East of Croydon

by Sue Perkins

  It will not surprise you to learn that I am not good in formal settings – specifically, anywhere there’s a PowerPoint presentation, a plethora of biros or a whiteboard. In fact, I’m pretty dreadful in any organized situation where the main driver is ‘work’. There is something about the expectation of application that makes me panic. Certain business-oriented trigger words, when spoken in a conference room or meeting space, will make me so anxious I’ve been known to make my excuses and run. Here’s a brief run-down:

  – Agenda – literally translated from the Latin as ‘the things that must be done’. Things. Plural. There is more than one thing I need to do. I might be here for days. I feel claustrophobic. Get out. Now

  – Brand Strategy – I don’t care. I just want to make jokes. Now look what you’ve made me do – I am drawing a cock and balls on a napkin.

  – Let’s schedule a catch-up – So you want to repeat what we’ve just discussed in one week’s time? My life is slowly ebbing away. I was young once.

  – Feedback – You said ‘feedback’. You mean ‘criticism’. Let’s never speak again.

  – Get-together – A ‘get-together’? You bastard. This is a meeting in disguise. You think I don’t know that? You are cloaking a meeting in a social setting. This is like a Matryoshka doll of work. Well, I’ve rumbled you, pal.

  – Inventory – See List.

  – Itinerary – See Agenda.

  – List – Right, first up, show it to me. I need to see it. I need to see how long it is. If I don’t know how long it is then how will I know it is nearly at its end? I am sweating. I am actually sweating. SHOW IT TO ME. SHOW ME THE LIST.

  – Mission statement – Tone it down, will you? This isn’t Cape Canaveral. Mission statement – honestly. Anyway, why do we need a plan? Plans are death. Where’s the room for improvisation or manoeuvre? Live a little. OK. You still want to run with ‘mission statement’? Fine, mine is to be in front of a bag of crisps within the next fifteen minutes.

  – Recap – See Catch-up. I have already moved on and I can no longer remember your name.

  The meeting room was long and thin. You could smell the torpor in the air. The whole place looked like it had been built as an internment camp for middle managers – prefab white walls, endless projector-screens and wires. You could hear the electricity pulsing through the walls. The whole set-up was like an ennui installation as realized by a Turner Prize-winning artist.

  The space was dominated by a vast and heavily lacquered table surrounded by a jumble of black office chairs. More than a dozen cameramen stood around me, filming, as I took my seat opposite Mr Virapong. As soon as his gentlemanly buttocks hit the cushion, he launched, full throttle, into the presentation – accompanied by a dizzying selection of slides.

  I tried to calm myself. I focused on my breathing. Just be in the moment, I thought. Be mindful, be mindful.

  It turned out that the office chairs were not only comfy but swivelled – and I realized that if I could angle mine towards the projector screen, rest my chin on my hands with my fingers covering my left eye, then no one would notice if I drifted off a little.

  I descended into a comfortable trance state. Technical drawings flashed in front of my eyes: radial gates, spillways, navigation locks, sand flushing. I seem to remember an awful lot about sand flushing.

  Halfway into the presentation, I was pulled from the depths of an alpha wave by a single, ridiculous sentence: ‘Blah, blah, blah, blah FISH LIFT,’ said Mr Virapong.

  I was suddenly awake, my curiosity piqued.

  ME: Sorry, Mr Virapong. Did you say ‘fish lift’?

  MR V: Yes!

  He waved his arms in the air emphatically.

  MR V: The doors open, the fish come in, the lift takes them up and then releases them!

  ME: But who will operate the buttons?

  I thought, but didn’t say. I was obviously still half asleep.

  This is insane. I am in Laos, in the middle of nowhere, in a massive conference suite with a senior member of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party, telling me they are spending billions building a lift. For fish. I felt like I was in an aquatic episode of Are You Being Served? ‘Ground floor, pangasius, striped barb and pa pao luang, perch and anabantidae, catfish and khop. Going up!’

  The meeting ended as abruptly as it had begun. The film crew and government personnel got up and headed outside, and I duly followed. A line of freshly waxed cars stood idling by the front doors, waiting to take us to our next location. After a few minutes’ drive, we arrived at the entrance to the site. I donned a hard hat, ear defenders and a pair of acrylic goggles, and approached.

  Nothing had prepared me for the scale of the thing. It was as if Nature had all but given up. Below me, I could see the river, stemmed by a gargantuan concrete platform, its banks stripped of their customary green to reveal mountains of exposed scree. Nine thousand people worked on this site round the clock, day in, day out. The air was thick with dust as drills akin to those from Journey to the Centre of the Earth bored endless holes into the ground. I was simultaneously amazed at the industry, the technology and drive, and dismayed by the utter destruction of the environment around me.

  MR V: Incredible, isn’t it?

  He was shouting to be heard over the incessant grinding and whirring.

  I don’t think I said anything in reply. I was still struggling to take in the enormity of the scene.

  MR V: Go, go wherever you want. You can go on your own!

  ME: On my own? Really?

  If I sounded somewhat suspicious, it was only because we had become used to the legion of government officials following us around.

  MR V: Yes! Of course! Wherever you want! Just go!

