The Luxury Of Privacy

The Luxury of Privacy

Recently, I had occasion to spend a few weeks in a remote village in the tiny Southeast Asian nation of Laos.  Just as I have seen in many other parts of the developing world; they are accustomed to a few more people packed into small places than we are in our spoiled and pampered society.  I have witnessed buses and trains overflowing with humanity.  I have seen bustling streets and marketplaces crowded to the brim but these observations were always made in public.  Even though the thought had crossed my mind before in various and sundry exotic locales, a short stay with the villagers of Ban Nakalom provided the realization that something that is held so dear and regarded as a basic human right by the average wealthy (income greater of $2000 US a year) Westerner is actually quite a luxury. The luxury that I refer to in this case is privacy.

We live in a broken and fractured society.  Most marriages end in divorce, which leads to family members being pissed off at one another.  Children grow up and move away from their parents.  When the elderly show the slightest sign of senility or physical frailty, “successful” people don’t want to deal with the problem so they ship their relatives off to some substandard nursing home to die.  This is not the case in most other parts of the world, especially those sections where money is scarce.  I’m familiar with large scale tight knit extended families in Oaxaca, Mexico but Asians even top them when it comes to excessive procreation and claustrophobic inhabitation.  Evidently rice provides more energy than beans as over a billion people in China and India’s mega-societies can attest.   Any group of people that can reproduce faster than Catholics is very impressive!

First, I should provide a little bit of backstory regarding my arrival in Ban Nakalom.  Joshua Zahn, aka Josue’, is an old firefighter friend and world traveler buddy that I had not seen in quite some time.  A few years earlier, he had backpacked around Southeast Asia and had met and married a girl from Laos.  He built a nice large house for a ridiculously low amount of $ in her home village and now resides there for a portion of each year.  Josue’, met us in Vientiene, the national capital.  We spent a few days familiarizing with this city on the Mekong River and partying a bit.  After which we left town headed South for his small village amongst the rice paddies that was several hours away.  We arrived later in the evening.  Upon arrival, we got our first look at his newborn daughter, his pride and joy with the cute name of Kiwi.  Then, we were introduced to his wife, in laws, cousins, aunts, uncles, and various little kids.  Thus we got to know the household of 12 or so individuals.  Since our arrival was rather late, we soon said “Sai bai dee dorn yen (Good night)” and the household slipped off to a night of unsettled sleep.  Between babies crying, old people with loud hacking coughs, and everyone else snoring their asses off, to say that our night was restless would be putting it lightly.  Everyone in the village thought we were crazy the next day when we set up tents in the backyard and moved our sleeping bags since it’s so “yen lai lai (very, very cold)” in lowland Laos in January, with temperatures dipping as low as 60 degrees Farenheit in the middle of the night.  Burrrrr!  We spent most of the next few days hanging out at Josue’s house (the biggest in the village) with his family and an average number of guests at about 20 so there were 30 or more of us in the house at any given time.  A favorite pastime was playing volleyball with the kids with dozens of spectators (at the school yard) cheering from the sidelines.  It was impressed upon me then that with these crowded conditions, so much of these people’s lives revolved around social interaction.  Being a bit of a recluse myself, I did not quite know how to handle it.  At one point, I discretely cut out to Josue’s expansive porch in an attempt to quiet my thoughts over a few pages of an adventure novel that I was reading.  So I laid out my sleeping bag, sprawled upon my back, and jumped into Wilbur Smith’s epic plot.  Within less than 5 minutes, a local man who was about 35 years old walked onto the porch and saw that I was lying there.  He immediately came over, lied down directly beside me, put his head on my chest, and stared at the English words on the page.  Even after all I had seen in the village, this really blew my mind.  These people have absolutely no concept of personal space.  Now that I have seen India and China with my own eyes, I realize that most of the developing and undeveloped world is like this as well.

I just spent the last two months hiding out in my hovel (a basement apartment in Portland, Oregon) reading books, watching movies, and doing damned well what I please.  I had a few friends stop by, but for the most part, I was alone, just appreciating a little “me” time.  This is not how I always like to live but I have to admit that I enjoy the occasional extended hermitage hibernation session. I realize that this is because I am a spoiled First World American but we can’t change where we were born.  So remember, next month when you fork over that $600 to your landlord for a studio apartment what you are really paying for is a luxury, the luxury of privacy.

The End

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