Monday started “early,” well, I guess no earlier than surgery at the hospital all week, but earlier than usual for Vientiane. Waking up 6:30, Sophia were on our bikes by 7:30 and to the conference by ten to 8.
Day 1 was the most hectic. I was working the victims’ assistance workshop, and CMC volunteers were there mainly as logistical support. CMC is one of the biggest organizations committed to ending the development, manufacture, and stockpiling of clusterbombs, and thereby one of the leading organizations at the conference, although it was officially designated as a UNDP event.
During my week away, I had been emailed by Manuele, who told me to ask for him when I showed up. He wasn’t there at 8. He was stuck in infamous Vientiane traffic. Whenever there is an event in town, police swarm the streets to serve as impromptu traffic lights, where they are lacking. (Through the middle of town, there are only about 7 or 8 traffic lights.) Thing is, they also decide to work at the traffic lights, and I’m convinced that all they do is make traffic slower, because the traffic lights in town work perfectly fine. However, once in a while, they’ll clear the road for an ambassador convoy, which is fun to watch.
Anyway, before Manuele showed up, I was asked if I was the IT guy, I wasn’t, but I switched Firoz’s laptop’s VGA connection in the projector from “Output” to “Input 1.” Hard work. Next, I went outside and Sophia gave me my nametag… her daylong task. Manuele showed up and I was put to work with a woman from HI (Handicap International), printing, making copies, and highlighting in freshly printed packets. However, no one could connect their computer to the printer. Despite it being delivered the day before, no one had installed the printer on their computers (about 7 people). To complicate the issue, the printer was so new that its plug-and-play driver wasn’t in the windows list, so it couldn’t be easily installed in anyone’s computer. After about 40 minutes of struggle with that, we found the printer box and inside, of course, the driver disk. And printing was a go.
Amidst all of this excitement, Sophia was sitting calmly at her desk, infrequently digging through the piles of perfectly alphabetically arranged nametag badges to hand to conference participants, enjoying free coffee, biscotti, and the friendly company of a number of the Lao volunteers around our age(s).
As the day wrapped up, we were reminded of the art exhibition and book signing that evening at the Lao Cultural Hall, where we would partake in enjoying paintings with complimentary box wine. I did come to Laos for the Franzia, so after a month and a half plus, I am finally satiated. We also spent some time that evening talking to a young American woman who was soon to become our new best friend (555).
Day 2 started off even more excitingly. This time, we showed up at 11 am and were told we had to rearrange a room that was set up with tables in a U by making a narrower U by removing a table in the bottom section and adding two discontinuous tables at the head for a panel. This may sound simple, and is in theory; however, the execution is much more complicated, because all of the tables are already decorated with drinking glasses with stems, water bottles, pads of paper and pens, and flower arrangements. Then, all of the tables were connected by felt covers and a silky, folded drapery which ran the length of each table, continuously inside and outside of the entire U, and about every 10 inches pinned the drape into the felt table cover with a glamorous one-inch fold. I don’t know much about this, or flower arrangement, but I did know that two people was not enough to accomplish this task of removing one table and bringing 8 tables toward the center at the same time. Check that, they wanted both sides brought in, which means we would have to remove one table and then move every other one closer to the center. I was much more positive about this endeavor at the outset than retrospectively, mostly because I didn’t really understand every little thing that needed to be done, undone, and redone. We begged for hotel staff to come and assist us with the rearrangement, but they were elusive, as we found they always are. After about 30 minutes of walking back and forth, inching table after table toward the center of the room, without ruining the décor, hotel staff finally showed up in time to redo some of our undoings which permitted the rearrangement, and by 12:00 we had a brand new room, which, as it filled up over the next hour became overcrowded despite our work at creating more room. Snake-Five!
Sophia returned to the ticketbooth operation she’s worked at yesterday and I hopped on my still-functioning bicycle to get some copies of a booklet made in town.
I know this is completely uninteresting, but that’s essentially the gist of our work during the week at the conference. Now a little about our time outside of the conference this week:
So on Wednesday, we stayed in downtown after work, took pictures of the new statue on the Mekong, and then went and did bike tricks on the promenade, above the river, and got plenty of pictures of that. Basically, we discovered that day how awesome we are 1) at life, 2) at bike tricks and 3) how awesome bikes are… this is the sad part.
We met up with our new American friend, and went bowling. We hopped into the back of a tuk tuk with a bunch of Australians. Correction, our bikes hopped into the back of a tuk tuk and Sophia and I stood on the back, holding onto the roof and snapped a few myspace pics. It was a nice shot of fresh air straight to the dome. Extremely dangerous and refreshing. On the way home from bowling, she told me that she couldn’t ride a bike, at 19 years, I didn’t believe this was a real thing, but I guess I’ve got friends who still don’t know how to swim… oh well. So, I prompted her and it came out that she could in fact ride a bike; only she could only ride straight. Being from San Francisco, she was definitely lying, so, I eventually convinced her to prove her inadequacies. Little did I know, this would be the end of many things, both good and bad.
She rode about ten meters before a sudden turn left and BAM, she was on the ground, and the bike on top of her. In my slightly inebriated state, this was one of the funniest things I thought I’d ever seen. In retrospect, it is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. She was up quickly, and physically uninjured, but I can’t imagine her heart didn’t ache. BURN. I picked up the bike and hopped on, but despite my peddling the bike wouldn’t move. I hopped off and checked it out. It took little examination before it was abundantly apparent that my back tire was no more.
Now, usually when a bike tire goes flat, it just takes a little pump-up. If that doesn’t work, you patch up the tube, refit it to the wheel and pump it up. Good to go. If that doesn’t work, you buy a new tube. What I saw that night I didn’t know was within the realm of possibility. The tire was literally shred to pieces, with tube avulsing here and there, sticking into the brake pads, so the wheel couldn’t turn. This was the epitome of a CLUSTERFUCK. Excuse my French. Go back to Paris. Anyway, my lovely, over-endeared bike was essentially no more, with a total of about 7 days left in Vientiane, I was not going to repair it. Anyway, without an apology our “friend” blamed the accident on my bike. I put the triangle over my shoulders and walked her back to her hotel. I found a tuk-tuk and headed home. That was the end of my bicycle, and the end of a very short-lived friendship. New rule: No American friends in SEA.
The rest of the week went well, and Friday night concluded with a volunteer party, with free food and drink, me giving my email to one of our volunteer friends and us drinking more beer than we expected due to excessive cheersing, a strongsuit of the Lao, and as I had learned the week before, also the Vietnamese (who cheers with vodka shots, not beer). Here you say sok di which I think translates indirectly to “good luck.” I also took about eighty pictures with different groups of new friends, a good portion of which were couples shots with women. I felt loved.
I also had a nice conversation with Mr. Benjamin McCabe, CMC’s intern, who happens to be the same age as me, and filling his post-graduate time with more regularly productive work. He also happens to be Sophia’s new life love. Hope you’re well, Ben.
Saturday we woke up early to catch our 11.5 hour bus to Luang Prabang City, for the first week-long trip.
Links for Cluster Munitions:http://www.stopclustermunitions.org/
http://www.flickr.com/people/clustermunitioncoalition/
http://www.clusterconvention.org/index.php
http://www.clusterconvention.org/1msp/ THIS ONE'S ABOUT THE CONFERENCE!!!
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