Vang Vieng, Laos - June 13, 2008

I milked a goat today. Several, in fact. It was kind of interesting.
While I’ve been editing in Vientiane the past couple of days, Evy’s been staying at this organic farm just outside the backpacker town of Vang Vieng. I joined her here yesterday, and due to my delay will only be spending a day here compared with her week. I got up early to make the most of it, and spent from 7am to 8am attempting to squirt goat milk into a bucket. An interesting experience… As Evy’d said, you kinda wish you could poke more holes into the large yam-like object that is the goat’s udder. The one little pinprick at the end doesn’t do much. But then who’s in a rush, anyway?!
The milking of the goats was my second volunteer experience at the farm (we’d picked it because it offered various volunteer opportunities, and were glad we had).
The evening before, when I’d arrived, I was brought directly to the youth community building (built with assistance from a Korean NGO) that was hosting the daily evening English class for local youth. Every evening, these kids (who I later found out spend the majority of their days cutting grass in fields with a sickle) come in to attempt to learn English. A textbook donated by some organization is the general lesson plan followed by whatever volunteers are currently staying at the farm. Yesterday it involved a dialogue about the Internet. ‘Daniel’ and ‘Andrea’ are talking about how great this new thing called the Internet is (I would guess the text was written 10 or more years ago). ‘Daniel’, it turns out, only uses his computer for letters & reports, and is impressed that ‘Andrea’ is able to look up stuff from sports & cars through UFO’s…
It’s a very brief piece of dialogue, and the class is then meant to go through the unfamiliar words, discuss, and eventually re-read out loud for practice. Now this would be all well and good if this ESL class were in say, Canada. But try explaining the internet to someone who uses a sickle all day to cut grass. Or, say, the difference between a fax and an email to someone who’s never seen, let alone used, either. And UFO’S?! UFO’s was a whole other story. I tried to draw a spaceship with aliens and suddenly realized how engrained certain connotations are in our culture, and how they’re totally non-existent in other cultures. A little dude with two bobble-eyes next to a spaceship tends to mean alien to someone from a western culture. Here, they looked at me like I was crazy. My eventual way of describing a UFO was to draw the world with stars, the sun, & planets around it, and then little question marks here and there. Unexplained Foreign Objects. Thank god for Pictionary.