As those of you who are veterans at making sticky rice know, after steaming the rice and "kneading" it the rice is put into various size wicker containers to keep it warm. On this cold morning the kitten you see here had the "best seat" in the house!
I was going through some of my books on Laos yesterday and came across one of my favorite children’s books, Rice is Life by Rita Golden Gelman. Although this book is set in Indonesia, on the island of Bali, the reality of the life cycle of rice that it portrays is universal to all Asian countries. And what Gelman captures so eloquently is the rhythm of the rice growing season from a multitude of perspectives. As a school librarian who has worked at all grade levels, I know the value of using “picture books” with all students. Often times a “picture book” is the perfect anticipatory set (ala Madeline Hunter’s lesson plan) to awaken students’ interest and curiosity. Rice is Life is such a picture book. What I’ve done is to scan in all the pages and put them into a Keynote (Apple’s presentation program) presentation. In the younger grades the kids don’t mind gathering round you in a circle and it’s powerful to share a book like Rice is Life in this way. But for older students, if you have access to an LCD projector and can connect your computer and read the book while the students look at the projected pages, it will hold their attention.
I love to read this book out loud and I feel like I’m right there in the “sawah, or wet rice field.” Unfortunately this book is out of print, but I’m sure it’s available in libraries, and I encourage anyone interested in the role of rice in Asia, to check out this book.
And here are a few selections from some of the pages in the book...
“In the wet and fertile sawah,
Where the mud is warm and deep,
Small and slippery eels live.
They swim.
They eat.
They sleep.
The egrets come to get them,
Picking,
Poking for their prey,
While the slippery little eels
Try to quickly
Slip away
Through the sawah,
Where the mud is warm and deep.
...”As the sun sets in the sawah,
And the sky is purple-red,
A child and his mother watch
While bats fly overhead.
Bats are looking for mosquitoes.
They are eating as they fly.
Flapping,
Darting,
Swooping,
Moving pictures in the sky,
Above the sawah,
When the sky
Is purple-red.
...In the darkness of the sawah
With a yellow moon above
Comes a serenade of frogs
Singing out their songs of love.
Calling to each other.
Croaking,
Croaking all night long.
While a gentle sawah breeze
Filters softly through their song,
In the sawah
With a yellow moon above.
...In the quiet of the sawah
Near the frangipani tree,
Some very special offerings
Are made to Dewi Sri.
“Thank you,” says the farmer.
“Thank you,” says his wife.
Then they lift their hands in prayer,
For they know that rice is life.”
If you’ve ever experienced rice growing in Asia, this has to bring back powerful memories. To read the complete text you’ll have to check out your local library system or buy a used copy on the Internet.
"Provincial teachers wait to be paid"
I’m including an article from the Vientiane Times below on teachers in two southern provinces not getting paid. By reading this article you will see how desperate the state of education is in Laos. Not only do teachers often not get paid for months at a time, but the average salary is below $30 a month! Compare that to a Lao young woman who can get a job at a foreign bakery in the capitol of Vientiane and earn up to $70 a month within a couple of years. Something is wrong here...
The first photo I’ve used to accompany this blog is taken in the small rural village of Ban Na Ang in June 2006. Here you see the lead teacher/principal for the elementary school planting rice with his wife in a small patch of land nestled against one of the limestone karsts surrounding the valley. Here he is the lead teacher of a staff of six teachers and only gets paid about $25 a month! Not enough to feed his family and so he has to resort to planting rice where he can.
Here is another photo I took of him this last December when my wife and I donated about 150 children’s books published in Lao/English by Big Brother Mouse to students in the school. I also took some video of him planting the rice I will post to this blog in a YouTube video within a couple of days.
An even more “in your face” example of how desperate it is for teachers in Laos is when my wife’s cousin, who is a teacher, about a half an hour from this village, was driving his motorcycle back home from school and came upon a dead dog that had been hit by some previous vehicle. In the US we drive by road kill like this, avert our eyes and hold our nose. What did he do? He stopped and picked up the dog and put it on the back of his motorcycle. What he saw was money, as some people like eating dog and he knew of a shop that would pay cash (kip) for this carcass.
Unfortunately when he arrived at the shop, who was there at the same time? The owner of the dog who then accused him of killing the dog to sell and the police were called and he was hauled off to jail. It took about three days and about a $10 payment/bribe by his parents to free him from jail. And yes, this is a true story, which I think graphically describes the desperate lives of teachers in Laos.
Here’s the article that was in the Vientiane Times.
“Education personnel and teachers in Xekong and Saravan provinces have not received their salaries for the fourth quarter of 2006, or for the first quarter of this year.
This was revealed in a report on the current academic year to date, summarised last week by the Deputy Education Minister, Mr Lytou Bouaphao, at a Ministry of Education meeting from February 27 to March 2 in Vientiane, for senior education officials nationwide.
The report pointed out that in the academic year 2006-2007, the ministry expected to receive about 52.3 billion kip, approved by the National Assembly. This included 44.3 billion for administrative costs, and 8 billion kip for school buildings, textbooks and other educational supplies.
In the first quarter of this year, the National Assembly approved a further 15.8 billion kip for both administration and educational costs incurred by the ministry. So far, the ministry has received about 10.8 billion kip, in January.
The ministry owes almost 2.4 billion kip in back pay for teachers in Xekong and Saravan provinces. A total of 367 million kip is due to Xekong province and more than 2 billion kip to Saravan province, the report noted.
However, an official from Xekong Education Department, Mr Phouvin Souvany, said yesterday the department had now received the money to pay salaries for every month last year, but had yet to receive funds for salaries this year.
He said the department, along with those in other provinces, usually only received money at three-monthly intervals, as the process of distributing funds from the central to the local level was slow, especially in Dakcheung district.
Mr Phouvin said that while the ministry disburses money for salaries every month, the accounting section in each province or district was slow to distribute it to individual schools. Sometimes teachers did not receive their salaries until the following quarter, if a district was located far from the main town.
He thought that teachers and administrative personnel would receive their overdue salaries in the next couple of months. This would mean that they should receive six months' salary all at one time.”
(March 12, 2007)
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