The expanding froth of synthetic white bubbles is in obvious
contradiction to the grimy angular tiling in this sorry excuse for a bathroom.
It grows, a fractal of hygiene, erupting like a middle school baking soda
volcano from a teal PVC abyss. I guess Laos’ wet season gets you quickly
accustomed to wetness after a long hot dry season of general desiccation – dank
bathroom stalls, mold and bacteria now colonizing the seams of a cheap tile
job, just inches from your body’s own bacteria-rich seams.
So this scouring, not of an innocent landlocked tropical
carpet by geopolitical resource vacuums, but of a rather unassuming smallish
bathroom stall by hordes of expanding soap bubbles, was not at all
unwelcome. Cleanliness is all relative
here – there is only a certain level of sterility that can be attained when one
lives on a bamboo and thatch structure above molasses mud of the Mekong and a
host of various domesticated (and not so domesticated) animals. And politically
as well, clean is rarely any easier. A project or mandate not tarnished by
streaks of greed and corruption is unheard of in these forests and hills.
And in my current Saturday eve stupor catalyzed by sticky
rice and beer Laos, although wary of colonization of any sort, I silently dare
these waxing half moons of increasingly incandescent bubbles to do the job that
the tired Lao woman had failed to complete the night before, at this particular
watering hole, in this particular capital city – if you could call it such. Simultaneously, as my mind’s eye pans from
gazing down to all around, I ask those invisible orbs that contain the force
necessary to ensure that local people have a say over the future of their land
and livelihoods, those bubbles that travel only along strands of shared
understanding and experience, to one-day expunge the back door mining concessions
and illegal logging roads from this country’s collective tiling.
