The Journey to a "Sabbai" Village: Ban Phon Sim

The drive from Savannakhet to Ban Phon Sim is not far in terms of distance. We get on a main road and head east out of town, past the modern new concert hall advertising modern artists including what looks to be the Lao Carlos Santana, past the skeleton structure of what promises to be a grand new building that no doubt means it will be a bank of some sort, and past a large compound with a billboard in English that identifies it as a “special economic zone.” I think I know what this means—a tax exempt zone to attract western manufacturing, that is, sweatshops—but the one large warehouse seems empty.

But when we turn off the main road, we’ve clearly shifted area codes. The road is smaller, the buildings more consistently rustic, the vegetation closer to the road, the traffic occasional. The sky today is a cumulonimbus world of blessing. We may, for all I know, be headed into the heart of paradise itself.

When we meet a small herd of cattle meandering up the road toward us, apparently aware that they must stay on the right side, I decide we may not be headed toward paradise as much as headed to some arcadian dreamland, an untouched idyll tucked away in the Lao countryside, where the rice farmers wear pointed straw hats and play the Asian lyre at noon while the water buffalo rests and the cows come home docilely in the fading light of evening.

But, as it should be, the way to this idyll is unpaved, and though it hasn’t outrun the tangle of powerlines—how authentic are these people? I bet they’ll still need satellite dishes!—the jagged bursts of banana trees above the roofline and well-kept bamboo fences along the warm road which bends off into the distance promises my pastoral vision just around the corner.

Here the countryside opens up as well, and across the flat floor of what must be a wide valley, a patchwork of rice paddies whose borders are two-foot mud ridges stretches to a ridge on the horizon, dotted by simple pagodas apparently used for midday shade and even, I’m told, a place to sleep at night during fieldwork season. We seem to be approaching my arcadia. This is the planting season, and the farmers seem to be progressively moving across the field plowing them with multi-use long-handled tractors that look like the front half of four-wheelers were cut off and ten foot handles were welded to the handlebars. They’re not water buffaloes, which are still around though we encounter them less than we did in Thailand, but the tractors are simple and odd enough to fit the vision.

I’m struck by the order of the fields. Two days ago we rode through the Thai countryside and found it much more chaotic. I’m wondering as to the difference. Part of it may be landscape—the Thai side had more water and more trees to work around. But I wonder as to the impact of character and an emphasis on neatness; I wonder at the impact of agricultural collectivization enforced by the communists, but by all accounts that was a train wreck that lasted a mere year or two.

By the time the road dwindles to a path and we cross a simple one-lane wooden bridge, I’m a bit nervous. Finally, our path is stopped by a family of ducks, but a friendly voice hails us from behind. This is my mother-in-law’s first cousin, who shares her smiling eyes. Soon another first cousin shows up who shares so many characteristics of Grandma Mouth, I think she must be a reincarnation of her. These are the only three first-cousins left from Grandma Mouth’s family of 5 siblings for one reason and another. It’s an occasion for tears. We’ve arrived.

Our schedule for the afternoon is simple: my mother-in-law has brought a feast of foods from the city that must be prepared or spoil. The women set to it underneath the overhang adjacent to the house while the men drink to our health inside a tiled-floor house with doors thrown open, my mother-in-law’s cousin insisting how “sabbai”—nice, peaceful, restful—the countryside is and why would we want to live anywhere else? Meanwhile, our kids find infinite entertainment in driving off the chickens that approach the women slicing paper thin the fish that mae Keo has brought. A dog comes in and lounges on the floor. We snack on rambutan—that ubiquitous hairy fruit which we’ve eaten at every turn on our trip—and fresh pineapple pulled from the backyard. And drink Beerlao.

The meal uses everything. The fish is cured in lime and herbs and pepper and eaten with sticky rice; the leftover fish heads and skeleton are made into a fish head soup that mae Keo also makes back home with the remains of walleyes after I’ve filleted him, a dish my wife has said is “very rustic”; here we are at the source of it.

After dinner is the giveaway. Six women sit in a semi-circle as maeKeo, with some flourishes of offhanded nonchalance, her daughters insist to me later, divvies up two suitcases worth of clothes she’s brought for them. This is the village daughter returned from the outside world, or to borrow from Joseph Campell, the heroine with her western haircut who has “ventured forth from the world of a common day into a region of…fabulous forces…” now returned “with the power to bestow boons on her fellow[villagers].”

***

I’d like to think I can know the village through the children.

Up the lane from the cousin’s house, neighborhood children play in a mud puddle, the youngest falling down in it.

In the evening, as we enjoy fresh coconut juice cut from an uncle’s tree, Aidan plays tag with a three-year old to immense giggles.

At a distance, in the space beneath her raised house,a mother swings her baby in a handmade wicker cradle.

In the fading light, a teenager completes her chores of bringing the cattle in for the night; another walks home with her littlest sister.

But there are other stories.

At the cousin’s house, a darling little girl, Momei, attaches to Sommer. The pictures next to the TV that look like they were taken at the Lao version of Sears are of the grandparents, the mom, and the daughter, but not the father. The father was Thai, we’re told, and before he abandoned the mother, he also robbed the house. Now, the mother is working somewhere, presumably Savannakhet; the grandparents have taken care of Momei since she was three days old.

Another of the elders, a second cousin of maeKeo, also takes care of a grandchild about three years old who is three-quarters white. How does one get a three-quarters white child in an almost completely ethnic village? Simple, the mother wasluksaut, mixed blood, and the father wasfalang, all white.

There’s a story here that I will never know, yet it’s a story that I already know. Young people from a “sabbai” village encounter the opportunities and appetites of the voracious modern world and it consumes them, they sell themselves to it, and they get things they didn’t bargain for, which then fall back on the “sabbai” village.

And yet, of course, the “sabbai” village is not that “sabbai.” There are satellite dishes on many houses connecting to everywhere. Here, too, we’ve been told, we’re more susceptible to things like malaria and even Japanese encephalitis. In the evening, two cousins argue drunkenly about whose coconuts are sweeter, Keo chastises them, and I come between them for a picture. Another complains somewhat bitterly that we aren’t staying at his house, but we doubt his motivations are pure: we mean money to him. By the time we leave, it seems that some of the politics of family and village are encroaching upon us.

***

It turns out Momei is Sommer’s third cousin, closer than some of our relation at church with the same last name. At the end of the day, it’s a wonder to find family half a world away, to find the tangle of humanity much the same as it exists anywhere on earth, but always the children, misbegotten or not, carrying on the “sabbai” beauty and difficulty that is life.