Climate change in the rural village

6:02 a.m. July 18, 2009

Al and Jim wade the river to get the shot.

It is absolutely pouring where I’m sitting, looking out at the Mekong River. It’s going to be another long day, but right now it’s peaceful and calm. And the coffee is strong.

We are in Laos to see the work MSU is doing with jatropha and carbon credits. But, unlike Thailand, in Laos the effort is raw and new. They’ve been growing jatropha, but the idea of refining it efficiently is just taking hold. The notion of carbon sequestration as a commodity is really still in the brainchild stage.

Yang talks with Jim about climate change in Ban Lao.

But it’s all coming and we are here to take a look.

We headed out from the capitol city of Vientiane early yesterday and hit the road to some very rural areas in Laos. “Hitting” the road can be a quite literal thing as many are shredded and more pothole than asphalt..”

Jamie DePolo who’s here covering this trip for MSU News calls the driving “freeform.” I think that covers it pretty well. The lanes seem to be suggestions rather than mandates. And after spending some time among the manic drivers I can only imagine the rule book from the Lao DMV is slim.

A little girl in Ban Lao watching the crew.

But it works.

We careened at breakneck speed along winding roads, missing all the hazards except the aforementioned potholes. Poor Al was stuck in the backseat, holding the camera in his lap where lens met head more than once.

Dr. Sithong Thongmanivong is with the Faculty of Forestry of the National University of Laos. He’s been working with Jay Samek and Dave Skole for years. And drove us expertly through the maze of bikes, scooters, goats, cattle and the occasional water buffalo.

Al shoots in the village of Ban Lao.

“The people here know something is different with the climate,” he told me. “They see the floods and too much water and wonder why.”

Getting to the villages means a severe change in landscape. Vientiane is a bustling city, no doubt, but it has a lot of rustic roads. Jay laughs, “I mean, come on. How many capitol cities do you know with dirt roads?!”

Lao road food.

From the exhaust choked streets that make you pray for carbon sequestration, we head out to a beat up highway that’s under construction. The workers are sweating in the fierce heat trying to get the road done for the upcoming SEA Games. SEA standing for South East Asia, the games are a sort of mini-Olympics that’ll take place late this year.

We’re trying to make our way quickly so we don’t really take any time for lunch. We’re traveling with some of the officials from the National University of Laos and some others interested in our project. They grab some slippery-looking stuff to go, Al and I go with Cokes and Pringles.

Okay, so I need to put in a quick word about the potato chips here. They are AMAZING! It’s not the chips; they’re the same. It’s the flavors. Why do Lays and Pringles kick out such wonderful chip coatings here and not in the States? I dined on Lime Basil Lays and consumed truly embarrassing amounts of Garlic Basil Pringles. I’m telling you, nirvana. They might not get the cheeseburgers right in this country, but the chips rock. And, since I am being totally honest, I declined some pretty intriguing versions. I let Spicy Squid Pringles stay where they were and managed to turn down offerings of Tangy Urchin Mango Snail Lays.

All right, so I made that last one up. But it was something like that.

Pringles, Lays…bring us the flavor!

And now back to carbon and jatropha.

We’re standing in Ban Lao, a small village where the streets are muddy and rutted. Sithong translates for me as I talk with some of the villagers about the idea of climate change. A woman named Yang, surrounded my small children, tells me she’s seen the weather change. She says there’s no rain and then too much.

“Can you imagine that engines and machines could change the weather?”

Her eyebrows go up a bit as she thinks.

“No.”

Sithong says the people here live their entire lives in this village and don’t get much news from outside. “We need to explain how carbon and all that effects climate.”

Like I said, the effort here is new. In Thailand they’ve been working on it for a while. Government officials there tell me that it’s critical for the local farmers to learn about climate change, greenhouse gasses, agriculture and how it’s all related. In Thailand they send people into the field, into the villages to talk about this face-to-face. Here in Laos, it’s not that far along.

“We are working on that,” Sithong says.

There is jatropha grown here. It’s integrated; planted among pineapple and other cash crops. We get some shots after changing into shorts and wading a flooded stream up to our waists.

Deep in the muck, slogging through the water carrying the camera high, Al gives me a smile and that “I can’t believe what we’re doing” look.

This is why we’re here. It might not feel like research, but it is.

“This is the lab, “ Jay tells me. “This is where it’s happening.”

I ask Yang how it’s going with the jatropha.

“I don’t know. The government tells us to grow it. We grow it. We pick it. We save it. But no one has come to buy it. So we wait.”

Walking back to the truck, Sithong tells me one of the first things he’s going to do is find a buyer for these jatropha seeds.

“Like I said, this is new. But it’s good.”

I said at the beginning of this that yesterday was a long day. It was another in a string of long days. But it doesn’t matter. 14 hours of driving and banging our heads, of wading through streams and eating Pringles seems worth it. Standing in a tiny village where people’s entire lives are lived and listening to their stories is worth it. Seeing what places like this with your own eyes really is priceless.

It’s very basic. Dirt streets, livestock wandering around, children playing with sticks in the heat. These people rely on the crops and the land. They are going to be some of the first hit by any changes in the climate. And they are some of the first to start making a difference with what they’re learning from people like Sithong and our MSU team. Standing here, it’s a lot easier to “get it.” It’s a lot easier to understand why Dave Skole calls climate change “the greatest threat to peace and prosperity in the world.”

So, yeah, it’s worth it.

And so I sit with another coffee, staring at the rain pounding the Mekong River.

I’m dry and I’m comfortable.

I’m writing this blog.

But I’m thinking about Ban Lao.