Friends Without a Border

After a year in Mandalay you facilitated English and personal courage at the Lao Friend's Hospital for Children in Luang Prabang, Laos for six months, June-December.

The hospital, a non-profit NGO based in New York, opened in 2015.

All medical equipment and medicines are donated.

Patients are low income Lao and H'mong. Many have traveled a long way in pickup trucks to try and save someone they love. The hospital treats 50-80 children a day.

Malnutrition, thalassemia, fractures, burns, rashes, infections and childhood illness are common.

Treatment, medicine and Out Reach community care is free.

Lao with money go to the Provincial Hospital next door. There, a old man relative pushes an empty wheelchair across a parking lot. Water floats on the surface of the ornate circular broken water fountain. National hammer and sickle flags hang limp. Families camp out under trees on straw mats with bags, bedding, an unplugged fan and bamboo rice baskets. Trash litters the ground.

White clouds dance with forested mountains under a blue sky in a landscape painting.

Eighty local staff at LFHC.

They call you "teacher."

You call staff "teacher."

They are surprised.

No "teacher" calls them "teacher."

You smile. You are the teacher and I am the student.

You are health care professionals. You know your job. You are learning more about your job. You know more about medicine than I do.

You are a team. You are the future of Laos.

I am here to help you. Simple English is good. My English is getting better.

You are responsible for your learning.

You smile.

You speak slowly and clearly. Pro-nun-ci-a-tion. Diction. Articulation. Intonation.

How now brown cow?

Sound by sound.

Language chunks.

"I need help," are three important English words.

Talk, share, learn and teach your partner. If you can teach it you know it.

They are doctors, nurses, lab and X-Ray techs, administration, infection control housekeepers, physical therapists, maintenance, outreach staff, anesthesiologists, and patient intake receptionists.

Together you do general and medical English. You laugh, dance, sing "I love to color," and practice meditation.

I am breathing in. I am breathing out.

Calm, relaxed heart-mind.

Beginners to  advanced practice the four skills, speaking, writing, reading and listening. I don't understand a thing please repeat.

They create vocabulary notebooks and mind maps by topics: medical equipment, illnesses, blood basics, body parts, internal organs, bones, muscles, senses, daily activities, home/furniture, adverbs of frequency, prepositions, directions, family, food, sports, free time activities, weather, time, travel, and dreams.

Staff consistency attending English classes is a challenge. Work schedules take priority.

An operating theatre and neonatal unit recently opened. Staff are busy with medical training.

The in-patient department has twenty beds. Emergency has five beds.

Foreign volunteer health care professionals come for two-four weeks. They share their specialist expertise. They return to England, Australia and beyond wild.

The hospital is in a village twenty minutes from town. The College of Science and Health is nearby.

Outside the entrance gate along a dusty road people sell grilled meat, fish, rice, fruits and vegetables to patient's families, staff, and students.

It's a 125cc motorcycle culture.

At LFHC families have lockers for food and personal belongings in a large community area outside reception. There are toilets and showers.

They use a large outdoor kitchen for cooking. They chop kindling and stoke fires for rice. They eat, sleep and talk while their children receive care.

Every Thursday the nutritionist, visa coordinator and head of infection control prepare healthy meals for the families.

Young H'mong mothers nurse babies.

Families watch comedies or nutrition education films on a large plasma screen.

People sleep on benches.

Dogs rummage through trash.

A family sitting on straw mats eats from shared bowls.

A mother holding her infant studies mirrored reflections.

A father supports a pole with an IV drip bag for his son.

Kids play games on a cell phone.

A housekeeper mops a tile floor.

A security guard dozes near pink, yellow and white orchids hanging from bamboo.

A happy girl with a bandaged leg rolls her wheelchair into the sun.

Curious eyes study a smiling stranger passing through.

He came, he helped, he left.

Friends Without A Border. https://fwab.org/

laughing children

maintain their honest true
emotional awareness
in the moment
before artificial social conditioning 
destroys their fragile innocence

humor and curiosity

crimes against humanity

fear is a killer

mai's hearing evaluation -
anthony from NZ came, met, talked,

promised the world, took her out, tried to seduce her, failed, he left
mai has a black belt in karate
she's killed more men with silence than you can imagine
she is resigned to her life

massage and laundry scrubbing under the paternal gaze
of her older sister who sits in perpetual admiration of her mirrored reflection

how does her awareness register POTENTIAL for unrealized dreams
how does her silent resignation
understanding comprehend one single lost chance,

all the complexity w/o expectations

in the false dream of star rain

they moved a wooden toy pawn,
salad bar in silence
welcomed cool air from a brown river,
children pressed noses to a rolling window, laughing

an archeologist skips through star puddles into 8th Century excavations
freedom sings stones,
selling a Blue Pumpkin to a Cambodian land mine amputee
w/o a left leg selling DVDs to fat tourists
talking with their mouths full

