Family Picture

We’re the only people I’ve seen with cameras here. That in itself seems to be a major ethnographical observation. What does it say that we’re trying to freeze time? To preserve it in a two-dimensional form in order to take it back with us and lodge it deep within the recesses of a computer to be called forth in the future, when nothing remains as it is in the pictures? We’re voyeurs, certainly, tourists of the exotic, like visitors at a zoo.


Nowhere does this become more apparent than when photographing the poor, even when the poor are blood relatives through marriage.

We had been warned that the economic condition of Sy’s sister was not good. The story of how she’d come to this position we heard ahead of time. She’d had a job in the city of Savannakhet at a police office and had had a nervous breakdown, a shattering--due, some say now, to a curse that someone put on her, but at least due to the curse of modern existence that can make life feel nasty, brutish, short. Her family did all they could in terms of doctoring, but the final solution of the sister and her husband was to sell all they had and buy a piece of land, a rice processor, and an ice cream machine. Now they live in a house off a road to Savannakhet on less than an acre of land that they’re clearing from forest; she gets pennies to husk the rice of local farmers; he works the road somewhere selling ice cream. They have one child, a boy, four years old.

“House” needs to be qualified here, too. It’s a shanty-shed combo, the shanty made up of long thin trees bound together under a tin roof. When we arrive, Sy’s sister is working in this shed, pouring brown rice into one of the funnels or chutes of the rice processor. The first round seems to sift or winnow the chaff from the rice; then Sy’s sister takes the filled pail and pours it into the other chute, where the rice is finally husked, pouring out two valuable products: the bright-white grains that connote that this is glutinous or sticky rice, and a brown flour apparently made from a part of the rice plant I'm not aware of. The chaff blows out the back of the shed to a pile where the chickens scratch.

The shanty holds the rice machine; it also holds Sy’s nephew’s few toys amidst some duck eggs and a cooking fire. The chicken “kabobs” we picked up from a roadside vendor are not sufficiently done for the women in our party, so we finish cooking them over this fire. We take these skewered chickens on a path alongside the sister’s land fenced with bamboo poles and holding a pig sty as well as newly planted papaya trees and plants I don’t recognize.  On a path just behind the sister's house, mats have been spread.

This is a Lao picnic: grilled meat—savory and well-cooked to the point of almost being jerky—sticky rice, dom mach hung from a bag, fruit, and water, except today our American offering is Sprite and Coke to supplement the water. However, a couple of the people in our company are not looking pleased; this is no picnic when poverty is the view. Couple that with the fact that Sy’s sister refrains from joining us—perhaps someone is expecting their rice or perhaps it’s sheer embarrassment from not having anything to offer or from clear and apparent class distinction—and we really seem like misplaced tourists.

So the lunch festivities are rather somber. When we’re nearly done, she and her son join us; she urges her son to eat but in the end they only accept a bag of mach kaam, dried tamarind. We walk up toward the house; a new customer is here delivering his grain for processing.

We linger around the shed, waiting for something to happen, a time to sit and take off our hats for a bit, but nothing happens. We walk around to the house part of the shanty, hereto off limits—if we want to see how she lives, then why pretend, anymore, that we’re not here to look? Sy is one of the first, at the sister’s urging; our kids each look; I look. It’s one room with three Asian mattresses, which are really just well-stuffed cushions, some blankets, some clothes, a TV and a fan. That’s the extent of the sister’s simplicity, but though this is all an intended step back from stressors of city life, this is no Thoreauvian experiment. This is poverty.

Before we leave, we get pictures of the sisters standing together. It’s then that we get what she has to give: the smiles she offers seem as genuine as they can be under the circumstances. The real history between the two shows through: this is the sister who carried Sy around on her hips until they were red; this the sister who Sy remembers playing with her ear until she fell asleep.

We leave, and we’re relieved to leave. We’ve left something to help, but we’ve no idea how it may help, how big a band aid it may be. It’s all wrong somehow, American money in exchange for a morning’s visit, a look into “poverty” firsthand, and yet it’s more than nothing, more than sitting in a lovely house in Edgerton, Minnesota, and not knowing, more than not even wondering.

Still, I’m wondering about the pictures. Yesterday, I tried to capture a young mother selling mangoes along the highway wearing a straw hat and black mask. It’s an image I need to explain something about life here, I tell myself, though the woman seemed to want to pull her mask down when she saw my picture, wanted not to be anonymous.

Then, last night, with our kids in the back of a truck, I saw some international businessmen, not just with a camera but with an iPad, when they stopped and took a picture of my children. Though they took for reasons only known to them, I was uncomfortable. What were they capturing about my children? And what were their motives? If a picture is worth a thousand words, what did this picture of my children say?

And what am I saying in the pictures I’ve taken of Sy’s own sister, a woman who treated her tenderly? Can I honor her in what she gave us, a look into her hard life and a genuine smile in the midst of poverty?