Lao People’s Democratic Republic

By Dominique le Roux

Slowly it dawned on me — I was being tailed on the runway of what was once one of the busiest airports in the world and one of it’s most secret places. I’d been photographing a family of ducks strutting across the airstrip (such an irresistible metaphor: flightless birds at an airfield with no planes). A Lao man in silky boxing shorts and white T seemed interested in what interested me, until I realised I wasn’t inspiring him to see his surroundings with new eyes or teaching him to find beauty in the mundane. No, he was tailing me because I wasn’t to be trusted, I was to be reported on.

I wasn’t supposed to be there. I’d snuck in to Long Chen a few hours earlier through deep mud and night forests with four motorcyclists. A bottle-blonde, short-haired chick in jeans and boots on a dirt bike with a camera sticks out in rural Laos.

Soon a younger man sidled across the runway to

“greet” me: “You should go,” he said. “Leave now.”

This is the story of Laos’s survival.

It’s a place of secrets and evasions, of steering away strangers, of more than the eye can see — a place where spirits drift off and shadows merge with mystery.

The Lao People’s Democratic Republic has been my home for six-and-a-half years. It’s a strip of land the size of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal combined, hemmed in on all sides: China to the north, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia and Thailand to the south, Myanmar to the west. It has the muggiest aspects of KwaZulu-Natal’ s climate with the Eastern Cape’s rural poverty.

It’s a place where people have survived through the centuries by shunning change. Few strangers appear via the unnavigable Mekong River or through the jungled mountains to the north. When the occasional stranger straggles through, they keep their head down and stay at a distance.

When the CIA’s Air America planes took off from that secret runway and tried to obliterate the Lao from the skies because they misunderstood the war in the nextdoor country they melted into the forest or moved into the mountains, building hospitals, homes and printing presses in caves.

The Lao people won the Secret War by waiting it out, quietly. For nine years, bombs fell. Equivalent to half a ton per man, woman and child. From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped more than 2-million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions — equal to a plane load of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day — making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history.

That’s the way they roll here: dissolving into obscurity. Social distancing? They’ve got this. I crave the South African hugs and handshakes, but the Lao “nop”: hands together with bowed heads, as if in prayer. The kids’ stony-faced stares do my head in. Poker faces all round.

There’s no physical contact in public, not even between a man and his wife. Every tuktuk taxi passenger breathes nervously when I get in, in case I don’t know that women mustn’t touch nor make eye contact with monks.

Lockdowns? Closed borders, enforced disappearances, censorship and curfews have eased over the past few years, but they’re still part of the DNA of this communist state. Is the new norm just a return to the old norm?

There have been changes since I’ve been here — there’s a cinema, some fledgling shopping centres, coffee shops on every corner defining the new urban cool. In this Covid crisis, the government has been proactive and transparent, despite the cynicism of expats. But I fear that rural Laos will return to hiding for safety and that new-fangled ideas of gender equality, vaccines, family planning and high-school education will be seen as just more foreign invaders, just like this strange and dangerous disease brought in by Europeans though China (all 19 confirmed cases here so far trace directly to Europe and the UK).

Now, if the government did allow people to travel to the next province, villagers wouldn’t let them in. They have scarecrows on the roadsides, and woven-grass messages to bad spirits: “Keep out. Your type isn’t welcome.”

I keep thinking about that strip of tarmac, which sent and received bombs and opium, rice and mercenaries, loyalty and heroism, and death in bizarre barters, strange even four decades later, after the declassification of documents and published memoirs.

That tarmac is deserted now, save for the ducks, but the legacy of the war remains. It came from the air but is still in the soil, waiting for the industrious and the playful. Rusted unexploded ordnance is still killing rural people: farmers ploughing their rice paddies, children playing with scrap.

Long after this Covid “war” is over, and China and

Europe have survived their economic depressions, the lethal virus “bombs” will still be killing villagers: women will die in childbirth because Covid prevented distribution of contraceptives, kids who didn’t get vaccinated will get ill, malaria tests won’t get made because labs were churning out Covid-19 kits.

And yet, somehow, this quiet heart of Southeast-Asia has evaded the global tragedy thus far. It’s part of the mystery in this land of secrets.