, then quickly to the sky above. My eyes followed his to the sight of the brilliant full moon. As if on cue, a display of fireworks—a homage of flowers of fire to the Buddha—lit up the sky over That Luang.

  As gasps of excitement and cries of joy erupted, I remembered the description of the festival Souvannavong had offered so many years before: “The procession is followed by music, singing, dancing, and love that continues and finishes very late at night, as the full moon projects on the limpid sky the slender and majestic silhouette of That Luang.”

  Not even war and revolution could change the powerful hold that the Great Stupa had over the Lao people and their nation.

  Sugar Daddy

  ______________

  If you want to help someone, don’t do it unless it dignifies him.

  Lao Proverb

  It felt like Christmas Day at the NTA.

  One morning in December, I arrived at work to find Mon, Souksan, and Seng huddled together in a corner of the UNDP project office. Shredded cardboard boxes were everywhere. Mountains of packing material had been strewn about with abandon. I waded through the plastic wrapping and twine that covered the floor to the corner where they had gathered, to find out just what was going on. It turned out that a new computer, monitor, and printer had just arrived, an unsolicited gift from the UNDP.

  My friends were gathered around the new equipment, intently scrutinizing the directions in the English-language printer instruction manual. This particular printer was the largest I’d ever seen—larger, in fact, than the monitor and computer put together. It did it all: double-sided printing, color printing, collating, and binding. It practically wrote the document for you.

  But this morning, all Seng wanted to do was print a single black and white page. No graphics. No color. No binding. No problem! Or so Seng and I thought. In fact, the printer took more than five minutes to warm up, another five to re-position and paginate, and two minutes simply to feed a sheet of paper through the tangled web of gadgetry deep inside. Finally, something popped out of one of the many holes on top. It was a blank sheet of paper. “Great printer!” Seng joked. He would have been better off using the “old” one we already had—a gift from the UNDP last Christmas. Or even the trusty old manual typewriter we kept upstairs, just in case.

  As Seng consulted the manual again, I looked around and noticed that almost everything was labeled with a small UNDP sticker. From the computers and printers to the desks and chairs, right down to the smallest tape dispenser and staple remover, everything had been marked. Nothing in the room had actually been purchased by the government; it had all been donated by the UNDP. Today’s new gift came with Microsoft Internet Explorer, even though Internet access at the office was to remain a dream deferred throughout my time in Vientiane. The fact was that, even if we’d been able to use these new toys, we didn’t need them. Indeed, none of my colleagues could remember requesting the new equipment. The UNDP had simply decided to dump a few thousand dollars of gear on the NTA. Whether or not it would be of use was immaterial.

  But at the end of a century marked by unrelenting foreign intervention and intractable poverty, the Lao had learned the cardinal rule of international development: never kick a gift-horse in the mouth. The NTA staff wasn’t about to s
end this stuff back, so we set about figuring out how to use it. . . .

  ___

  That afternoon, in the changing room at the Lao Hotel Plaza gym, I finally met Bob.

  Bob was the country representative for a UN aid program, and had lived in Laos for more than six years. Six years! That made him practically a native. I had been searching for the man ever since the day I’d moved into my house, when I’d discovered a pile of New Yorker magazines gathering dust in the corner of my living room. I spent many a night under the stars on my balcony, swatting away mosquitoes as I devoured short stories by John Updike and non-fiction pieces on genocide in Rwanda and administrative intrigue at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was Bob’s name that graced the address labels on these New Yorkers, and for months I’d been determined to find the man behind the magazines.

  On my way into the gym, I had noticed Bob’s name on the members’ sign-in list. This list was a veritable Who’s Who of Vientiane society. On any given day, you might find the signature of Pino, the ebullient owner of L’Opera Italian restaurant, the best Western place in town. He liked to work off that delicious tiramisu on the rowing machine. If the head of the Asian Development Bank’s representative office in Vientiane was on the list, he was probably using the treadmill. And if you saw the name of the foreign minister, it likely meant he was in for a massage—on the house, of course. I found Bob in the men’s room and, as I changed out of my work clothes, I introduced myself and explained the magazines. It turned out that Bob had known my landlady’s family for years. Every month, when he finished with his New Yorkers—received through the UN internal postal system—he passed them along to his friends.

  Such a warm gesture contrasted sharply with Bob’s demeanor. He rarely smiled, and spoke with the gruff manner one might expect from a guy who had been raised in New York City. Even the angles of his face were severe. His shaved head was indicative of the austerity inherent in his approach to life; nearing sixty, Bob was in better shape than anyone else at the gym. Lean and muscular, his physique put me and my 23 years to shame. During endless sessions on the gym’s rickety exercise bike, he wore a thick headband to prevent the torrent of sweat from running off the top of his bald head and into his eyes.

  Bob was also a fountain of cynicism about Laos and its future: “Is anything getting better in this country?” he once asked me as we took turns lifting weights. “I don’t see it, do you?”

  In Laos, I saw a country that was slowly succeeding in raising the standard of living of its people, while at the same time struggling to preserve what set it apart from the rest of the world. Bob saw a falling currency, rising prices, crumbling roads—and, above all, a development community that was doing more harm than good. When I dared to suggest the possibility of UNDP funding a small campaign at my office to discourage drug use by tourists, he scoffed: “So you want to get at the trough as well, huh?”

