FAQs

Tomorrow morning by this time, we will have woken up three children, ages 11, 8, and 6, and we will have traveled to the Sioux Falls airport to board a flight for Chicago where we will board a connecting flight to Shanghai, China, and then to Bangkok, Thailand.  We will fly for a total of just short of 20 hours, leaving in the morning of one day and landing in the evening of the next. 

The flying should be the easy part.  Barring weather and other flight delays, once we check our luggage and board that plane, the chain of events that will take us to Bangkok is in someone else's hands.  When we touch down in Bangkok is when the real work of travel begins. 

"Got your trip all planned?" someone asked me in the weeks leading up to tomorrow.  Apparently, the blank look I gave in return said enough.  "How does one go about planning a trip like this anyway?" she appended. 

Yes, how does one? 

Through the internet.  Sort of.  While we had initially planned to take a train from Bangkok to the Thai border, through a facebook contact in Bangkok we reserved a car--and, we think, a driver--instead.  After spending one night in a hotel in Bangkok, a car will pick us up from the hotel and take us to Mukdahan, Thailand, on the Mekong River.  This "car" was competitive in price and, most of all, was preferred by my mother-in-law who, for some reason, seems to fear the trains in Thailand.

"Will you be staying with relatives?"  This is the most frequently asked question about our trip.  The answer is, it's doubful.  My wife has two half-sisters in Laos, from her father's first marriage.  By the time everyone gets there, we'll be a big group:  11.  Who has the means to put up 11 people?  Probably not Sy's sisters.  There's also some story of some relative along the way building a sort of guest house there for when they visit Laos.  Will we stay there?  Again with 11 people, it's doubtful.

Then there's the issue of air conditioning.  My mother-in-law has insisted that, absolutely, we'll want to stay in a place with air conditiong.  That if we don't we won't last long.  She also insists that we don't need to make reservations ahead of time.  "Just go there and do it," she says, waving us off.  So, yes, we've looked into possibilities and have them bookmarked on our computer should we have internet access, but beyond our arrival on Tuesday evening in Mukdahan, the schedule is wide open. 

"Does Sy have family over there?"  This question is simply a variation of the one above, and yet not simple to answer.  Where does family begin and end?  If one of my distant Schelhaas residents from the Netherlands were to land here, would they have family here?  Probably at least 60 distant relatives.  In Lao, there are separate words for all kinds of family relations:  older and younger brother and sister, maternal grandparents, fraternal grandparents, maternal uncles and aunts older and younger than your mother, paternal uncles and aunts older and younger than your father.  So, yes, I expect that Sy has family over there, that there will be little end to family, and most of it will fall under the broad category of "cousin."

"Will you be doing any sightseeing?"  No doubt we'll do some.  So far, the major interest is for Sy and her siblings to see personal history sites:  where they were in camp in Thailand; where they lived in Mukdahan for a time; where they crossed the Mekong; where grandma grew up. 

Again considering the size of our group, I'm expecting a lot of our activity to focus around being.  What will we do while we're there?  We'll be there.  We'll procure food, we'll travel to someone's house, we'll watch as it's being cooked, we'll eat it, we'll talk--or I'll listen and try to pick out the 20 Lao words that I know--we'll help clean up, we'll go back to wherever it is we're staying, we'll walk in the street, we'll get on each other's nerves.  By this time, it will no doubt be time to procure food again.  There will be dispute about how to do it and where.  I'm especially prepared for our kids to probably hate it, to be board within the first day.  But that's okay, this trip isn't about them. 

And so we'll spend some time in Mukdahan, cross the river and spend more time in Savannakhet, where my mother-in-law lived most of her life.  Depending on how we like Savannakhet, we'll go up to the capital city, Vientiane, where we'll also find a place to stay, visit "cousins," procure food.  In Vientiane, we have made plans to visit a family that works for CRWRC, a family we met while they were on homestay. 

Then, barring a real phobia of trains on my mother-in-laws part, we'll train back to Bangkok and begin the trip back. 

Even as I write this, it sounds naive, it sounds like we're flying blind.  And we are in some senses.  And that's intimidating and invigorating at the same time.  The amount of borders, boundaries, and barriers we have to cross or navigate is stunning:  umpteen borders, language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, class lines with different rules within a different culture, and family grudges--which exist even before we leave.

And yet we're counting on still being among people, other human beings that use language to build relationships and--what else--procure food.  Sure, we'll be westerners with that passport in our pocket that is said to make the world go round--cash.  But still, there's something larger at work here than just a spendy vacation that we've been saving for all our married lives:  we will travel half the world to return to my wife's place of birth in order to consider world and family upheaval as well as the wonder of culture and diversity, and, in a myriad of ways, we'll depend on the humanity of others to do it.