Thanva recovers from malnutrition

Thanva plays with a fan at Thongkang Health Centre, while his mother Bouanang looks on
© UNICEF China/2024/Andrew Brown

How UNICEF and China are supporting malnourished children in Laos

It’s a hot morning towards the end of the dry season in Nan District, Laos, when Bouanang brings her son Thanva to Thongkang Health Centre for a check-up. Small trucks called tok-toks drive past, with people or farm produce in the back. The sound of cockerels crowing is interspersed with the noise of chainsaws and there is a faint tang of smoke in the air. Further down the road, a farmer is burning a field in preparation for planting casava, ahead of the expected rainy season. There should be an impressive view across the valley to the hills opposite, but the mountains are wreathed in smog due to slash-and-burn agriculture, and the far ridge is a faintly sketched outline against an unnaturally grey sky.

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Vandy is treated for malnutrition

Meena comforts her son Vansy, 6 months, at a community outreach in Laos
© UNICEF China/2024/Andrew Brown

How UNICEF and China are supporting malnourished children in Laos

Meena is a 20-year-old first time mother from Houay On village in Nan District, Laos. Small and just past her teenage years, she still looks like a child herself. With her six-month old baby Vandy on her back, she walks up the hill to the village hall, where a community outreach from nearby Thongkang Health Centre is taking place. It’s around 9am but already well over 30°C. This is the end of the dry season, and the weather is brutally hot. The hills on the horizon are also much fainter than they should be: slash and burn agriculture has created a constant haze of smog that feels out of place in this rural area.

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Photos: morning alms giving, Laos

A line of monks pass locals seated outside the entrance to Wat Nong Sikhounmuang temple. Each monk gets a handful of rice in their bowl.
© Andrew Brown/2024/Laos

On my last morning in Laos, my alarm went off at 5am. I’d spent the last week visiting UNICEF nutrition projects in rural Nan District during the hottest month of the year, and I was very tempted to hit snooze and go back to sleep. However, I also knew that if I did, I’d beat myself up about it later. So I dragged myself out of bed, grabbed my camera, and headed out to the front of my hotel, where I got a tuk-tuk through the gradually lightening streets to the main temple district of Luang Prabang. My objective was to see Tak Bat, or the morning alms giving ceremony, which I’d first witnessed a decade before, during my first time living and working in Asia.

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Coping with tragedy: the legacy of war in Laos

Peter Kim, a young bomb survivor, at the COPE centre
© UNICEF/Laos 2012/Andy Brown

Peter Kim is a victim of the Vietnam War. But he’s not a Vietnamese or American veteran; he’s a 20-year-old Lao youth living in Vientiane. Four years ago he lost both his hands and eyesight to one of the millions of unexploded bombs that still litter the Laos countryside almost four decades after the war ended.

Peter Kim grew up in a small rural village in Viangchan province, where his father grew rice and kept cows and buffalos. “On my sixteenth birthday, I went to school for an exam,” he told me. “I came home with my friend. On the way back, my friend saw something on the ground. He picked it up to show me. I tried to open it and that’s when it exploded. It happened very fast. Afterwards I couldn’t see or hear anything.”

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Luang Prabang: monks procession at dawn

Joyce at Wat Xieng Thong. Having lost my camera memory card in January,
all these photos were taken on a return trip in October
© Andy Brown/Laos 2012

Luang Prabang is like a city adrift in space and time. The old royal capital of pre-communist Laos, it now feels like a cross between a suburb of Paris and a rural Thai village. It occupies a peninsular between the Mekong (see part two of this blog) and Nam Khan river, which takes a hairpin bend off the larger waterway. The main roads are lined with French restaurants, cafes and bakeries in colonial era buildings: brightly painted villas with wooden shutters on the windows. French tourists cycle lazily around between the cafes and sights, conversing in Gallic tones.

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Laos: slow boat down the Mekong

Coming from Thailand (see part one of this blog), Laos is both familiar and subtly different. The people are from the same ethnic group, they have a similar language and the same religion. The streets of a Lao town look very similar to those of a small rural Thai town. They have the same wooden stilt houses with the same spirit shrines in the corner. The shops accept Thai currency and locals sit in cafes watching melodramatic Thai soap operas on TV.

However, there are small but significant differences. Where in Thailand you see yellow royal flags hanging next to the national flag, in Laos their place is taken by red flags bearing the communist hammer and sickle. And where Thailand hustles and bustles, Laos moves at a slow, sleepy pace. Here, roads are often unpaved and bicycles and motorbikes are the main modes of transport. “Thai people view Laos as a backwards province of Thailand,” I was told in Bangkok, and while it’s true that the economic benefits of development were absent, so too were their darker side effects, like pollution, over-population and prostitution. It was in many ways a refreshing change.

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