Above: Women's project meeting. Left: Building a house in Xieng Kouang province. hold clinical trials to determine which ones are effective, and then pass this information back to all the villages they can. The plants then make their rounds through normal intervillage exchanges among farmers. In a health project initiated by a French NGO, larger towns construct artificial limbs and crutches out of materials they grow themselves, then trade them to neighboring villages. Former invalids become productive members of their communities again. These are all wonderful and imaginative programs, but what selfreliance projects should the NGO's embark on next? Ideally, aid workers would encourage the dev·eloo~ ment of local products from local materials. This opens up discussion in villages as to what is efficient and what is not, and keeps products independent from the global market so communities can barter for them. Villages can then pass techniques around through visits and travelling Buddhist festivals, as they do today. Natural dissemination can be seen at work in the speed that introduced vegetables and medicinal plants move from community to community. The next stage of sustainable aid.work must Winter/Spring include longer term labor saving ideas - gardening to reduce foraging time; planting fast-growing trees so day out of four isn't spent gathering firewood; cmno,)stimt. to increase food yields; planting a diversity of crops to provide better nourishment; planting crops, for sale or trade, that grow well on land too poor for other uses; the Azolla fern as a nitrogen fertilizer in rice paddies, the Chinese have for centuries; and supporting edJilca.tion. Education is difficult to promote anywhere. the current Lao curriculum of literacy, numeracy, health information and revolutionary politics particularly strikes many villagers as irrelevant. Relevance can be developed: convince farmers to write down what they know for the local children's curriculum; entice people to learn numerical skills so they can better arrange their crops and make barter arrangements with the next village; urge villagers write contracts for each other regarding issues like water distribution; and encourage them to act as teachers themselves, instead of just giving them poorly trained ones. Buddhists priests have played a role in education, relevance for some Lao. Priests are registered with the state, so the kind of education they are involved with is of the top-down kind. This state-directed education is not effective both because of the irrelevant curriculum and the nation's lack of money for schools. This is why the encouragement of local self-education is so crucial- it may be the only method that works. Eventually, peasant farmers must learn that they are representatives of an unusually resilient economic
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz