The next morning we left pakse for Bolaven Farm - a coffee farm run as an NGO, whose goal is to provide villagers with education and skills to make a living for their families. It is really neat. People go through a 3 year program, learning to grow organic coffee, getting paid on a sliding scale depending on how much coffee they harvest and how well they take care of the land allotted to them. They are given a house to live in with their family beside their plot. At the end of the three years, they will have made enough to buy their own plot of land and grow coffee. Their are many farmers who have successfully done this. The farm has a central meeting place where the families that live on the farm meet together for church services and they were having special celebrations for Christmas with lots of singing. The farm also does lots of extra programs teaching them English, helping with medical bills and other things. We had a great time playing games with the kids and took lots of pictures - and one of the kids had a camera and took a photo of me!
It is Christmas day, so the kids had the day off school. The farmers and their families (about 150 people) shared a meal, the parents had a worship service, and then the kids sang and danced. It hits a deep cord in my heart when you see the joy and happiness of little kids praising God, who have so little here on earth. Some even have partial blindness, but that didn't hold them back from singing their hearts out.
The kids loved 1 song in particular, so much so that it must have been repeated for at least 45 min. Anna and I got into it and sang and danced with them - to the laughter and joy of the kids.
After the singing, one of the leaders had a bag of candy and was throwing it into the group of kids - their very own candy man! Some of the small kids didn't get any candy, and started to cry. The amazing thing is that 2 or 3 other kids would come over to share their candy with them. As we've learned and seen, this friendly, generous attitude is very much part of the Laosian people. In fact, in school, students will help each other out on exams so that everyone can pass. From a Western perspective, this would seem to be counter productive. In reality, it means people care for others, share, and make friends, not opponents. I'm not promoting cheating on tests, but we can definitely learn to share ourselves with others to help them grow.
It was a very unique and special Christmas for us to celebrate with people from a different culture and who have so little. It was a sober reminder of how much we truly have to be thankful for, and it was actually a nice break to be away from the western commercialized Christmas, although we did miss spending time with our families.
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