Alms-Giving; Big Brother Mouse - Visai

I’m hoping to catch up with a backlog of blogging today. So hard to do when there are so many eye-opening things going on in everyday life. I’m planning to arrange a tuk-tuk for a day-trip visit to the spectacular Kuang Si waterfall, and a bear sanctuary and buffalo sanctuary en route. Other traveling buddies are going hiking/camping in the mountains near the Chinese border; others recommend a hot air balloon ride south of here. For my part, I’m finding plenty of fulfillment at my doorstep.

Like yesterday, waking at 5 for the Buddhist monk alms-giving ritual.


Then conversation hour at Big Brother Mouse, where I met Visai, a high school senior. It was an awesome experience and so touching. Y’all would definitely love it!


Visai is from an Akha Luma village about 6 hours north of here in the mountains near the Myanmar and China border. They don’t have a written language and practice animism and ancestor worship. The men are said to know and tell stories of the lives of their ancestors going back 60 generations!

Visai is one of six, and how he came to Luang Prabang three years ago to study is something I’ve yet to find out.

His family are subsistence farmers, rice and vegetables, a buffalo, a cow and chickens. In the past, many tribal villages grew opium poppies, a story of woe and amazement all its own that I’ll write about later. Today their cash crop is a particular kind of straw used to make brooms.

I could tell right away that Visai was bright, curious and motivated. We spent a lot of time with a globe talking about where I live, Canada and Mexico and Europe. In his spare time, he studies English, Chinese, and computer science. And plays football (soccer) and volleyball. He’s invited me to come to his school to meet his friends and play Sunday afternoon. I told him I’m too old - little does he know - but that I might come to watch - ☺️.

He plans to go to the university here and wanted to talk about what he should study. He thinks business and marketing would give him opportunities to travel the world.

*The Akha Luma are an indigenous, largely animist, and subsistence-farming subgroup of the Akha people residing in the high mountains of Phongsaly Province, Laos, near the Myanmar border. They live in remote villages, practice ancestral worship, and share a common Tibeto-Burman language with other Akha, though they maintain distinct cultural customs, clothing, and, in some cases, consider themselves distinct from other Akha.



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