Khout's village

Khout Vixayphone runs the tiny storefront that Big Brother Mouse Books opened a couple of months ago up north in Luang Namtha. He's a slight, handsome, thoughfully talkative twenty-three-year-old who graduated from the teachers college in Luang Prabang and then taught for several months before going to work for BBM Books. Khout (pronounced somewhere between koot and kuh-oot) could have stayed with the company in more up-to-date Luang Prabang, but he chose this frontier town because it was near his beloved home village.

The day after Joe got back from his trek, we hired a tuk-tuk and joined Khout for the ride on a bumpy dirt road the two kilometers out to the hamlet where Khout grew up and most of his family still live. Unlike the distant Akha village, Khout's village (whose name we failed to write down) had government electrical power and other amenities. But the sensible houses were much like the more rural structures, except solider, with harder woods. The government is trying to get people to switch to brick and there were a couple of those. Deforestation has brought flooding in many areas, including Khout's village, which was inundated last June, causing the loss of many animals. A number of houses in the village had satellite dishes, but also the customary array of chickens running loose, hogs and dogs stretched out in the dusty streets. The homeowners rice and other fields were a short walk on the edge of town.

Khout took pride in showing us around. He pointed out the efforts at modernization, though it was the peace and quiet and connectedness among the villagers that he talked about most fondly. It seemed to seem to him an ideal life. He loved the ways people helped each other out all the time and then hung out together. He was known wherever he went and talked about the families in each house. We met his non-English-speaking mother, who was preparing vegetables for the evening meal, and his live-at-home brother, who sat off to the side as we enjoyed some cool water, and who has a "problem." Joe diagnosed the problem as Down's Syndrome and he was probably right. Khout said it was this brother who looked after him when he was a tot and they have a close bond.

Khout was not blind to dissatisfaction. He said many of his secondary-school classmates broke off their educations, married early, and some now felt a bit trapped. He spoke of the bad effects in the village of both excessive drink and of television. (TV may replace opium as a Lao opiate of the masses.) Khout's own life took a sad turn recently when he broke off his engagement because his girlfriend did not like his parents. Also, her mother was a troublemaker who was better left out of the family picture. The wedding banquet pumpkins were piled in a corner of the house uneaten.

Khout's father works in Luang Namtha for the Ministry of Culture. He rides his motorbike from the village to his town office each day. This probably means he is a good communist party member, but the few times we provided Khout with openings to talk government and politics he did not pick up on these openings. Luang Namtha was the site of a major battle in the 1970s civil war, and there's a large heroic statue of General Kaysone, the Lao-communist George Washington in the center of town. I did ask Khout which side his village was on in the war. He sidestepped the question, but he said at that time "brother fought against brother," and it was terrible. He perhaps exposed some Pathet Lao family sympathies when he talked about the war as being between "the Americans" and "the Vietnamese." Not "the North Vietnamese." For U.S. leaders, the war was about ideology while among most people in Indochina it was about liberation from foreign powers.

Khout went to teachers college on scholarship and so is obligated to teach in public schools for three years. However, his work with Big Brother Mouse Books is considered so valuable by the surprisingly flexible Ministry of Education that his BBM job can count toward his obligation. The ministry is right to do so, for Khout is dedicated and energetic about getting good books into the hands of Lao children. Joe had some clever ideas about signage and promotion, and Khout picked right up on these. One of Khout's disappointments has been in discovering how few of the teachers he comes into contact with are as eager and hard-working as he is. Many become teachers because it's the only job they can get.

Khout invited Joe and me for dinner at the BBM store, where he lives in a room in the back. His cousin and her friend, both students at a private school in Luang Namtha, cooked a dinner for us of sticky rice, crab jeow, bamboo shoots, chili sauce and grilled strips of water buffalo. It was lovely. The five of us sat village-style on a bamboo mat on the floor, since Khou's former girlfriend had made off with the only table. The girls were "too shy," Khout said, to use their English with us. But we had the feeling they understood everything we said.