Page 6 RAIN Winter/Spring 1991 Above: Harrowing rice paddies in the early summer. Right: Threshing rice under the house. Both in Vientiane province. Lao villages also rejected cooperatives and stuck to the lifestyle they already knew. If the government had more time and money, and if the Lao were not so cautious culturally, they might have coerced people into collectives. But the government was impoverished, so collectivization was barely more than a suggestion. Detailed central planning of those few resources available to the government has not worked well. Individual needs and sometimes entire villages were overlooked in plans. It is lucky that they were mostly self-reliant. The government responded that it only needed to learn how to plan better. Small aid organizations interacting directly with villages had to make room for themselves within these struggling state plans. The plans ranged from reconstruction and provincial self-sufficiency to attempts to copy the rather modest Vietnamese model for industrial and agricultural socialism. These plans never worked as expected, at the very least due to meagre resources, and a frustrated segment of the government eventually turned to world aid organizations. Since 1986, foreign aid experts have been coming into the country with big development money, but the country still does not have anywhere near the financial resources for the planners or materials needed to run a statist economy. Even more recently, the government has entirely moved
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