My Life as a Photo-Journalist, by Zall, 14

Hah! Caught her!

Crouched under a bush, I laid down on the dirt; the dusty camera lens poked through a gap next to a mud-stained fencepost. Pulling back the zoom a little bit, I attempted to focus on a group of women trying to sell things down below.  I adjusted a few things; no, it’s way to dark, bring up the light settings. Ease down on the button, and… *click*.  Being a photographer overseas isn’t as easy as you may think.  As a matter of fact, there can be some major drawbacks and problems along the way.  A lot more work and effort goes into each shot than one might believe.

I’m loving her grin!

One major problem with shooting photos of the tribal groups is that a lot of them don’t want their picture taken due to religious or community beliefs.  A very common belief is that a depiction of them takes away part of their soul.  As you can see, this makes the picture process even more complicated, because now you have to hide in a bush, or behind a house.  I would often ask my dad to stand still and then act like I was taking his picture, when in truth the lens was focusing over his shoulder on a person behind.

Another dilemma is that nobody smiles in a photo.  Photos are believed to be very serious things, so you must look very serious, leaving most of our portraits looking gloomy or mad.  In truth, the people look so much better when they smile.  It seems their personalities shine when you can see the wrinkles and teeth.

A sneaky shot of a hard-working mom harvesting manioc root with her hard-sleeping baby.

An additional problem is my parents (yes I’m blaming this on them).  They like to continue walking on and not stop for a couple of minutes for a good shot.  They’re normally almost out of sight on trails, yelling at me to hurry up.  Because of this, I can’t get just the right angle or light settings.

One of the perks of the job…

Yet another problem with time is that people don’t stay in one spot or do one thing for very long.  Most of the time I may only have half a second of the right angle, and if I don’t click the button on that moment, I miss the shot.  I don’t like getting pictures of people when they know they’re getting looked at by a camera lens, so the only way to do that is catch when they’re doing their regular everyday things.  So it seems I walk around with my camera out, ready and wasting battery power, a lot more often than I’m actually focused on taking a specific shot.

Problems, problems, problems; It seem like that all I can talk about, so I have to add:  photographing things overseas is one the best things of my life.  I love the constant struggle to get the right point of view, and to get the shot just at the right time.  I truly think that taking photos in the remote hilltribes of Laos is the best possible photography assignment I can think of.

The Meat Market (Warning: Explicit Animal Parts Ahead)

Writing these stories gets increasingly difficult.  The more I travel, the more I think that what I see overseas is normal.  A simple walk down the road will reveal people burning plastic garbage, little kids rolling rusty metal hoops down the slope, and busy looms under every thatched-roof hut; it all seems entirely normal, just an everyday walk.  But if someone who had not traveled saw this, they might have freaked out, taken hundreds of pictures, and written pages of articles on this one walk.  So I’ve been trying to see Lao life through the eyes of a fresh visitor.  What would be amazing?  One example: every slightly larger town has a market, and in every market are the counters where local women are selling fresh meat, waving sticks with plastic bags tied at the end to shoo away the ever-present swarms of flies.

Zall, with his camera and MAG shirt, on assignment in a tuk-tuk in Laos.

Entering the meat section, the smell of raw meat and flies floats around us like a heavy fog.  The rows of stands seem to go on until they dip below the horizon.  All along these stalls, piled up like mountains, is every type of fresh, dripping meat that you could ever imagine; rats, bats, cats, chicken fats, and little scraps.  Everything is posed in a way to make the pieces look a little more attractive.  They make the prepared dogs look like they are smiling by placing their heads towards the buyers, and then (and I don’t know how they do this), they make the bald-headed dog grimace, exposing it’s teeth and then curling the lips up.  Next to the dog heads is a stack of bald forelegs, still with their paws.  They burn the hair off, apparently.  Their red roasts and internal organs are neatly piled to one side.  Needless to say, it doesn’t look too appetizing to this westerner.

Fresh meat vendors in Laos.

The pigs faces look like they’re the happiest creatures alive.  Really – you can buy a pig face in the market!  They do this by skinning the entire pig face – chin, cheeks, ears, eyebrows and all –  and then shape them to look happy.  You can buy every other part of a pig as well – and I mean every part – kidneys, intestines, livers, hooves, tails.  And some parts I still don’t know what they are.  They’re all piled tidily on the plain wood counter.  I’ve never seen so many different shades of red.  You can even buy a pie-shaped slice of coagulated blood.

Happy pig face in Laos.

