You can understand my disgust, then, when I entered a Laos village after a five-hour trek to find the place crawling with diaper poopers. Actually, they don’t use diapers in the villages and I still don’t understand how that works. But kids were everywhere. Thankfully, Asian kids are much more well-behaved than Western kids. Especially village kids, who don’t have advertising and don’t know what it means to really want a Barbie or Elmo. In fact, they looked at us suspiciously, as if they knew our shady morals and capitalism could transform their small sanctuary overnight.
I didn’t know what to do in the face of such child skepticism. Luckily, I was with a group well versed in kids. Three teachers in a group of eight. We were three from England, a chick from St. Louis, another from New Mexico, me from the Chi, and two Lao guides, Noi and Pon Sok. We’d met that morning at the governmental tourism office in Northern Laos near the Chinese border where they set up tours to remote villages. They bring only a small number of tourists at a time, and they rotate villages so that none become centered around the tourist industry. This is great for us to see the real Laos, but it also must freak out the villagers when they see some random ’round eyes’ popping in toting backpacks more expensive than the contents of their huts.
Well, our things might be more expensive, but theirs more valuable, the land especially. Even the forest leading up to their hidden town was magical. Green moss covered all the trees, ferns the size of copy machines reached out to tickle our shins, and a bubbling brook followed us along.
Before sunset, we arrived in the village to the dismay of the many many children. A drunk man approached us. Through hand signals, we figured he wanted to give us a tour, so we followed the fellow to the “bar,” which was a pair of benches under someone’s hut. We tried their homemade potion, which gave me an instant buzz. With kids and drunk men in proliferation, we realized there are two past times in the village: drinkin’ moonshine & makin’ babies.
Each family lives in a one-room hut with at least five or six kids. Or sometimes twelve. Nobody has a bedroom or privacy. The shower is the river. The village is a mere two blocks long. We couldn’t quite grasp when and where all these children were created. But there they were, staring at us interlopers with disdain.
Thankfully, Anne, the English girl in the group, has such a great kid rapport that she knew exactly how to make them cave. After just a half hour, we were playing a village-wide game of tag. It lasted a good hour, until we realized it had become a game of grab-the-tourists-tits. Are they touching your boobs? Yes! They’re touching yours too? I think we should stop. But we couldn’t stop. The kids suddenly loved us and followed our every movement. We got them to play Simon Says and the Hokey Pokey. I think we even taught them the twist. Their scowls were washed down the river, replaced with giggles and awe. I guess kids aren’t that bad.
The next morning, our new throng of friends showed up after breakfast to bid us goodbye and get one last titty grab. We took off on another eight-hour winding trek through forests that must have been the inspiration for every fairy tale in existence. We toiled up curvy mountains and through fields of rubber trees, tasting jungle treats and breathing oxygen directly from the trees. When it was all over, I loved Laos even more. Shit! I might have to move here
You’re it!
Even the pigs have a million kids. I bet they drink moonshine too.