  It turns out that when Mr Virapong said,

  MR V: You can go on your own!

  What he really meant was:

  MR V: You can go on your own, as long as you are OK with being followed by a fleet of ten white jeeps brimful of Communist Party lackeys tracking your every move.

  We arrived at one of the resettlement villages, Ban Talong, and parked up. The ten jeeps parked behind us in single file and, as we got out, I saw ten doors open in perfect synchronicity in my rear-view mirror. If this was being left alone, then I sure as hell didn’t want to experience what it was like to be accompanied.

  As I walked into the village, a crowd was already forming. I approached what I assumed was one of the villagers and said hello. After some to-ing and fro-ing, it transpired he wasn’t a villager at all but a property developer. I moved on and greeted the man next to him – who also turned out to be a property developer. I introduced myself to a third man – who didn’t say much, but who, thankfully, appeared to be entirely unconnected with the construction of the new settlement. Finally, a genuine resident of Ban Talong. We sat down for a chat, just me, the contributor and a dozen observers.

  After exchanging a few pleasantries, it turned out he wasn’t a villager either, but a member of the government – in fact, out of the eight people seated in front of me, all but one was an official of one kind or another. Three henchmen were writing in notebooks; the others were whispering advice and key buzz-phrases down the line. The extraordinary thing was how brazen it all was – they simply didn’t care that we could see how obvious the coercion was.

  ME: Is there anyone from the village actually here? Anyone who lives in Ban Talong? Is there a representative of this community at this table? Or anywhere?

  There was a lot of huffing and puffing and some frantic scribbling in the notebook.

  Finally, one of the men opposite me lifted his hand.

  ME: You’re a villager here?

  The man nodded. The other men nodded. It was hard not to feel a little intimidated, but I carried on. The building company had requested that they provide the translator, rather than us using our own. This would, of course, save any embarrassment should the villager say something that wasn’t appropriate for translation – or should the response need
to be finessed into something that was more ‘on message’. To this day, I have no idea whether what the guy said and what the translator said he had said were one and the same thing.

  I asked him about his new life, and what it felt like for his community to be resettled away from the water’s edge where they had lived for centuries. As soon as he heard each question in his mother tongue, his eyes flickered around the table. Sometimes he didn’t bother to reply at all. Instead the answer was simply provided for him by one of the developers or government officials crowding around me. Once again, everything was being videoed, and a rather old-school Party member with a Fu Manchu beard was making notes on a clipboard. I felt bad. I knew this was an uncomfortable experience for the villager, and I didn’t want to stress him out, but at the same time, there were questions that needed to be asked. Matt did a great job of getting shots of the collusion around me – and, to be honest, those images say more about the duress we were under than any amount of my fruitless probing could.

  Down by the water, you could still see the traditional shacks, raised on timber stilts with steep thatched roofs and rickety verandas. But there was no sign of life, no thin plumes of smoke emerging from the kitchen stoves, no screams of children as they dived in and out of the river, no snort and snuffle of pigs or cluck of chickens. The ancient village of Ban Talong, as was, lay empty. Abandoned.

  Up on the bank, however, and winding up into the hills, you could see a Brave New World. Freshly built concrete houses, in perfect rows, with shiny gravel pathways, and, most exciting of all …

  Electricity.

  This was what it was all for, this degradation of the landscape, this mass construction, this exodus from the old ways of water and land towards tarmacked roads, plastic bags and retail opportunities, all for this.

  Power. It was finally this community’s turn to have power – and all at the touch of a button.

  I was taken to one of the new houses, surrounded by the gabble of minders and the flash of cameras. There was no denying it was a cut above any village hut I’d seen before. The ceramic floor was cool and clean, the wooden beams straight and strong. We stood, not on loose boards suspended above the earth but on concrete foundations, sturdy and enduring, set well away from rising water and flood risk.

  I felt joy and sadness in equal measure. Joy for the villagers, because their lives were about to get easier. After all, who wouldn’t want to flick a switch and have light? Or be able to flush a toilet or have your clothes washed for you by an automated steel drum?

  But I felt sad for us, for our ‘developed’ world that keeps on developing and developing and doesn’t know when to stop, that cannot help but expand without end. A world defined by acquisition and insatiable need, where our houses are filled with baubles, and where we pay for out-of-town storage outlets to contain the overspill of our excess possessions. But where, in our endless plans for expansion, do we consider or pursue the intangible? Happiness? Community? Mutual respect? Can we ever reclaim a time when we weren’t fearful and insular?

  We’re all in this together. Those of us fortunate enough to live in a place where we want for little have a responsibility to support those in need. But we also have another responsibility, one that we have never embraced. We need to finesse the end goal of it all. We need to work out what we’re chasing, and what really matters. We need to know when enough is enough.

  We need to know when to stop.

  The main switch was flicked. There was a fizz as the long fluorescents hanging from the beams sparked to life. There was the sudden hum of fridge and television as the room filled with white noise.

  The government officials applauded. So did the developers. So did the villager. Then they looked at me, and I applauded too.

