The Orphanage in Luang Prabang

Andrew, one of the Australian owners of our hotel here was looking for a worthy cause to get involved with and discovered this orphanage. There are 460 kids there aged 6 to 17. The government provides $16 per month per child which is enough to pay for water, and 2 meals a day of vegetable soup and/or a big ball of sticky rice. His assessment was that food and sanitation should be the first orders of business, with improved education to follow. He has accepted donations from guests and kicked in his own money and been able to provide a breakfast of a fruit jam filled roll per child for breakfast 6 days a week. We are going to help him get to that seventh day. He has provided sinks, soap, tiling, toilet paper and dispensers at his own expense. All this just in the year or so since he opened the hotel. There is a director and staff (although absent when we visited), and he works through them. He says they are fine, there just is no money and therefore not enough food, etc.

It is still incredibly basic. (Think a very under-funded, soon to be condemned summer camp in the States).What is amazing is that the kids seem truly content, happy even, and they are very well behaved and self-motivated to keep the place going. It is actually a pretty nice site, surrounded by a creek, with lots of terraced gardens that the kids tend. The day we visited a two week school vacation had just begun and about half of the kids had returned to their villages. The other half were still there, some working in the gardens, some playing tackraw (another blog post maybe) and soccer ...a few cooking the midday sticky rice meal ,a few taking showers or hanging around the "dorms", concrete buildings with a long wooden platform down each side for a bed. There were no adults on site! None! No Lord of the Flies here. It was all very relaxed. It makes you want to study the Lao psyche.

When one boy rang a bell, everybody headed to the "kitchen" (a cement floor with two large grates with wood fires underneath for cooking rice or soup) and was served a ball of sticky rice, some the size of a small cantaloupe other the size of an orange, I think by choice. That was lunch. They take it in their hands back to the dorms to eat.The contrast to what we consider our needs in the West is pretty dramatic.

A very enlightening and thought provoking visit.
[Posted by John]