I stay in a flat two blocks from the centre of Vientiane. Behind me is one of the poorer districts. Every evening I see an Indian man bringing his cow home from whatever patch of grass he has tethered it that day. There was a time, not so long ago, when the cow didn’t have to be tethered. It would have wandered, along with goats and chickens, through the school yards and along the dusty pot-holed roads. Maybe finding itself a shady spot under a flame tree or a warm spot to slumber on the road. There was not much to disturb it – mostly bicycles, some motorbikes and the odd project-owned car.
Now, in front of my flat is one of the major roads streaming with traffic. I’m shocked by the traffic, by the change in only eighteen months. Since I left, all the major roads and drainage systems have been completed. Many of the shady trees have been sacrificed to road widening. To progress. Now there’s an endless flow of four wheel drives, utes, motorbikes and noisy, exhaust- belching tuk tuks imported from Thailand. Nobody walks or rides bicycles any more except the very poor and foreigners like myself. Here in the capital the changes are stark – the traffic, the shops, the restaurants, the internet cafes. But an Australian colleague insists nothing has changed, really changed, he says, underneath.
I am given a desk in the Ministry of Education. Here in the Department of Teacher Training I see people busily organising their day. Carting boxes of training materials in or out of the office, working at their computers, getting on with their work. I think about the change from when I first worked in Laos. In 1990, if you walked into an office, as likely as not, nothing would be happening. People sat at empty desks reading the newspaper, chatting – or literally doing nothing, staring, bored. Everyone was waiting for instructions from above. Initiative was discouraged. Some time later, when I had finally been allowed to go to the provinces, I listen as my Lao colleague from the Ministry expresses her frustration with a teacher. She tells him, “You can’t wait for us to give you everything and tell you what to do. Times have changed. You must think for yourself now. You’ll never move forward if you can’t decide for yourself”. Ah, yes, I think to myself, something is changing – but is it changing, really changing, underneath?
Return
When I returned to Vientiane it was almost eighteen months since AusAID assistance to the English for Government Officials program had ceased. My intention, during this second stage of fieldwork, was to research if and how the Lao stakeholders had overcome the practical, political and cultural challenges they had faced as the LEFAP project was drawing to a close. As in my previous field trip, I canvassed the views of administrators, counterparts and teachers, but this time I also sought, through interviews and surveys, the views of students (see Appendix 6). My previous investigation had been deliberately broad in its focus in order to leave open the possibilities for widely ranging Lao responses. This later investigation was narrower, focusing on the specific issues that had emerged from the previous multivoice reconstruction. Eighteen months before, the Lao stakeholders in all locations had articulated commitment to the program. This was despite the project having been insufficiently grounded in the socio-political realities of Laos necessary for a secure and stable program to have been established before AusAID withdrew its support. As a consequence, in this chapter, the post-project experiences of Lao stakeholders are woven into stories around the previously documented disjunctions between:
Lao and donor priorities in regard to project focus
Lao post-project responsibility for institutionalising the program and the building of management capacity
Lao post-project responsibility for staffing and the number of teachers trained
Teacher knowledge and provisions for upgrading
Lao post-project responsibility for recurrent costs and the building of capacity for income generation at the ELRC
The English language training needs of Lao government officials and the extent of the curriculum pathway provided
The demands of a competency-based approach and Lao cultural expectations.
The stories depict the continuing evolution of the Lao socio-political path to modernisation. Some tell of the accelerated pace of change in the capital city, some of
the effects of which have been described in the ‘Snapshot of change’ that began this chapter. These Vientiane-based stories reveal how AusAID intractability resulted in a wastage of project funding and a consequent failure to support the country’s move towards decentralisation. The provincial stories tell of the changes ushered in by this policy and reveal how it had resulted in a widening gap between program provision and need. They reveal how the inadequacy of the project design to meet these needs constrained the ability of government officials to express their development priorities in local and regional forums and thereby limited their ability to take charge of their country’s development process. The stories contain examples of the hegemonic hold of the dominant discourse on the thinking of development workers, but they also demonstrate how culturally and politically aware Lao stakeholders are attempting to overcome the disjunctions. The most powerful of these is the emergence, eighteen months after project funding had ceased, of the ‘Middle Way’ solution to the disjunction between ‘foreigner’ values and Lao values.