Laos Red Cross, Luang Prabang, Laos.

When Keith finally arrived at Luang Prabang, he insisted we have a massage at the Laos Red Cross. He'd been reading about them and knew this was their only source of income and that they desperately needed money to run their entire list of services ... but then we had the worst time ever trying to find the Red Cross Head Quarters.

There was a reason for that. Stupidly, for nearly two hours we wandered the length and breadth of Ban Wisunalat, getting sunburned and blistered and increasingly cross, looking for the Red Cross sign, not realising that the strange history of Laos meant it didn't have one.

To save you similar trouble,
here's the Laos Red Cross Head Quarters,
right opposite Wat Wisunalat.

Laos Red Cross doesn't use the Red Cross symbol because it isn't actually part of the International Red Cross Organisation. The Peoples Democratic Republic of Laos does not allow international aid agencies into the country because they strongly object to foreign interference, although other nations are allowed to send money. And, yes, only the Government itself is allowed to handle any international aid funding because only they, so they say, know what needs to be done in their country, and the less said about that the better.

The Laos Red Cross is actually a grassroots organisation, put together by good local people as an umbrella for the good works they do around the country. Needless to say, they get no funding from the government and so raise the money they need by giving massages and detoxes at their Head Quarters above. They charge more than elsewhere - Massage = US$30.00, Sauna and Detox = US$10.00 - but can you blame them; they have no other source of income and there is soooo much they have to do.

And they do it too. Although the International Red Cross isn't the same thing as the Laos Red Cross, the international body keeps a watchful eye on their activities and the upshot is that it endorses the Laos Red Cross totally, allowing it to continue to use its name and helping whenever and where ever it can.

The Laos Red Cross is also the only medical service in Laos - again an opportunity to castigate the French for not setting up a hospital system - despite or maybe because of the fact they have no "doctors". What they have is "Native Practitioners", and the name is such a blast from the past, I totally had to meet one.

You may already know this but I'll tell you again anyway: When Dr D.W. Hoodless took over the Fiji School of Medicine in Suva back in the 1920s, the commonly held view was that "natives lacked the fixity of purpose to become doctors" and even though, at FSM, Pacific Islanders did a full medical degree, as they had been since 1885, they were not permitted to call themselves doctors. Instead they were called "Native Practitioners".

Dr Hoodless rightfully found this outrageous and finally got rid of that stupid and petty-minded restriction by sending the best of his students (our late President Ratu Sir Kamesese Mara being one such) off to prestigious overseas universities (Canterbury University in New Zealand being the main, although Oxford University was also helpful in this regard.) to do further studies. And these "Native Practitioners", I'm proud to say, more than held their own, earning very prestigious second degrees, and thus, by sheer force of "the obvious", were finally permitted to call themselves Doctors.

So you can see why I was shocked to discover that, in this day and age, the world still had "Native Practitioners" and I really wanted to meet one in person and indeed I did and here's the very charming fellow himself:

Mr Sahi

Although Mr Sahi and I had no language in common, I decided to consult him: for six months I'd had a strange triangular patch of numbness on my left foot and no western doctor I'd seen about it either understood it or could do a thing about it, so I asked Mr Sahi, sitting right there as you can see him, explaining, mainly in mime, what and where the problem was. Without warning he stuck a finger into my leg, right beside the left kneecap, and an almost electrical volt shot through my body. Naturally I jumped. He then smiled and stuck an impossibly strong thumb into that same spot. The pain was unbearable, but when he lifted his thumb off, I felt tingling in the numb spot and then, for the first time in months, I got full feeling back.

And then he demonstrated a way of sitting that I must immediately give up and I thought "He's wrong. I don't sit like that." but I've since noticed that, whenever I watch TV, that's precisely how I sit. Mr Sahi nailed it precisely! I'd been hooking my heel around my knee for balance - our sofa is very narrow - and cut off the "chi" right down that meridian with the resulting numbness at the base of my big toe. Very clever fellow, Mr Sahi!

Mr Sahi is retired from his medical practice but volunteers his time to train locals in massage and detox, the two traditional Laos healing methods. And the Laos massage done here isn't at all like the Thai massage offered at the LP massage places; it's more like their own version of traditional Chinese acupressure, wherein they trace the meridians with their thumbs and stick a thumb deep into any spot where they feel a blockage.