an Enfield rumbles in Pokhara
spinning the Wheel of Time
rejoicing in miracles, small ones
sit in meditation 

we do laundry by machine, said language animal

3.8 billion years ago a black hole captured a star the size of our sun
sucked the star into its empty mass the star exploded the black hole
escaping energy created, released streams of light we see today

at that moment 20 raindrops trusted your intuition
to travel is to feel

indonesia asked you to return
two years ago you said thank you to orchids
goodbye to gardens

orchids remember you
the apple tree

you planted at Gardenia

grows strong
roots buried deep below blossoms
fragrant with memory

Street meat in Quanzhou, China

watch women work

sunday song

cambodia is a funny place. ha, ha, ha.

what do you see? i see a man carrying one red brick. he’s looking for a place to put it down. he is confused. he had no idea his day would involve carrying a brick AND making a decision.

he needs a woman to tell him what do. this is rare because men, in his culture, are the boss and tell women what to do. usually they tell them to lie down and get ready for the big thing.

he is confused about loss. his wife wears the pants. she is the now.

i see an exuberant extraordinary solid particle cow patty land-mine in the middle of sunday’s broken pot holed road. it’s a steaming green mountain.

it smells like an art project.

it will be discovered by a speeding SUV leaving a trace of aroma past sweeping weeping women. it will spread itself over the entire olfactory landscape.

it will create new tomorrows.

***

welcome to a new reality game show. it’s called “Watch Women Work.”

work to eat now OR evolution of the species and social organization (+-)

log on, log in, log the forest. yeah, yeah. i am mr. monosyllable, your creme filled hostess cupcake for this week’s exciting program. yeah, yeah.

contestant #1. a housewife in a rural village. her task is sweeping dust into piles of dust outside her bamboo shack. she has all day to complete this arduous task. repeat.

dust to dust. dawn to dusk. (poetic ramifications in the theatre of the absurd)

contestant #2. a housewife. she has a house. she is a wife. she has 10 children. having children is her DUTY. sex for her is nothing but a DUTY. she is a duty free outlet. her price tag has expired. everything must go.

many children gives her mother and extended family someone to love and play with and yell at. yelling at kids here is abNORMAL and healthy. it nurtures their self-esteem and neurotic adolescence with punctuation marks.

her husband is sleeping. he loves sleeping, eating and making babies, because he doesn’t have to carry them around for nine months and experience hormonal feelings. he sleeps forever dreaming of a hammock in a bamboo forest.

her, his, their children are naked. they play with trash. they set fire to the forest.

fire is their great fun and games besides Yelling and Whining.

contestant #3. a housewife. she is milling around. she has no focus, plan or direction. she is a teacher. she teaches by example. she hopes the lazy boys and men understand. she’s knows many won’t and don’t.

she pounds things like metal. all day. she is a tool. she is a worker. she is a tool of production in life’s assembly factory. she is a simple person. she spits out many children. this is her duty. children are tools.

contestant #4. a housewife. she works. her lazy adult son watches her. he is bored watching her. he wants to stare at the long and winding dirt road. he wants to feast his small beady rat eyes on dirt. his eyes are dirt. pure clean red dirt. she sweeps him into the river. swim, little fish. bye-bye baby, bye-bye. he floats away.

contestant #5. a housewife. she has a diamond in her mind. she is calm and focused. she exhales beauty, truth and love.

she sings all day long.

pick one to emulate. find one with incentive and initiative and win BIG prizes.

what’s the prize? a broom, a brick, an SUV smashing a green cow patty and a monster home shaped like a wedding cake surrounded by a moat, high walls, silver barb wire and iridescent colored candles.

anything else?

a year’s subscription to your favorite illustrated color glossy advertising magazine:

“Dreams, Lies, Wishes, Hopes, and Great Expectations While Driving a Blue Dismal Diesel Dump Truck Needing an Overhaul Loaded with Charcoal.”

cool prizes. let’s play. what’s the first question about the quality of life? said Socrates.

meanwhile: destiny’s child disguised as a black and vermillion butterfly nurtured red and orange exploding flowers above a cool brown flowing river.

see you next week on WWW.

 

pee wee play

a kid who had no idea
what was going on besides i want
grabbed for the yellow plastic ball
mine mine mine he screamed in Lao demanding

ball kid gripped tight
grimace
pulling away

suddenly 
four armed pee-wee power stranger rangers
with interlocking plastic
red, yellow, green, blue 
guns entered the fiasco 

hand it over or else
we blast you with our supersonic death ray
grabbing kid looked astonished
distracted

ball owner ran away
laughing, you can't BE serious

carve

in a village
a girl carves
a gourd
she creates
children
families
animals
homes
forests
flowers
skies
rivers
stars
planets
delicate
lines
spirals
universes