living on busses

that's where i've been for most of the last five days. 4 hours from vangvieng to vientiane, 2 hours to oudonthani across border in thailand, 12 hours to chiang mai, 10 hours to bangkok, about 5 hours navigating bangkok's public transportation, 10 hours to surat thani, then 5 hours to phuket. so now i have finally arrived here in patong beach and rejoined my beloved friend eli.

the farm was hard to leave. i kept extending my stay there, but after 10 days it was beginning to pinch the time i had left for the last adventure in asia. so i had to leave. the structure of the mudbrick house's outer walls is basically complete, and the last few days we were plastering them with layers of specialized mud, each harder and more waterproof than the last. peter keeps a blog of its construction, which you can see here: http://earthbricker.wordpress.com/

also, some of the other volunteers passing through the farm, erik and susan, write about their travels here: http://bigadventure08.com/

i spent a couple of the last days doing more biking and climbing. vangvieng has a tourist place called greendiscovery, which gives guided climbing tours, but i didn't want to fork out the money and have to sit around with a bunch of newbs. so i asked, and they handed me their big fat book of information. it had maps, directions, pictures, detailed descriptions, climbing jargon i could not hope to understand, maps of the routes up cliff faces, everything. for dozens of sites all over laos. they even said i could go make photocopies if i wanted, which was shocking because they were handing over such a valuable stash of info and stood to make no money off of me. on wednesday i tried to find one of the sites, which i never could find, but it resulted in a beautiful hike up a stream through a mostly bamboo forest. cool pools, waterfalls, and gorgeous moss-covered rocks. i did get my feet covered in leeches though.

on thursday i ran into a pair of french speleologists (spelunker scientists) out in the western valley where i was biking and climbing. they were mapping the depths of the region's caves, many of which the lao have never explored. one is 8 km deep they say. they are finding new species of spiders and ancient artifacts like footprints and burned torches. for their work they had to have backgrounds in geology and biology too, to understand how it all fits together. what a cool job.

getting back to chiang mai, the apartment, and my big packpack was ridiculous. it felt like an absurdly luxurious treasure trove of resources. for my three weeks in lao i had three shirts, two shorts and two underware, and the odds and ends in my daypack (stupidly underdressed - i froze for the first week until i finally bought a sweatshirt).

that day, saturday, i got a ride out to payap university to play in the weekly ultimate frisbee game. almost everyone was an expat, either an english/international school teacher, a missionary, or a capitalist of some kind (one guy admitted that he was on the run from the FBI - he said that they killed two "kids" and tried to pin it on him, letting him take the fall for the murders). that capitalist type was either retired at about 40 or ngo workers, but even they openly admitted that they worked with and supported venture capitalists. sooooooo, scum of the earth basically. they are fine as humans of course, but most of those economic roles have just got to go.

the english teaching is a tricky one. i did play this very role for three nights at the farm's classes, but i'm not at all comfortable with it. the thing is that economic hegemony translates into cultural hegemony, especially these days with globalized economy and information revolution. so the culture of the current world "empire" gets imposed, through force or subtle manipulation, on everyone else. teaching english has always seemed inherantly ethnocentric, egotistical, self-serving, and the easy way out of cultural clashes and language barriers. instead of one person learning the language of their host culture, they teach thousands of their hosts their own language.

i confronted ward, the teaching coordinator at the farm, with all of these ideas before i left. he respoded that the lao get such an economic advantage out of learning english that we are giving them a gift, and it would be detrimental to them to judge this situation in such a way that would lead to us to withhold it. standard liberal argument, accept the breadcrumbs that fall your way, fighting over them and trying to justify the system that lets them slip off the banquet table. lao is still totally impoverished, and isn't really changing in any substantial way.

here's the problem: this system, in which it is mildly economically advantageous for peripheral workers to accept cultural hegemony, is a direct result of international capitalist class dynamics. the majority of the core of the ruling class, and therefore the biggest, richest, most touristy middle class, happens to be in the US. any decent revolutionary program would end this relationship between core and peripheral regions. if the lao controlled their own regional economy with workers' councils, and wealth was redistributed from regional capitalists and from core/hegemony regions, they would never ever have the material incentive to assume this subservient position, in which their culture and language are slowly replaced.

so do we continue teaching english, justifying our behavior by appealing to the relatively miniscule advantage they derive from it? knowing full well that this type of reformist activity - granting tiny concessions to the permanently toiling masses - serves to distract, to satiate, to buy off a tiny population (the farm's program might affect a couple hundred people), which only postpones the day when people are compelled to find and attain a real solution to this problem. drawing out their suffering, extending indefinitely the amount of time the lao (and everyone else in this situation or similar) must endure this slavery, humiliation, exploitation, and destruction of their of their culture? well, what's it going to be folks?

at least lao doesn't have the standard hyper-consumer-whorism of even semi-developed capitalist countries. when i got back into thailand, i was immediately repulsed by the massive billboards, the corporate logos everywhere, the fat bloated make-uped bling-blinged middle class, and the pickup trucks with massive speakers in the back, cruising slowly through chiang mai blasting ads through the walls, bedrooms, and skulls of more potential consumers (this last constitutes a crime against humanity by the way, easily a lynchable offence in any community i would choose to live in).

lordy.

i stayed with a couchsurfer (check out couchsurfing.com) my one night in bangkok. fang took me out to a dinner of excellent street food, let me play her family’s piano (pure ecstasy, i am more homesick for piano than for anything else), helped me navigate bangkok’s busses and trains (never could have done it without her, and even let me stash my big bag at her house for a week. like all couchsurfers i’ve met, she is kind, sociable, curious, open-minded and generous. what a cool community to foster such attitudes on an integrated and international scale.