  17. It’s Oh So Quiet

  The dam might have come as a shock, but there was no question that something in Laos needed to change. Laos is the poorest of all the Mekong nations and education is simply out of reach for large sections of the population. Approximately one in every four Lao kids is illiterate, putting them at a distinct disadvantage to their rapidly developing neighbours.

  Where the state is struggling, independent non-government organizations intervene to take up the slack. Community Learning International is a small NGO set up by an American called Bob but run by locals, with a mission to provide educational outreach to the more remote and rural areas of the country. One of its projects is a book boat, which visits more than a hundred riverside villages. Think floating library and you’re almost there.

  This library, however, turned out to bear none of the traditional beige, municipal trimmings of its Western cousins. This library was a belting baby blue, with vast cartoon murals on each side in gaudy yellows and reds. Inside, racks of shiny, colourful paperbacks lined the walls, all with slightly forbidding titles, such as:

  – New, Improved Buffalo!

  – The Dead Tiger Who Killed A Princess

  – The Frog Who Unbuttons His Shirt

  And my own personal favourite, the uplifting kids’ classic:

  – Life in Hell

  This waterborne learning centre also shunned conventional rules on sound pollution. There were none of your twin-set, horn-rimmed librarians scuttling about, frantically ssshing. In fact, it turned out to be the noisiest library ever. From the moment I got on, it was basically a non-stop party with the odd paperback thrown in.

  One of the volunteers had been a famous cabaret singer in Thailand in her youth, so we were treated to some solid-gold Bangkok folk classics, all delivered in a shrill soprano that could have shattered glass and put the local dog population on high alert. After a two-hour uninterrupted set of her greatest hits (I had started to wonder just how many more she had in the tank), we came to a rather abrupt halt.

  ME: Oh. Are we here already?

  I made as if to get up, but stalled on seeing the concerned look on my fellow travellers’ faces. It was clear that something had gone very wrong.

  ME: Is this where we get off?

  SINGER: No.

  ME: So we’re not here?

  SINGER: No.

  The driver turned towards us with a look of desperation on his face. He yelled something to the volunteers. They mumbled something in return. I waited for some kind of explanation, but none was forthcoming. In truth, the atmosphere had become a little awkward. I broke the silence.

  ME: Is everything OK?

  The volunteers stared at me, wordlessly. I tried again.

  ME: Is there a problem?

  Still nothing.

  ME: Guys, why have we stopped?

  What on earth was going on? Why were the crew so reluctant to speak?

  ME: Is this normal?

  Eventually, one of them shook their head.

  ME: OK. So, what’s going on?

  It turned out we had crashed into some large rocks on the bank and the boatman was having difficulty extricating us from the shoreline.

  ME: What can we do? How can we help?

  That awkward silence descended again. More staring.

  ME: Hello? Anyone? What can we do to help?

  It took me a good few minutes to figure out that the problem was me – or, specifically, my heft. The volunteers had been either too polite or too embarrassed to tell me. With old Lumber-tubs here as passenger, the boat was lower in the water than usual, so it had snagged on the boulders at the water’s edge.

  ME: Ah. I think I see what’s going on. Shall I move?

  The entire crew nodded in emphatic unison.

  Bless them all for trying to spare my blushes. I vowed to treat them to an a cappella version of ‘Kumbaya’ on the way home, by way of a cultural exchange and thank you.

  It’s true, I was packing a little more timber than I should. Years of relentless power-eating on Bake Off, where I’d spend every summer feasting on Ukrainian funeral breads, Chechnyan meringues and obscure English puddings, had, it’s fair to say, laid waste to my waist.

  I manoeuvred my way, c
lumsily, to the rear of the boat, shuffling my buttocks along until I was past the centre line. Suddenly a victory cry went up. The front of the boat reared upwards, no longer weighed down by my Anglo-Saxon podge, we freed ourselves from the rocks and were able to push back into the river.

  We puttered for a couple more hours, along the river’s least-travelled backwaters. It was here, in one of its most remote windings, that the hill people of the Hmong lived, one of forty-nine ethnic-minority tribes in Laos.

  ‘We’re here,’ said the singer. It was the first time she had stopped singing in nearly four hours.

  As we approached, I could see hundreds of little kids running down the hillside to the sandy banks below, their faces smudged, clothes hanging off them like rags. They were all waving and cheering, not for the cameras, not for the pale Westerner, not for any of that circus. They were cheering, quite simply, because the books had arrived. My eyes pricked with tears. We take it for granted, our access to learning, to betterment. What a way to be shocked out of my complacency, to see these kids, tumbling down rocks barefoot, rushing towards us, desperate to lay their hands on a book.

  My tears didn’t have a chance to make it down my cheeks, as the sight of the children had set the singer off again, this time with a shrill welcome song that appeared to have no fixed key and, more worryingly, no seeming end.

  This charity doesn’t just deliver books, it runs an impromptu school on the riverbank, where the Hmong children can learn Lao. This means that the younger generation will have a chance in life: to travel, to be understood, to be connected with the rest of their countrymen. No sooner had we moored than we were conducting lessons on the beach – a call-and-response class, which introduced them to the benefits of learning. The beach exploded into a riot of song and movement. Out came a tambourine, a drum, and an awful lot of props. I was in heaven.