Red Earth, Birth Control, and Twinkly Sky

After a twelve hour (overly air-conditioned bus ride that does nothing good for my cough) return trip from Vientiane, we're back at the school and it's a downpour. The dirt path leading to the school has been turned into a flood plane and there's red mud water everywhere. I wonder if the library has been flooded. Luckily it hasn't.

Oh yeah, the red mud. The soil here is all red (lots of iron). And it gets everywhere, under your toenails and fingernails and in your clothes. No problem I thought, I'll just wash it out...erm...turns out that it doesn't work like that because the red soil is a dye as well. Given time, everything tends towards that terracotta colour. It takes some effort of scrubbing to get the colour off my skin, and even more effort for my clothes. It doesn't much help when you bathe and wash your clothes in a stream that is sand banked by this red earth. In a way, its pervasiveness is a constant reminder of the soil, and ultimately food production and ecosystems. Even as I fight against it, there is something reassuring about its presence.

Ramsey has been coughing and sniffling. He's stuffed up and blames me for making him sick. I feel fine for the most part and just have a bit of a cough, and no sneezing and congestion like he has. He still teaches however, but only one class today.

In the evening I ask the students how many children they would like in the future. Most said three children, and some said two. I was surprised by this, considering that some of them have seven or eight siblings and their parents probably even more. So taught them the connections between family size and economic and environmental sustainability. Most of these students are really poor, and doing the status quo - having a lot of kids - will just doom them to a cycle of continuing poverty. They are learning a lot at the school, but if there's one lesson that may have the greatest impact on their future wellbeinog, it may be this one. However, deciding to have fewer children, and being able to make that happen is another thing. At the end of the semester, So will teach them a sensitive subject, birth control and family planning. Education does work!

As I step outside the library to brush my teeth, I hear the now familiar orchestral hum of evening insects, and I see something that takes me a while to register. With the rainy season, the skies at night have been too clouded over for viewing stars, but now there's a brief reprieve and I see them...and they twinkle. Though I know stars are supposed to twinkle, I have never actually observed this before. I look for the big dipper, the only constellation I can always find. I can't find it, but then all of a sudden I see it! It escaped my search earlier because I was looking for something that was a lot smaller than what is before my eyes. It's the big dipper as I've never seen it before...it's gibungus! (No, this is not a chilli-induced trip.) It is the biggest I have ever seen the big dipper - it takes up a full quarter of the sky in my field of view. I geekily announce my finding to a lacklustre audience inside. I guess they're used to it here; I'm impressed however. It seems as if the sky has fallen closer to Earth, or else the Earth has ascended a little closer to the heavens. It's enchanting and impossible!

Goodnight.