Going to Laos: Expectations

It's a sort of "bucket lister" for me, monumental enough that, in reality, this might be the only time we go, despite my wife's protestations to the contrary.  But its monumentalness comes from how often we've thought of it, how often we've made rudimentary plans to go only to scrap them for superficial sorts of reasons: a bird flu outbreak when we thought our daughter was pneumonia prone; the war(s) in Iraq or Afghanistan (Which war was it?  Who can remember?) that led to an "amber alert" for Americans worldwide.  Really?  Did we really think the long arm of Al Queda--is it really long, or just in our imaginations?--would reach all the way to Laos?  The truth is we've never been truly in danger of actually buying airline tickets, of really going. 

Now we're going.  To Laos. 

Laos, that kid brother of Vietnam, a Vietnam wannabe.  Or, more realistically, the secret Vietnam, where the US was actively combatting communism, but privately, behind the scenes.  Laos, the whipping boy of US bombing raids, the most heavily bombed country in history, where more bombs were dropped than in WWII Europe.  Every year people still die in Laos from "UXO," "unexploded ordnance," whatever the hell that means.  No, the hell that that means is leftover bombs. 

Laos, that landlocked country of Indochina, tropical and other.  I expect a paradise of fruit, dirt roads, and rice paddies.  I expect heat and humidity and an almost overwhelming greenness.  I expect down pours of large drops of rain, falling straight down in glittering waterfall from the heavens cracking with sharp thunder.

I expect street vendors with haphazard carts serving noodles.  I expect exotic dishes served on a low table as we sit on the floor on a mat.  I expect dishes with vegetables that are shredded, dishes with whole peppers, dishes with black-green broth.  I expect flavors so strong I know they'll give me diarrhea.  I expect bathrooms to be very different.

I expect squatter settlements, low shanties of cast off wood and tin patched together into marginal dwellings on marginal hillsides.  I expect traffic that seems out of control and deadly, a cacophony of horns communicating in another language about who has right of way, who'd better watch out.  I expect to hear stray dogs barking in the night.

The last time I was in the developing world, I was part of a drama missions team.  We went to the Philippines, where American culture has made a lot of inroads, and we were associated with Christian groups that made us feel welcome, and plenty of people were interested in getting to know us because we were white Americans.

I draw many of my expectations from my Philippines experience--the traffic, the climate, the squatter settlements.  Others I draw from knowing Laotian culture somewhat from the inside--the food and what it does to my digestion.  Others from the internet--legaciesofwar.org--and a PBS documentary I once saw about a Laotian immigrant family dropped off--literally dropped off--in New York City. 

This time, I will be going to a country with significantly less American inroads, the inroads that do exist leading to stories of war and death.  Of course, even in the Philippines we were told never to beckon someone by pulling an index finger toward ourselves: that was the sign American GIs used to beckon prostitutes.  And so the story of American imperialism, even in the far corners of the globe, seems to be my forerunner, seems to have gone much farther than any long arm of Al Queda. 

Then, too, missions has made a lot less inroads into Laos, a country with a communist government that "shut down" a church in Savannakhet--my mother-in-law's home town--as recently as 2006. This time I go with a group of ex-pats, so to speak, and yet a group of insiders to food and culture.  I don't know if we should attempt to visit a church, nor how easy it will be to find Christians.

What I'm saying is that going to Laos tests my imagination.  I resort to my imagination to knit connections together in order to lessen the "culture shock," in order to prepare myself for a degree of "otherness" greater, perhaps, than anything I've ever experienced.  Of course, from other trips abroad I know that experiencing "otherness" can lead to a feeling of disjointedness, of disorientation.  Or it can lead to a feeling of freedom, escaping from constraints one has always known into a new experience of humanity.  Many times, these feelings happen together at the same time, paradoxically.

Yet, of course, imagination can only take me so far.  Already I'm overlaying the trip with my expectations, warping it with my preconceptions, determining what it is in relation to what I know.  It may be impossible not to.  And yet successful travel, it seems to me, must come down to humility, to suspending disbelief, to a small "I". 

And successful writing, it seems to me, must depend on the same things.  As must successful travel for Americans with a domineering narrative.  As must successful missions as Christians with a biblical vision for the kingdom that must respect divine diversity and human culture making as well as have an eye out for the antithesis. 

May God grant us all the humility to imagine well.