I have visited many rural villages in developing countries over the last decade, mostly in Central America. I have either become callous or clinically detached from the poverty, the dirt floors, the dark, low ceilings and stick walls, the lung-clutching smoke from the cooking fire that never stops smoldering. I no longer see the tiny brown children smiling and think how happy they are with so little. To be honest, I was not sure what I felt or how I was supposed to feel until yesterday when we visited a rural village on the Mekong River in Laos.
We booked a tour with a local company on a power boat, at least sixty feet in length with cushioned seats, wooden tables, a bar, a separate seating area and even a small futon for napping. Imagine business class on a 747 and you will get a pretty good idea of our comfort. The boat is staffed with half a dozen people along with the captain and his assistant. Moments after boarding, one of the men mops the varnished wooden floor. The entire boat, including the toilets, is spotless. We ride low in the swirling, caramel colored river, open-air, mesmerized by the landscape drifting past as if it, and not the river were flowing, an endless stream of rocky banks laced with muddy sand bars cut into the mountainous jungle rising steeply out of the river.
After four or five hours, we disembark on a sand flat and climb the steep bank to the village. I’ve seen this before. A dozen or so white skinned people walking through the hard-packed mud streets, smiles plastered to our faces desperate to disassociate ourselves from our unearned privilege. There is the nervous older lady, smiling too hard for her face, constantly bowing in a western imitation of the local greeting, loudly asking questions as if showing interest in their poverty will somehow absolve her of guilt. The distance between tourist and villager is wider even than the Mekong swollen to its full raging height during the wet season, and equally impassable. Our questions and smiles decompose in the air between us like sticks thrown in the river. It is not a matter of language, or customs. It is not even a matter of privilege and random injustice.
I am not – and here is the biggest lie of all – a poverty tourist.
Unconsciously, I separate myself from the group telling myself the same arrogant lies. I am not part of this group. I am different because I have seen this before. I worked in these villages, not here, but in the ones in Central America. I tried to do something to help. I am not – and here is the biggest lie of all – a poverty tourist.
As we head back down the bank to the boat, I ask our guide, La, what the people in these villages think of Americans. La tells me the story of when President Obama visited Laos, of when he asked the villagers, through an interpreter, the same question. La tells me the villagers would not answer. They were anxious about the question. He tells me that after prompting from the President, pleading by the President for them to be honest, a villager said, in what must be considered the most diplomatic understatement in history, “we are still grumpy.”
The older woman behind me is loudly talking to her companions as she cautiously descends the steep slope saying things I have heard before, things that now make me wince or cringe or both. “They were so friendly. What a lovely village. Isn’t it amazing? We really are not so different.”
She could not be more wrong. We are an annoyance, a condition in the contract between the village and the government. They suffer our desperate need for absolution so that the government will supply the village with electricity and fresh water. They are still grumpy, though you would never know it.
As I step back onto our boat unsettled by how my muddy sandals make tracks on the polished floor, a crew member hands me a cold, damp, white cloth. He is simply doing his job. There is no animosity in him, no condemnation or contempt; and, yet, the damp cool towel feels like a slap in the face, a hard, cold slap.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos then have ever been dropped on any other country in the world including Germany during World War II. More than fifty years later, those same bombs, some unexploded and hidden in villages like the one I just visited, kill over fifty Lao a year. The concussive evil of our insanity continues to reverberate today.
When President Obama returned to the United States after his visit to Laos, he announced that the United States would give $19 million dollars to Laos to assist in the effort to disarm unexploded ordinances. Before Donald Trump took office, about $16 million of the promised amount had been funded. When La told me this, he sounded grateful for the financial assistance, but that was not the part of his story that stuck with me. La said that President Obama asked a village woman for a coconut. She skinned it, cut it open and handed it to the President. He insisted on paying for it from his own pocket. All of this touched La. Yet, he was moved most because President Obama drank the milk of the coconut. As La said, he accepted what had been offered.
I do not feel guilty for being born a white American. I do not feel gifted or special either. I had no more control over the timing or place of my birth than any person in that Mekong village did. I do feel responsible for the insanity and cruelty of our country, not just in Laos, but in Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, El Salvador and Iraq. Like slavery and racism, like the genocide of Native Americans, our evils continue to haunt and harm. They are, as has been said so eloquently, a stain upon our consciousness. The United States is a unique and wonderful country. It is also deeply flawed like all countries, like all humanity. Our history is not so different from the history of other great powers. We have been responsible for both unprecedented good and unspeakable evil. The question is not, are we an exceptional country. The question is, as it has always been, are we capable of acknowledging our faults and accepting what is offered.
I put the cool towel on the tray held by the crewman and thanked him. Sometimes a slap in the face is precisely what I need.
