The red roofs rise out of the rice fields like misplaced mountains.
The rain drips and fills puddles around the new neighborhood, but the construction continues. Moving trucks — mopeds with wagons attached — haul bags of rice and picture frames and idols and families. Fireworks echo off the red-clay cliffs in the distance and bounce back through the treeless streets.
We sink further into our ran jackets as we search for a functional bathroom for of our teammates. After ten minutes, we find one. As we wait, Alex* invites us onto her porch. She offers her seat and her father's — he limps to the steps of his front door — and hurries to the kitchen to fetch for us a pitcher of water. After we drink and talk to her for a little while, she offers us what we've been waiting for: a tour.
Her front porch is identical to her neighbors'. So too is her foyer, her kitchen, the stairs that lead to her four bedrooms and two bathrooms and her balconies, which have two flags — Laos and Communist. The cold tiles chill our bare feet as we walk toward the balcony. She opens the door and reveals to us her new village.
A hundred houses, all the same.
***
It's not even a problem, she explains, that each house is identical. The problem is that this house is not her home.
Alex was raised in a remote village in Laos. She grew up with three or four generations living under one thatched roof. Her cousins and aunts and uncles lived in the houses on either side. Her family were river and rice people — they grew their food or fished it — and both were within walking distance
A few years ago, the Chinese, who have occupied this part of Laos for about 75 years, decided that they wanted to build a casino. And they wanted to build it right on top of her village. The village headman was bribed and agreed, and the construction commenced. Within two years, they were packing their lives and leaving their livelihood behind.
Objectively, these new houses are nicer than their old huts. The Chinese didn't consider that their village was organized by families and friends; they put them in order of how nice their house in the village was. Alex can't even tell us exactly where her sister lives now because there's no way to give directions in a maze of the same repeating houses. But, she says, "we may get house numbers soon."
This is the problem when we impose our own culture on a people group that doesn't care for it. We think we're helping by giving something nice and new, but we never really stop to consider what we're taking.
***
We wait on Alex's porch as the rain moves from a drizzle to a downpour and back again. The sun slips out from behind the clouds. We walk back to our truck and ride away in a daze, the village disappearing beyond the mountains.
An hour later, we are awoken to see the next mountain: the casino. Inside are a million lights and cameras and cards and machines and drinks and smoke and never-ceasing sounds and people just passing through. In the parking lot, there are Lexus's and Jaguars and Hummers. Outside, it's ornate. There are a dozen 20-foot golden idol statues and a dome encrusted with jewels reaches farther into the sky than anything else we've seen so far.
But it is ugly because it doesn't belong.
