What is this blog about?

Hello my audience. I will start writing here because otherwise I will never set myself to do it. Opening this blog has given me certain freedom to start writing about my fieldwork in Laos, without feeling restricted by academic considerations and formalities of language.  That is: scientific rigour is relaxed, although some of the stuff entered here might feature in my doctoral dissertation.


Without much further ado, let us start. The first time I heard about a country called Laos, I was a university student in Monterrey, Mexico, playing a United Nations simulation game. I was supposed to represent the Lao People's Democratic Republic in the General Assembly. It was a difficult exercise due to the fact that I did not know much about the country. Ten years forward, I was living there, in a little village in Champasak province. I stayed there for six months working for an NGO, which founded a school that has the commendable aim of teaching, and learning from, youth on sustainable living. The whole experience put into perspective the many weak assumptions I previously held about development, and it also prompted new interrogations. Above all, I had the beautiful opportunity to step into the unique universe of my colleagues and students. They taught me about their lives and their understandings of life and death. I do not claim expertise about such understandings, but possibly a fair grasp, nurtured by a perceptive disposition and mutual confidence in our interactions over the past three years. Whenever possible, I have tried to involve them in my own little creations of knowledge, interrogations and interpretations about other people like them or who are in similar situations. For these reasons and more, this blog is dedicated to all of them -- To: Bo Hu, Bo Hen, Lum, Deejay and Kavya --these pseudonyms translate as: "Don't know", "Don't see", "Forget", "Happy" and "Busy". 


Most of what I will write here deals with how people surrounding them (their families, neighbours, friends) are coping, if at all, with rapid agrarian transformations, where notions of what entails having "a better life" are being re-framed by a myriad of stakeholders, and enacted in peculiar ways by actors from below.