Eat To Live: The Lao, chickens and rice

THABAK, Laos, May 11 (UPI) -- As the community generator in this remote tribal village in the mountains of northern Lao rumbled into action, the old Hmong woman slipped her bare feet into the flip-flops parked on the steps of her stilt house.

She squelched off along the red mud lane in the dark through a torrential downpour, headed towards the family's rice storehouse. She needed supplies to soak overnight for the next day's sticky rice, before the light curfew shut down the generator at 9.30 p.m.

Every Hmong family in Thabak, this tiny hill tribe community in the border country between Lao and Vietnam, has a rice store. Each is a similar hut of woven bamboo strips, set on stilts along the bank high above the river. But the rice each contains is likely to be different.

There are more than 3,000 types of rice grown in Lao. In communities such as Thabak it is grown organically, the only method these farmers know and can afford.

Now the Lao government has launched a project to promote organic rice growing in parts of the country where traditional methods are under threat.

Somsack Kethongsa, in charge of the program, told the Vientiane Times that there is increasing call for rice grown without fertilizers. "It's tasty," he said, "but there is not enough for demand."

Close to urban areas where land is expensive, a smallholding farmer can grow only enough for his own needs. But demands for export are coming in from France and Switzerland, and the Lao government hopes other nations will follow.

In the lane, the grandmother was passed by a group of men striding up from the river below the village where they had gone fishing, not too successfully it appeared from their buckets.

Their boats are long, slim, metal tubes, fashioned from fuel tanks dumped during the war by U.S. fighter planes returning to base from bombing sorties.

In the kitchen, a space on the open verandah defined by pots and pans hanging from wall struts and a small stone charcoal-fired brazier, grandmama squatted with the other women of the house and the toddlers they had unpeeled from around their waists and set on the floor. Senior daughter reduced into chunks with a cleaver a chicken that had been strutting through the house.

As Vietnam revealed another outbreak of avian flu in that country this week, the Lao Ministry of Health's Center for Information and Education for Health has just announced plans for a bird-flu education drive throughout the factories in the Hadxaifong district near Vientiane, the capital of this tiny country.

Somkit Souksyvongsay, head of training and study in Vientiane for the Lao Consolidation Front, said, "It's important for workers, many of whom come from the countryside to work."

In Thabak as elsewhere, the villagers live with their livestock in or under their houses. Chickens are shooed away from inside in a desultory fashion. We ate ours fried with water hyacinth hauled from the river by hand, garlic and wild herbs picked from the hillside.

When mayflies swarmed suddenly in a cloud 2 feet deep around the single strip light, falling into clothes and hair, the family clapped in delight. One woman rushed from the kitchen bearing aloft a huge bowl of water. As the mayflies tired, they fell into it and slowly drowned.

Once the water surface became invisible under a carpet of floundering insects, the family took it in turns to draw their hands slowly across the surface of the water.

When they pull them away, mayfly wings were stuck to their palms. These they wiped off and fed to the chickens while the adults guzzled the mayfly bodies stir-fried with garlic.

Mayflies are a delicacy that comes free, their season so brief they may only provide one bowlful a year.

It's difficult to imagine how to make effective a campaign warning of the dangers of avian flu with a people linked by necessity this closely to "seasonal" and "local" and a store cupboard filled by nature and a few creatures cheap to raise.

That night we ate tomatoes grown down by the river, stuffed with chicken meat. This is an approximation of how it was done.

-- 2 large plum tomatoes per person, their insides scooped out with a teaspoon and kept along with their lids for another meal

-- 1 chicken breast, ground finely

-- 2 scallions, peeled and finely chopped

-- 2 cloves of garlic, peeled and finely chopped

-- 1 stalk of lemongrass, finely diced

-- 1 fresh chili, finely diced

-- 1 inch cube of galangal or ginger, peeled and finely chopped

-- fish sauce (Nam pa)

-- Mix together everything except the fish sauce, then add enough fish sauce to loosen.

-- Stuff the tomatoes and place side by side tightly in a steamer, cover and set over boiling water and steam for 1 hour till cooked.