Animist Shamanic Chicken Leg Child Pacifier Technique

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With quiet authority one of the Shamans glides across the Village Chief's hut, with sharp focus and serious intent towards an inconsolable crying infant... The atmosphere suddenly seems incredibly charged for a moment as I watch... Could it be that, as the Chief has been explaining to us, that we are really in the presence of intermediaries and messengers between the human world and the spirit worlds...

Well, perhaps, it occurs to me... But on reflection it was more likely the fifth Lao-Lao rice Whisky that the villagers had insisted I knock back...

Anyway, that's not the point. As I watch I convince myself that I am going to witness something special. Something spiritual. Mythical. Supernatural even. Perhaps something that will change the way I view the world forever... Either that or at very least she is going to do something cool.

And so, after soaking up some sun in Goa, drinking some beers at Leopold's in Mumbai, a one night stopover in Singapore, a whistle stop 10 days through Thailand and crossing the Mekong River into Laos, here I am... Eager anticipation... Half cut on rice wine... Sat in a circle with the local villages and a few fellow "trekkers"... In a bamboo hut in an Akha village in North Laos...

It unfolds that I watch a local Shaman aggressively shake a chicken leg in the face of a distressed and pressumably bewildered young infant... Magic.

This would be perhaps one of the more surreal highlights of three days trekking through the spectacular natural scenery of the Nam Ha National Protected Park before heading for Nong Khiaw by public bus... Still, in Laos even what should be a fairly mundane experience can prove equally surreal...

Clambering through the aisle towards the back of the bus, over rice bags, locals sitting on the hastily organised plastic chairs as the bus was overbooked, I finally manage to sit down... A nest of birds, who have made their home somewhere in the roof of the bus, serenading me and the rest of the passengers, we head off on winding roads, through bone dry forest and the occassional fire, as the farmers clear the trees for agriculture, the bus manages only to break down 3 times on the 12 hour journey...

It seems in Laos that time tables are completely irrelevant and estimated times of arrival totally pointless...

And moreover that Shaman child care principles are at very least questionable.




(Lack of photos the result of painfully slow internet connection in Laos)

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