Good trek---part II

can be done up in minutes with ivy leaves, green onions, ginger, fish sauce, meat if you have any, and then served with balls of sticky rice.

The Akha bamboo house where Joe and the guides had dinner was on stilts with cracks in the floor. Debris from food preparation was shoved through the cracks to the hogs and chickens below. There was no waste. Dogs came by and licked the kitchen floor clean. From time to time, one of the women fixing dinner placed a finger against one nostril and expertly shot snot from the other nostril through a crevice. No fuss, no muss.

Joe arrived in the village unexpectedly, he learned, and walked into a housewarming party that had already been underway for 24 hours. He was warmly welcomed to the celebration and was passed a communal cup of lao-lao, home-brew rice whiskey. Hoping the alcohol might kill some of the bacteria in the banana-flower salad he had just eaten, he partook, sipping from the area of the cup just over the handle, and he thought, oh, yes, yes, I remember this taste. Lapsing handily into his old debauched ways, Joe wondered if maybe the partiers would offer him one of their Chinese cigarettes---many adults and children were puffing away and tossing back the lao-lao---but no one did.

The new house, like those owned by its neighbors, was perched on a breezy steep hillside. Joe said the landscape was like that in a mannerist painting, with the eye taking in both the overall ethereal green and blue beauty and the crude and exquisite details. The house had been built by all the villagers. The socio-economic structure is Amish-like, with private ownership of rice paddies and vegetable plots but joint effort on big, single projects like buildings. The women who sell produce in town or roadside markets for cash take turns going to market so there's never a glut that will drive prices down. Kenkeo told Joe that a rooster crows at 3 a.m. to waken sellers going to market and another crows at 6 a.m. for buyers who need to be awakened.

With their cash---which also comes from producing more rice than they need for themselves---villagers buy tools, clothes and household items. In one Akha village Joe stayed in, a Chinese guy with a bundle of shirts on the back of his motorbike had come by, so everybody was wearing the same shirt, except with different colors.

A few houses near streams get electricity from small hydro-electric generators Joe said looked like Hamilton Beach mixmasters. He didn't know what the power was being used for---lighting maybe---but he did note ominously that at a few of the more prosperous looking houses bamboo frames had been put up to hold---oh, yes---satellite dishes. One house had a cross at its roof peak and Joe asked if these people were Christians. No, Kenkeo said, somebody had hung a stereo speaker up there.

The Akha are animists. Each village has a bamboo "spirit gate" at or near a main village path. Through this portal no bad spirit is permitted to pass. Joe was careful not startle any children, for doing so could frighten their souls away.

While Joe thought these villagers plainly liked their lives, there were also indications of hunger for more. Joe carried along ten Lao-language children's picture books from Sasha Alyson's Big Brother Mouse reading and literacy project (www.BigBrotherMouse.com) and gave them to teachers to pass out at the village school. The teachers were grateful and the kids mesmerized. Apparently there were no other books in the village, except for the teachers own instruction manuals. Teaching is done on rough blackboards. Marxist governments are generally good at spreading literacy---how else to indoctrinate the population? But Joe got the idea---reenforced by another encounter I'll report on soon---that not much learning was going on at these rural schools. Also, the young teachers, who earn $30 a month, were supplementing their incomes by selling the pupils packaged noodle soup and candy.

Joe loved his trek (if I had quit those Chinese cigarettes sooner, I'd have been able to go along, too), and he didn't get sick or have to speak the Akha words "my arm is broken." He said the villagers were like the Dutch in the way they are clever and industrious about making what little they have work for them so brilliantly. And then, when work is done, relaxing together and enjoying one another.