A Flower Blooms From the Ashes of War: Part 2

by JG Learned

I have just returned from the Lao side of the Viet Nam border, having assisted Jeff Hudgens and his 6 friends from the United States build a school floor and provide medical and material assistance to Ban Na Hom, a remote Lao village on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The inhabitants of the village are a minority group of Mon-Khmer extraction - the Bru Tribe - who have lived in and cultivated this area long before the great southward migration of Tai peoples from China's Yunnan Province in the 13th century.

There are many organizations doing aid-projects all over Laos. Most of these organizations spend upwards of 60% of their budget on administration alone. They spend money on shiny 4 W-D vehicles, airline tickets, expense accounts, paying staff and paying off officials. Rarely do you see individuals giving their time and help without expecting monetary remuneration and perks. Not long ago we booked a group of clients into the best hotel of a city in Laos only to find upon arrival that a group of doctors from Medicins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) had pre-empted the rooms, leaving our clients and us in the lurch. Jeff and his friends payed for their own flights and put their hearts, money and effort directly where it was needed. This was their goal.

Jeff wanted to express his gratitude to the village that helped him locate his father's remains. His father was a pilot, shot down during the Viet Nam War (or the Secret War In Laos - whichever way you prefer to call it). Jeff and his friends flew from Bangkok to Nakorn Phanom, Thailand the day after arriving from the United States. The next morning we crossed the great rolling Mekong River to Laos. After a 4-hour, dusty, bone-rattling – but beautiful – drive in pickup trucks from the town of Tha Kaek, we arrived in Ban Na Hom at sunset, unloaded our gear and set up camp in the headman's house before dinner and lay weary heads to rest soon after. Unlike in the west, roosters crow intermittently throughout the night and at 4:30 a.m. they reach a crescendo chorus that lasts until sunup. Sleep beyond that point is an improbability.

Tired and still jet-lagged, the team woke with the village and began preparations for the day's projects: the school floor and a dental clinic. Immediately following an early breakfast, the work began.

Among the team were two brothers, Bob and Bill Brown, 71 and 65 respectively, who both are still in the construction business. Bill was one of the men who built the Nakorn Phanom airbase in Thailand in the 1960s – the base from which Jeff's father flew off on his final mission. The brothers Brown immediately put their skills to work, mixing and pouring cement for the dirt-floored schoolhouse, teaching by example.

Bob Brown found time while working to entertain the village children, riding a bicycle backwards, making bamboo hoola-hoops, a box for box-hockey, and generally charming the entire village with his vitality and sense of humour. Work progressed slowly at first, then more rapidly as the village men picked up the knack of working cement.

While one part of the team worked on the school, Dr. Greg Armi and his assistant Jeff Meyers set up an outside dental clinic in the shade of a tree, checking the teeth of the 80 plus students and as many elders as they could and educating them in basic dental care. More than a hundred examinations were carried out in 2 long days. Several extractions were performed, including difficult surgery to extract an impacted, infected wisdom tooth. Another complicated extraction was performed in the dark with only a headlamp. With limited medical knowledge, I simultaneously set up a clinic to care for and assess the most basic medical needs of the villagers, most of whom have never seen a doctor in their lives. The school floor was completed by mid-afternoon the next day - 31 ½ cubic metres of concrete mixed and poured by hand. Woman carrying buckets from holes dug in the dry riverbed supplied the water, the men mixed, carried and poured the aggregate from buckets made from aluminum fuselage and wing, salvaged from crashed aircraft, perhaps Jeff's father's.

Jeff von Richter (a lot of Jeffs in this group) and Ken Macon put their energies back and forth wherever they were most needed, as did Jeff Hudgens who oversaw and coordinated the whole project with the help of Somboun, his Lao friend and interpreter.

The other goal of the team was to place a brass commemorative plaque at the crash site of Jeff's father's A-1 fighter plane. During the peak of the Viet Nam War he was shot down and killed deep in the jungle in the rugged limestone border terrain, while providing covering fire for a team rescuing two downed F-16 pilots: a touching gesture from a son to his father, who died while he was still a young child.

We threaded our way across rice fields and into the jungle past countless craters, some 60 feet wide and more than 15 deep – the result of 2000 lb bombs. What was once a forest of huge hardwoods is now recovering scrub jungle for the most part. Bombs and Agent Orange created a shattered wasteland. Everywhere was evidence of recently recovered unexploded ordinance, deep holes dug inside shallow craters.

The eroded, knife-edged limestone was a steep, tortured jumble, woven together with vines, tall bamboo and undergrowth. Of the crashed A-1 fighter plane that Jeff's father flew, little remains outside of a few nuts and bolts, the rest having been carried out and sold as scrap to the Vietnamese or utilized in the village as pails, vegetable planters and other utilitarian items.

On the last day blankets, sleeping mats, shoes, school supplies, soap, shampoo and other items were distributed amongst the 40-some families in the village. Interestingly – but not entirely surprisingly – an element of discord and jealousy reared its ugly head between some of the villagers and from neighboring villages, giving all food for reflection. Human nature is what it is. What we leave behind is not always what we intended to give.

Jeff and his friends didn't live more luxuriously than the villagers. They slept on thin mats on the floor; they ate local food; at night they sat around a single diesel-fuel lamp (a tin can with a wick) ; they huddled around fires in the predawn chill; and like the villagers, when they used the bathroom it was the ‘big bathroom': meaning when you relieve yourself, you walk across the rice field into the tree line, followed by a hungry pig and/or dog who cleans up your business after you. Often you have to whack them in order to make them wait. Though used to common amenities, they accepted it all good-humoredly in stride.

Both goals accomplished, the weary team made its dusty way back to the Mekong river for a night in modest comfort; beds, bathrooms without hungry pigs, running water and no all-night rooster chorus to deprive them of sleep - things we commonly take for granted.

Jeff Hudgens, his friends and community supplied the funds, energy and inspiration for this humanitarian adventure. North by North East provided the guides, organization and logistics. When all is said and done, we all have much to reflect on: the intent, the deed and the impact of providing help, and how it ultimately affected us all.

We are honoured to have been a part of this project and to have the opportunity to work with people like Jeff and his friends and hope that in the future other people will follow his example, without the assistance of organizations and bureaucracies, to make direct contact with those in need and to give not only from our pockets but from our hearts. To the three Jeffs, Ken, Greg, Bob and Bill: We at North by North East wish to thank you for letting us be a part of this grand humanitarian gesture. May the pure spirit within us all always light your path.