  The “trough” of which Bob liked to speak was the seemingly endless source of money that funded UN operations in the developing world. It was this trough that kept everyone associated with the world of development in business: not only the international consultants, the highly paid UN “volunteers” and local support staff, but also the restaurateurs, nightclub owners, and real-estate agents who relied on them to survive.

  A news report about the refugee crisis in Kosovo appeared on the TV in the gym, and Bob began to laugh. “You know why we didn’t get in there sooner? Because this war benefits everyone—the media, the aid agencies, everyone. And it just means more work for the UN.” When the reporter mentioned Bob’s own UN agency and its emergency relief activities in the war-torn region, he emitted a jaded cheer.

  Bob was about to retire from the UN, and it struck me that it wasn’t a moment too soon. He had been drained of all enthusiasm for his job, having lost sight of the lofty goals that had once driven him to work overtime. After nearly a decade in the trenches, he had come to view the development community as little more than a self-perpetuating money machine interested primarily in its own survival. That morning, his agency’s headquarters in New York had faxed him a budget for the upcoming year. According to the proposal, his food distribution program would hand out only a fraction of the rice in Laos that it had during the current year—but with three times the staff, a new four-wheel drive vehicle, and additional computer equipment in Vientiane.

  “My boss wants us to spend 18,000 dollars on computers over the next year, and buy a new vehicle. We only have two staff, and we have two cars already! And how can we possibly spend 18,000 on computer equipment when you can get a top-of-the-line PC here for a thousand bucks?” At the same time that they were increasing funding for administrative offices in Vientiane, many UN agencies in Laos were cutting costs out in the field: “I just had a big argument with my boss,” Bob told me. “She wanted to pay the guys who actually carry the rice less next year. So basically she wanted us to cut spending on the little guy while we treat ourselves nice up here.”

  Bob’s steady stream of woes pointed to what he saw as the real goal of the development community in Laos—keeping itself in business: “Just make sure you spend all your budget this year, so you can ask for an increase next year,” he said. “Who cares if you don’t need the money?”

  A large portion of foreign aid money, it was true, failed to reach the Lao for whom it was intended. The sharp increase in the number of cars on the roads in Vientiane in just the short time I was there was a testament to the rampant diversion of aid money into the deep pockets of government officials all over town. Just as motorbikes had all but replaced bicycles as the preferred mode of transport for Vientiane residents, hulking Mitsubishi Pajeros and Land Rovers were now clogging the streets as well. Considering that the government had imposed a 100 percent tax on all imported vehicles, and that almost all financial transactions were conducted in US dollars cash, buying a new car was no small feat. The equivalent in America would be walking into a dealership, plunking down 100,000 in cash, and driving off with a shiny new four-wheel-drive. It was hard to imagine, but in Laos this happened all the time. In a country that was one of the ten poorest in the world, you couldn’t help but wonder where all this money was coming from. When I first arrived at the NTA, the UNDP tourism development project had been stalled for months due to a single request: the staff wanted to blow the budget on a new Mercedes.

  But even when aid money was misspent, no one seemed to care. “The Japanese are the worst,” said Bob. “They know what’s going on, they know where the money’s going, but they don’t say anything.”

  Japan was Laos’ largest foreign aid donor, funding an array of projects, including the new international airport terminal, improved roads and bridges in the south, and upgraded educational and medical facilities throughout the country. The snappy Official Development Aid logo seemed to pop up wherever you looked. “Evidently the ambassador was really mad when he saw an aid project vehicle driving around Bangkok one weekend. But he did nothing.”

  The Japanese aid agency also failed to act when a public park it had built on the banks of the Mekong was torn up during the city’s road construction extravaganza. The park disappeared overnight, and the city was left without a single public recreation space. Nevertheless, on an official visit in January—the first by a Japanese premier to Laos in 33 years—Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi would pledge an additional 8 million dollars in assistance.

  “We cleaned out the files at the office yesterday,” Bob continued. “It was the most depressing reading. Files from the 1980s read just like reports today—the same problems, the same promises. We’ve been doing the same thing here for ten years, and the government hasn’t done a fucking thing. Except spend our money. And now they want to piss away more money in this country.” Bob shook his head in disbelief.

  Why do international aid agencies, foreign governments, and NGOs continue to clamor to get in the door in Laos? First, it is relatively easy to get funding. Laos has signed all the right internati
onal treaties, and while it may not abide by many of them, the government has sensibly sought to develop a very accommodating foreign policy. In addition, the UN classifies the country as an LDC, a “least developed country,” which opens the floodgates to vast amounts of foreign aid money. It allows Laos to qualify for aid now denied countries like Vietnam and Thailand, which have moved out of the LDC classification. As popular aid recipients leave the dreaded world of underdevelopment, the aid community must find new places to spend its money.

  A second, and far more important, reason was that for the average development worker, Laos was a rather nice place to work: “Hey, everyone smiles at you,” Bob said, “and the government says okay to basically everything you ask for—at first, anyway.”

  It may not have had the most exciting nightlife around, but it was a far cry from some other LDCs, where foreigners lived under fear of assault and were spat upon in the streets. In sum, it was easy to get stuck in Laos.

  “Some of these [development workers] are married, and they have really specialized skills. Back home, there’s not much use for an irrigated rice expert who speaks Lao,” Bob told me. “Even me, I don’t know what I’m doing next year, so I’ll stick around for a while after I retire.”

  The development community had a tremendous vested interest in staying put, and it would create work for itself if necessary.