I also consulted Mr Sahi when I came down with that strange malarial illness and this is precisely what he did; after giving me a herbal tissane to drink, he traced meridians to move around my chi, then made me drink lots of water and told me to go home and sleep, which I did, for fourteen hours straight. And, yes, I woke up the next morning feeling really, really good. He also told me, I think, that I should come back the next day for a herbal detox, but ... well, Keith was going on about how he didn't think a third world sauna was a place you wanted to be, what with heat and wet undoubtedly incubating huge cultures of truly hideous diseases. I listened to him, and, although Gerald would probably have agreed with Keith, I probably shouldn't have. I'd have liked to try a traditional Laos detox cure.

But what does Laos Red Cross do? Well, in addition to the usual, providing the full range of medical services, they have interesting projects, often taking up the most seemingly bizarre and idiosyncratic causes with rather startling results.

One example I particularly liked is their work among the Hmong hill-tribes. See, they all thought the Hmong were cretinously stupid and so, not hampered by even a smidgen of political correctness, got to wondering why that would be. On a hunch, they tested a group of hill-farmers and discovered they were seriously iodine deficient. Since iodine deficiency in the mother causes cretinism in the child, they then chose a sample group of pregnant Hmong women, feeding them varying amounts of iodine, and then monitoring the intelligence of their subsequent offspring ...

... and it turns out that they were right and all those "iodine kiddies" are bright as buttons; like, really, really, really smart. So now they give iodine tablets to all the pregnant Hmong and the kids are all wayyyy smart. Like my little friend here ...

My friend the souvenir seller.

... who saw me doing Killer Sudeko and asked me to teach her. It was astonishing how quickly she grasped the concept, but then she immediately wanted to properly figure out the answers (killer sudeko is the most difficult kind), so wanted to take my puzzle book away with her to work on it. I understood the need - my brain too desperately wants to solve puzzles - so, rather than surrendering the entire book, I ripped out several pages ... and for the rest of the day I kept coming across clusters of little Hmong kiddies, totally engrossed, trying to figure out what to put in each square.

These Hmong street-kids all speak great English, are literate and numerate despite very little education, and also are great fun, really enjoying getting to know the tourists and finding out as much as they can about the outside world. To this end they befriend everyone, using their souvenir-selling merely as a front. However, gorgeous as they are, they all have that strange and not quite pleasant air of knowing they are cleverer than everyone around them. They also have nothing real to do with all those "smarts", so I think this is something the Laos Red Cross didn't think through: why make kids so much smarter than their parents when there isn't a real education system in place for them to take advantage of nor anyone to encourage them to aspire to anything?

However, that's not really the fault of the Laos Red Cross who have, in fact, worked a miracle here and are not responsible for the rest of it. I guess it gives me just another chance to castigate the French for their lack of endeavour in setting up a proper infrastructures for the locals in their former colonies. And their current colonies too, by the way, as you can see in places like New Caledonia where there is still no education system for the locals and everyone who complains winds up dead!

Yes, I know I've said all this before, but it's something that can't be said enough! Neither can "Shame on you, France. Shame on you!" so please feel free to say that kind of thing yourself at every available opportunity! And if they say something like "Natives lack the fixity of purpose for education" feel free to throw Dr Hoodless's name into any resulting argument. Perhaps, if we all do it enough, the Colonial French will be shamed enough to finally put this right!

Mmmm, there's a dream!

But let's stop this pleasant and needful French-bashing and return to the Laos Red Cross:

It's a fabulous organisation doing amazing and needful things, so, whenever you're in Luang Prabang, make sure you go in there for a traditional Laos healing massage (US$30.00) and don't listen to Keith and try a herbal detox sauna (US$10.00) as well, and do this as often as you can, every day you're there, and then, later, when you're sitting in one of Luang Prabang's gorgeous little streetside cafes and get swarmed by friendly and clever little Hmong street-kids who quiz you about your life, home and country, smile to yourself and think "That's what I just paid for".

Laos Red Cross Head Quarters: opposite Wat Wisunalat, Ban Wisunalat.