Occasionally, the butchers come up to you and offer some smelly, gray, shriveled, barbecued rats.  These rats are “crucified” on thin bamboo sticks and then smoked over a fire.  Their bones look to be jabbing through their hides and any meat seems to have shrunk away.  Although we have been offered these many times (they seem to be especially treasured as bus snacks by the locals), when the hordes of flies jump off the rodents, leaving god-knows-what all over the “meat,” our stomachs twist and we decide it’s better to wait for fresh ones.  Which we will usually try to avoid as well.  Rat meat is really strong tasting, somewhere between dog and bat.

Water buffalo forelegs for sale in Xam Neua, Laos.

There are field rats cut open to show off how fresh they are, live frogs with their feet tied together, hunks of dried water buffalo skin, and rows upon rows of strange brown spices.  We’ve seen piles of small black bats, fish sliced open with their hearts still pumping, and huge water buffalo legs.  Sometimes there are trays of white, thumb-sized grubs or black beetles with their wings pulled off.

Fresh, Laos rats with juicy guts exposed.

To someone who had never traveled to the out-back of Asia, this would be something amazing, but to me, this is now a familiar market.  So when I sit down and write these stories, I have to put myself in someone else’s shoes.  I have to imagine it as if I had never seen kids chewing chunks of barbecued goodness-knows-what-on-a-stick. It also makes me wonder what in our “normal” world here in Eugene might look weird to some kid from a small Ta-Oi village in Laos or Vietnam

The First (and Last) Time I Try Bat (by Zall – age 13)

Our family rule is that if you ever are offered a strange food, you have to try it once. You don’t have to eat it ever again, but you have to try it once.  To complete this, you must chew and swallow the “food” (sometimes it’s hardly food) without puking. As you can imagine sometimes this leads to some pretty gnarly things…

It was in Xam Tai, a small town, and four hours from the city of Xam Neua when the opportunity presented itself.  Mai, our translator and friend, looked up at us with a raised eyebrow and three small, dead fruit bats in her hands.  “Are you sure?” she questioned with an edge of curiosity in her voice.  The rules could not be broken, so we nodded slowly.  You can never pass up a chance like this.  If you didn’t eat it, thirty years from now you may regret passing up the only occasion to try bat.  Mai turned and shrugged her shoulders.  “I will prepare this for dinner.”

Zall pops his first, and last, bite of bat into his mouth – see the batburger?

At five-thirty we walked to Mai’s family’s house.  After an hour or so of playing Frisbee with her son, it was time for dinner.  Two steaming plates came out from under the fire pit; one was a laap (a delicious traditional Laos dish of minced pork, banana leaf, lime, and spices), and the other was steamed, fresh greens.  Then the third dish came out from the flames.  No steam rose from this one.  Mai put the dish on the table and my stomach turned upside down.  On the plate was a heaping patty of bat: meat, fur, bones, innards, and all.  It looked like someone had put the animals in a giant blender.  I welcome you to the reality of locally-prepared cooked bat.

I could tell my whole family had the same thoughts because the color drained from their faces.  Mai took a fingerful of sticky rice and casually put a big hunk of the dead wad in her mouth, not noticing our obvious distrust of the pile in front of us.  I had no choice.  I’d be breaking our family code.  I grabbed the biggest chunk of sticky rice I could and loaded some of the furry lump into the hole I’d created in the rice.  To top it off, I put a pinch of ginger on top to cover the flavor.  My plan worked… kind of.

Mai’s son enjoying his favorite chicken parts – the eyeballs and tongue.

I dropped the ball of ingredients into my mouth.  I took a deep breath and bit down.  My face distorted as I broke through god knows what part of the bat.  The ginger covered up the flavor very well at first.  Then the bat flavor kicked in.  I could feel my face go white.  The flavor was fetid – a strong, rancid gray flavor that overpowered my mouth, my nose, my brain.  It swept through my body like a repulsive, vomitous perfume.  My gag reflex triggered but I held in the “food.”  I took one long shuddering breath and swallowed, choking on a rib bone.  A wave of relief flooded my body.  I quickly shoved more rice into my mouth and looked up at my parents and said with my eyes, “That’s definitely the last time I try bat.”

Trekking with Tui, by Zall (age 13)

Zall with a large friend.

Way up in northwest Laos, our family decided to go off the tourist track to a tiny town called Muang Long, only accessible on a single-lane dirt road.  When we got off the ramshackle bus, we found the only place to stay in town and went to a little restaurant fifty feet away, where we ate a late lunch of fried rice and vegetables.  Soon after our  meal, a gentleman came by the restaurant and said he worked for the local “tourism office” and he wondered what we might like to do.  We decided it was a good time to do a trek, so the guy in charge set us up with a local man named Tui, who spoke pretty-good English and knew the area well.  We told Tui we wanted a three-day two-night trek to some outlying villages that had no roads.  Tui said he would be ready early the next morning and that he would meet us at our guesthouse.  He  met us with a small backpack at 7:00 the next morning.  All we had to bring were changes of clothing, our med kit, and a jacket for the cool evenings.

