Pencils of Promise

A true story involving string, beer, a monk and a motorbike. Hilarity ensues.

So today village elders tied me up and got me drunk, then sent me off to shoot the monks, until I discovered that the monks were, in fact, shooting me. Oh, and I crashed my motorbike.

The awesome part about all of this is that I’m not even kidding.

Thanks to the underground marketing campaign of a pair of friends (I owe you, Wilsher/Johnson), I have been granted the extreme privilege of shooting documentary materials for Pencils of Promise in Laos as they get set to turn over control of several PoP-established preschools to the Laos Ministry of Education. I’m not going to pretend that I didn’t accept the privilege for selfish reasons—Los Angeles and the film industry were wearing on me, and I was looking forward to a recentering of perspective or, at the very least, to avoiding traffic on the 405.

On my first day in Laos, the Lao offered me something better—a total renewal of equilibrium and impenetrable spiritual armor. The Lao have this incredible ceremony during which, when you’re about to embark on a new journey or project, the village elders call your wandering guardian spirits back to you to restore your balance and ensure your protection. My first day in Laos coincided with the last day of Lao New Year, so everyone in the country was embarking on a new journey right along with me (Go Team!). The elders symbolically fasten your wandering guardians to your wrists with white or orange string—in my case, white—chanting blessings and well-wishings and “may you have beautiful children” sorts of things.

They smile a lot as they do it (and generally), and afterwards, they feed you things that you haven’t necessarily seen before, give you five shots of rice whiskey and three glasses of their native beer (actual numbers may vary, depending on the voracity of your elders and your own will to decline) and send you on your exceedingly merry and newly protected way, unsteady video camera in tow.

My rather glib description of the ceremony does not nearly do it justice. Nor does it speak to its strength and effectiveness—after my motorbike accident later in the day, I’m a staunch believer. But we’ll get to that.

First, to the New Year’s parade, where teenaged monks in seriously beautiful orange vestments march in succession with an endless line of young adults and children in traditional national costume, getting doused with bucketsful of water along the way by the throngs of people watching from the sidelines. It’s a surprisingly tourist-friendly affair—I was permitted, along with the rest of the falang (Lao slang for white guys—first time I’ve been designated as such, ever), to walk as a member of the parade, running in and out of the marching lines with my camera sometimes inches from accommodating Lao faces.

It was during the parade that I saw what I thought was a beer and whiskey-induced hallucination, but upon reviewing the tape after the alcohol had worn off (several, several hours later, if you catch my drift), there he was, in all his conundrum-like glory—a young monk holding a shiny silver video camera, shooting me as I was shooting him.

It was at that point in the parade that I decided I should be drinking water for the rest of the day.

Now, to the part where the spirit guides save my butt.

We were set to cap off the day with a Lao New Year dinner at what amounts to a Lao mansion overlooking the Mekong River. The last conversation team PoP had before jumping on our respective motorbikes was whether we should wear jeans or shorts for the evening. Shorts are the modus operandi around here, but it was New Year, so we made a group decision to formalize ourselves with long denim.

Score one for the spirit guardians.

Through another collective decision made earlier in the day, I had decided to leave my camera equipment at a guesthouse in town after the parade so that I wouldn’t have to deal with it until later. We were on our way to pick it up when the motorbike crashed. Otherwise I would have had it with me, resulting in thousands of dollars in busted camera equipment and a definite end to my filmmaking duties in Laos.

Score another one for the spirit guardians.

So clad in jeans and sans expensive electronics, I jumped on the back of Bryce’s motorbike and we took off to meet the others for dinner. About five minutes into the trip, we blew our rear tire, hit a patch of water and went down, sliding on our right sides for 6 to 10 feet before skidding to a halt.

Score one for the bad guys.

But this is where I was most thankful for the white strings tied around my wrists. I have friends that ride motorcycles in Los Angeles. They wear helmets, jeans, leather jackets, boots and protective gloves, even in the dead of summer, because if you go down on a motorcycle, you’re getting torn up big.

Bryce was wearing flip flops. Both of us were wearing short sleeves. Neither of us were wearing gloves or a helmet. They just don’t do that in Laos.

Yet somehow, I walked away with some scuffed-up jeans, a raspberry on my knee, a negligible carpet burn up to my right hip and a right palm that, although embedded with asphalt, wasn’t even bleeding. Bryce had a pair of nasty cuts on his big toe and a raspberry on his knee as well. Otherwise, we were fine.

And the spirit guardians win.

Ten minutes later it began to rain—the first rain of the New Year, a big, deep, cleansing rain that killed the electricity in the entire village and kept us pinned to the guesthouse where I had left my camera, waiting for a van to take us the rest of the way to dinner.

Mi tao, a name that literally means old woman (several woman share the name in every village), sat near the door in the guesthouse lobby, eating her dinner alone by candlelight, watching the downpour. The wind howling through the banana trees, the pebble-sized hail falling from the sky, the two fallen falang, bloody, shaken and miserable in the corner—she stared out over all of it with a look on her face that said “I have seen this—all of this—before.”

It was a look of such sincere nonchalance, such peace without judgment, a look that made me wonder what we in the western world have been doing wrong for so long.

It was a look that said, “Welcome to Laos.”

Tags: crash, Laos, mi tau, monk, motorbike, new year, Pencils of Promise, philip, rain