Work

Bustle bustle. That's what my days are like here. I've discovered that communist governments have lots of red tape. Lots. That's a newsflash, now isn't it? Who knew? Anyway. Trying to operate legitimately in cooperation with aid agencies could be a quite promising source of material, but it's also a pain in the ass.

I ought to see if I can make a deal with this internet joint, since I spend so many hours in here. See if I can geta price break. I mean, come on, it's 6000 kip per hour(that's 60 cents). You'd think that they could cut their best customer some slack. Oh wait- the little rugrats playing video games are actually the best customers.

I was chatting yesterday with a man who grew up here who lit up when I told him I was from Boston. He said he had an English teacher once for one term in 1964 who he said must rank as one of the best of the best teachers ever. This teacher had eighty students in his class, and only one failed. Impressive, no?

That one semester of English provided Mr. D with a solid enough foundation to continue on to learn English as well as he knows it now, which is quite. I think we sat talking for over three hours yesterday. This teacher's name was Lou Setti. He was 32 in 1964, so that would make him 74 years old now. If I can find that guy, he might have a few stories for me, having been a non-spy American working in Saravane in 1964.

Saravane is one of the southern provinces on what was once know as the Ho Chi Minh trail. Heavily bombed, of course. Not quite as heavily as Attapeu, which borders on both Cambodia and Vietnam(lucky them!), but still fairly thoroughly. There were a stack of spies running around in that area at the time, mostly military advisers recruiting the local ethnic minorities, mostly the Ka in that area, to fight against the Pathet Lao/NVA alliance.

Tidbits: The Vietnamese are still paying back their arms loans to the Soviets and the Chinese. The guns weren't free, even in the name of fighting off the capitalist imperialist swine.

Mr. D (the chap I was talking to) was a teacher of engineering, electronics, and technical measurement for seventeen years here following the war. He quit when he finally lost his faith in the government here, that the socialist ideals had become a complete farce. He really believed in socialism for a little while after the war was over, but when Kaysone Phomvihane retired, it all went the way of a tin-pot autocracy.

He's an ardent fan of the French educational system under which he came up, finding it superior to what he calls the more modular American system. He said the French have a more linear sequential system of education, where you have to learn things in more of an order, and each thing builds on what has come before. I told him I didn't agree comletely, that sum of information that is out there is too great to approach it in that Renaissance-man fashion, that you have to break things down somewhat into units or else you'll get lost, but in any case. I do agree that interrelating subjects and creating a solid foundation seem to be a better way to do it than the more Cartesian fashion that we're familiar with from the traditional US education. Incidentally, he has nothing but respect for the Vietnamese educational system. HE said that after the wars, the Lao threw out the baby with the bathwater, but the Vietnamese kept the best of the French colonial educational traditions.

I like Vietnamese sandwiches. They taste good.

Back to work.