Lao People Are Just So Bad-Ass - Laos

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I think I love Lao in part because Lao people are so bad-ass. And I love all things bad-ass. For those of you unfamiliar with that term, “bad-ass” means something or someone tough and strong with total confidence and a, “fuck-off”, if you don’t like it attitude. We all know people or places like this. But imagine a whole country of people not only like this, but also kind and compassionate. I know, I know, hard to imagine. But this is Laos! I swear to you! It's just not like other places...

The children are bad-ass, the women are bad-ass, and yes, the men are bad-ass. How about building a house while wearing a traditional, long, tightly-wrapped skirt? What’s cooler than being eight and picking up your friends on your motorbike on the way to school? Collect the un-bagged trash from the baskets on the street in a skirt? No problem. Hold your baby in one arm while steering your motorbike with the other? No problem. And it is the women who handle the money here; counting out stacks of bills in seconds flat. And it’s the men not being nervous about balancing a six-foot tall stereo system, or a handful of chickens on the back of their motorbike. Women, wearing skirts and shirts of completely different prints and colors, confidently, happily, selling dumplings on the street or weighing out rice at the market. Ten-year old boys with bleach blond spiked hair, unabashedly checking me, a twenty-four year old girl, out. And in no way shy or nervous about doing that. It’s also the butch lesbians with their spiky mullets and their killer attitudes not giving a damn if other people don‘t like it. It’s the way women and men wail live fish and chicken with big machetes while chatting with neighbors. Lao people, starting with the youngest children, are just so admirably confident and tough.

Perhaps this unique combination of bad-ass and loving kindness comes from a Buddhist culture that has been through a hell of a lot. First, colonization and domination by the French. Then, a devastating war. If that wasn’t enough, what followed and continues now is domination by a small group of their own people. No space for dissent, no space for objection, no political freedom. Most Lao people still live in the countryside with little or no access to clean water, electricity, good schools, profitable jobs and hospitals. And there is nothing they can do about any of those things. They live in a dictatorship. So I guess if that was you, you’d also learn to be incredibly resourceful and amazingly resilient. But if that was you, would you also be able to maintain that Buddhist feeling of love and care for all, the feeling that Lao people emanate from their very souls? I can only hope that I could.

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Photos

This bunch of students actually put together this whole meal for their TEACHERS
Because they really love their teachers and are so thankful for them. Honestly.

Look at these bad-ass women walking back from market with their ducks
And rocking their colorful un-matching skirts and shirts.