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| Sundown on the Mekong, Luang Prabang |
I thought, in coming to Thailand, that I would really be roughing it. Being here now I can hardly remember what fantasies I had about Thailand: where I would live, my students, what it would look like, etc. When we got to Laos all those memories about my Thai fantasies came flooding back, as Laos is exactly what I thought Thailand would be like. Laos has found a way to accommodate foreign guests and all the pampering they need while still maintaining it’s own culture. All the women still wear the lovely Lao skirts (picked up one of those, 100,000 kip), the people in the markets still wear the pointed hat that looks like a pyramid to block the sun. Staring out a window of your bus you can see their culture still alive and well. Small villages pop up along the side of the road and extend up the hillside. The homes are made of woven bamboo and straw roofs. Everyone is barefoot. Everyone looks happy. They don’t stare at the farang like everyone in Thailand; instead they mostly go about their work and business. On a 9 hour bus ride through the mountains, our bus had to stop in one of the villages to connect a hose to a water pump to cool off the engine. We had to wait as a 60 year old woman sat bathing in her sarang at the water pump. This sounds a lot easier than it looked, as a woman is not allowed to show that much skin yet private bathing is not a custom for the Lao people. She cleaned her self quickly and gracefully while maintaining her modesty then bowing out so we could use her water pump to get a move on it. 
It’s a poor country and this is no more evident then at the hospitals. Due to a momentary case of vertigo, Molly acquired a deep third degree burn while riding a motorbike in the party town of Vang Vieng. Her leg looked like seared ahi tuna. We went to the “hospital” in Vang Vieng in an attempt to figure out what you do with a burn like that. This hospital resembled a civil war med tent more than a hospital. I'm almost positive you can blame the idiot tourists who come to party (V.V. is famous for it's mushrooms and opium) for the chaotic state of this place. Dirty and disheveled and under staffed. No one spoke English and they bandaged Molly up without giving us any advice on what to do. Our next destination took us a beautiful town called Luang Prabang, the self proclaimed “most romantic city in SE Asia.” I’ve never been to the French Rivera but feel as though they would look similar. The burn got more painful while we were there and we decided to try out their hospital. The hospital was newly built and looked much nicer than the one in Vang Vieng, which I know isn’t saying much. But they had clean enough medical equipment that Molly, who has worked in hospitals, said “okay, we’ll try it out.” We were told to wait in a large exam room with a clean bed to sit on, oxygen tanks at the ready, x-ray scans on the wall and a chart of the human body next to it. Hell, it even had air con, magic words in Laos.
“I’ll burn you every morning just so we can come sit in here during the day,” I told Molly. I wandered outside to get a better look at the large hospital when a Lao woman stops me with her perfect English. “May I help you?”
“Yes. My friend has a burn she needs looked at in room 24.”
“No one is with you already?” she asks.
“No.”
“Okay.”
I walk back to the room and snap this photo of Molly waiting for the doc.
A minute later two women walk in. One is young with a youthful sterness painted on her face. She works on positioning Molly on the bed, which has a latex sheet fitted to it the color of dried blood.
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| Two days old and starting to ache |
The second woman is a bit older and looks us over. Her smile radiates a genuine joy.
“I don’t speak English,” she says. Her voice is upbeat and cheerful and I smile and giggle at the joke. She busies herself unlocking equipment from the cabinet. I smile at Molly, thinking this is going to work just fine.
Nurse 2 then asks me if I speak Lao in Lao. I shake my head then reply that I speak a bit of Thai in Thai. She gets excited and gives me a rapid burst of sounds. It takes her two tries before I realize she’s telling me she’ll translate the Lao from Nurse 1 into Thai so I can translate to Molly in English.
“We’re screwed,” I tell Molly.
“Can you go find a doctor who speaks English?” Molly asks them.
Silence.
They begin to examine Molly’s leg by taking the bandage off the burn which is painfully sticking to the burn. Molly sits up, moaning and begging the nurse to put some saline solution on the bandage to ease the process of pealing the gauze.
“Sleep, sleep,” Nurse 1 tells her, meaning "lie down, damnit."
Meanwhile, Nurse 2 is, I believe, asking me what happened and how long ago. I tell her through hand gestures that it was caused by a motorbike. I tell her it happened in Vang Vieng 3 days earlier. I have no idea what she is asking me next but Molly moans again and make to put her hand up to stop the pealing of gauze. Nurse 1 actually slaps her hand away and rips the whole gauze pad off in one pull. Molly falls back on the table, leg shaking.
I realize Nurse 2 is asking what meds Molly is on and I tell her none (we are both miming putting pills in our mouth.) I tell the nurse we clean the wound with betadine every night but I’m pretty sure what I actually said was “I open the wound how many minutes a night.” She seems to understand. She sits me down at the table to fill out the paper work. We come to the discussion of medication and she loses me. She take out her pad and writes something, scribbles it out then turns to a new page and writes, A-M-O…
“Oh great, amoxicillin,” I shout to Molly. “You’re saved. That will kill anything.” Nurse 2 gives me a relieved laugh. She tells me two pills twice a day, which I understand the third time she says it.
Molly is getting rewrapped when a man opens the window from the outside next to the table I’m sitting at. He pokes his smiling face in and both the nurses scream and laugh.
“Doctor speaks English!” she says. We all cheer as the doctor comes in and confirms, to my disbelief, everything I understood about my conversation with Nurse 2.
After he leaves I reach across the table and put my hands on Nurse 2’s upper arms in an almost hug that she returns, one of the best hugs I’ve ever received. She tells me I’m beautiful and I tell her she’s beautiful and Laos is beautiful and we thank them and leave. Molly tells me in the tuk tuk that I did well and I do feel great having had my first complete conversation in Thai, via Lao, English and hand gestures.
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| All these photos are Luang Prabang |
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| My reward for the hospital visit: first glass of wine since September and broad beans! |
