We’ve been in Laos for a week now, and spent most of that time up in the northern end of the country, where diversity is high but incomes are low.  When you walk into ethnic minority villages where no one speaks Laos, let alone English, communication can be an issue.  Curious adults want to know where we’ve come from, how long we’ll be here - essentially conversations that require a degree of vocabulary that we sorely lacked.  With children, its much easier.  They just want to play!

With all the time we spent playing in the villages, I began to appreciate just how innovative their games were.  I wouldn’t necessarily categorize the people we met as impoverished; everyone we met were subsistence farmers and hunters, and always had plenty to eat.  But they certainly lived a life free of many of the worldly possessions that Westerners wouldn’t dream of living without.  Absolutely none of the children had anything that could be considered a toy.

You might not realize this, but thong sandals are incredibly aerodynamic.  From what I could make out, the game is played by tossing your sandal some 10 meters away.  Your friends then take turns trying to make theirs land as close to yours as possible.  The more skilled kids got some serious frisbee-esque lift out of their footwear.

Apparently dirt can be just as fun.  In a different village, kids eagerly helped us dig up small rocks to use as crude marbles.  Once you’ve got enough, you cup one hand against the ground and take turns trying to flick the rocks into the “pocket.”  I grew bored of this pretty quickly, but I’m not exagerating when I say the kids played this for hours on end.

The best game that I found also happened to (not surprisingly) be the dirtiest.  The place that we spent the night in had a village center, with a ring of benches set up for special ceremonies.  The children there had developed a unique form of tug-of-war that I haven’t seen before.  One kid would sit down on the ground, and wrap his arms and legs around the legs of one of the benches (which was firmly embedded in the ground).  The next would then sit behind the first with his arms and legs wrapped around his torso.  The third would then link up behind the second so that eventually there formed a chain of miniature humans.  The child that was “it” had to then pull his buddies off the bench, one by one, with the end result being a giant cloud of dust within which writhed a giggling mass of little limbs.

Let the record state that it took all dozen kids working in concert (and then some) to pull me off that bench.

Special Note: Its a shame that we haven’t been able to capture some of the remarkable scenes we’ve come across - in a cruel twist of fate, we dropped our camera in 6 inches of muddied water just as we started trekking into the remote hills for a closer look at the “real” Laos village life.  If you’re wondering why there haven’t been new pictures posted, we finally acquired a replacement just yesterday.