Tui, Zall, Tui’s friend, and Ari eating lunch by the side of the trail on a tablecloth of banana leaves.

Heading through the morning market area and between two stilted houses was a tiny trail snaking up a mountain.  I looked at the beautiful scenery in awe.  Dozens of steep, rolling green hills blanketed the vast landscape.  The steep trail wove through banana trees, strange ferns, dry-farmed rice fields, and bamboo forests.  Much of the forest had been cut down in previous years due to local “slash-and-burn” practices.  Down the trail, a small river ran through the foliage, and over the river was a rickety, bamboo bridge that would carry us to the other side.  Tui continued walking without paying any notice to the structure.  I hesitated, and then gingerly tiptoed across the wobbly bridge and heaved a huge sigh when I got to the other side.  Along the way, Tui told us about the uses of the plants; this large-leafed plant was cut into strips for baskets; the root of this tall plant was used to cure headaches.  He carved a spinning toy for me using a potato-like root he dug up and carved into a disk and some hemp twine he carried.  He also showed us some cool big bugs.  After about three hours of hiking up and down mountains, we stopped for lunch.  Tui had a tiny backpack in which he carried our lunch.  I was skeptical that he had enough food, but Tui kept pulling things out of his small pack: vegetables cooked with clear noodles, banana-flower and meat in a spicy sauce, globs of sticky rice.  I couldn’t believe how much food he pulled out of his pack!  We ate until we were stuffed.

We started down a long steep hill, and then met up with a wet jungle area.  I looked down and spotted a small worm.  When I asked Tui what it was, he said very calmly, “Oh, leech, hurry, let’s run.”  At the time, I was freaked out about leeches and sprinted as fast as I could.  It seemed like forever until we got out of the dank tropical region and back onto the dryer hillside.  A minute later I heard Ari, my older brother, scream at the top of his lungs.  I hurried forward and saw that a leech had suctioned to his lower leg.  Tui very easily pulled it off and sarcastically stated that it was only a small one.  Ari needed a quick band-aid to stop the bit of bleeding and protect the puncture wound.

School let out in this Akha village to greet a novel visiting group – us!

We passed through a couple of small Akha villages on the way to our destination.  At every village, we would walk through the spirit gate that protected the village from the jungle spirits.  Once in town, all the people would gather around to watch us.  In one place, the entire school of maybe 50 kids were let out to come down and stare at the four white people stomping through their village.  We’d wave and say hello, and they would act shy or just plain stare at us.  Every time the whole town would follow us to the edge of the village where we would walk again through a spirit gate.  We would all wave goodbye.

Finally at around 5 PM we arrived at our first destination, a Kwi village.  As we entered the town (no spirit gates are needed in a Kwi village) a crowd of about 100 people – the entire town – swarmed around us and guided us to the chief’s hut.  Tui told us that Ari and I were the first white children this village had ever seen, and the first “farang” faces seen at all in many months.  We were directed up a bamboo ladder to a bamboo platform – the chief’s front “deck” – and told to take off our shoes. Ari accidentally put his foot through deck, breaking one of the bamboo slats.   The villagers all laughed very loudly and Ari blushed and smiled sheepishly.  For two hours we sat on the deck while dozens of people crowded around us in a semi-circle.  Mostly we all stared at each other.

Zall, Tui, and Ari in front of an Akha village spirit gate.

Tui cooked an excellent dinner of stir-fried meat, vegetables, and sticky (glutinous) rice which the village provided (Tui had sent word earlier we would be there that night).  The “stove” was a fire-pit right in the middle of the two-room bamboo hut, set on large flat stones.  It turns out Tui is an excellent cook as well as guide!  As soon as the sun set we went to bed.  The chief offered us quarter-inch thick bamboo mats as hard as a rock and thick slightly mildewy quilts to keep us warm.  He made sure we tucked our mosquito nets in at the corners to avoid getting bit at night and possible getting malaria or dengue fever.  That night I slept like a baby, at least until the roosters starting crowing at about 4:30.

We got up before the sun, put on our jackets to fend off the cool morning fog, and had a breakfast of Mekong seaweed (an algae that grows in the river and really is quite delicious) wrapped around sticky rice. Another day’s adventure awaited us as we set off into the jungle enroute to a village of the Katu people.