Laos - Life in the ‘not very’
fast lane Written and Photographed by Charlotte Halligan
One volunteer’s culture shock at working in Laos:
Something unusual happens when you cross over the border
and enter Laos: time slows down.
It is not always immediately noticeable: it’s similar to
the effect of a music cassette (remember them?) that has had the
tape inside stretched. The sound becomes distorted, the singer’s
voice gradually becomes deeper, slower, distended, and before
you know it you have gone from listening to Lady Ga Ga to something
that resembles Enya on Ketamine.
You can sense the slowing down in virtually all activities: grab
a car or bike and hit the roads and you will find that very few
people drive above 30 mph; walk into a shop and you will more
likely than not discover the owner actively ignoring you and watching
TV, reluctant to get up even at the sight of money; go to a restaurant
and your food may take up to an hour to arrive, if it ever does
(forgetfulness in waiters seems endemic here).
It’s not that people here are lazy, it is simply that people
here have a different relationship to time. It is as
if Einstein’s theory of relativity is writ large here, except
its not proximity to mass that slows things down, but to the Mekong
and the ubiquitous BeerLao.
As long as you are in no hurry, and especially if you have just
arrived from the chaos that is Bangkok, this all adds to Laos’
charm. And if you stay here a while you find that you too slow
down, and that any sense of urgency and productivity you had begins
to fade in quite a pleasurable way.
A Different Work Ethic
Of course, as I discovered, when you’re working here, and
actually trying to achieve something, Laos can come as a bit of
a culture shock.
It isn’t that things here are just slower; there seems
to be a lack of basic organization and structure to just about
everything. When things happen, or rather if, it is due largely
to luck more than judgment – people work to their own schedules,
doing their own thing, and if it results in the successful completion
of a project no one knows how or why.
In my previous life, I worked for a company that constantly pressured
us to make things happen with impossible deadlines and insurmountable
bureaucracy. My world was filled with corporate speak; my ideas
were blue sky, I leveraged just about anything I could think of,
and there were paradigm shifts, action plans and deliverables
coming out of my ears.
The simplest of projects required at least a dozen forms to be
completed; sent to 20 people; amends from every individual collated
and incorporated; comments from an executive (who would invariable
change the forms back to their original content); and then final
sign off - all before you could do any actual work.
Following the completion of any project a series of meetings
would then be held to evaluate the process, identify any unnecessary
steps and to find someone to blame if it all went tits up. This
would invariably lead to a new project to fix these problems,
and the process would start all over again.
This is one of the many reasons I decided to give up my old life
in the private sector, up sticks and move to Laos to volunteer
for a local charity. There is only so much paperwork a person
has to fill in before she snaps, and my camel’s back was
one straw away from breaking.
But coming from that background into the Laos working world has
been a steep learning curve. Sure, I love to procrastinate like
the best of them; I hate bureaucracy and all it stands for; and
I love having the freedom to have an idea and just go with it,
without running it by the world and its dog first. But it would
seem that there comes a point, generally after you find out that
everyone has been working towards entirely different goals for
the last month (albeit very slowly of course), when you realize
that you can’t shake off years of indoctrination into the
corporate world.
Jumping from one extreme to the other has brought me to a deeply
disturbing realization: deep down I crave forms and guidelines,
strategies and plans, and I would give my right arm for someone
to leverage all the synergies I am so busy creating!
So I find myself, Buddha like, looking for a middle path. I am
creating documents templates, implementing measurement systems,
standardizing processes and designing forms for my colleagues
to fill in. Most shockingly of all I have become friends with
Excel.
And so it would seem that you can take the girl out of the organization,
but you can’t take the organization out of the girl. I suppose
the best I can hope for is that my new found passion for bureaucracy
will actually make a difference to the charity I work for and
to the people we try to help.
And failing that, at least there is plenty of BeerLao to drown
my sorrows.
Charlotte Halligan
is a freelance travel writer currently volunteering in Laos.
She is the author of travel blog Escape
to Asia.
