Laos: The Baci Ceremony and the Country That Time Moves Differently
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Laos is the most bombed country per capita in history. Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of bombs on Laos — more than all bombs dropped in World War Two combined — during a secret war conducted while the country was officially neutral. Approximately 30 percent of those bombs failed to detonate. They remain in Laotian soil, killing and injuring people every year. The UXO Lao organisation has been clearing unexploded ordnance since 1996. The process will take generations.
Against this history, Laos maintains a pace and quality of life that strikes visitors as remarkable. The Mekong River flows through the country's west, and life along it moves at the rhythm of the water. Luang Prabang, a UNESCO World Heritage town of gilded temples and French colonial architecture at the confluence of the Mekong and Nam Khan rivers, may be the most beautiful town in Southeast Asia. Every morning, monks in saffron robes walk barefoot through the streets collecting alms — a practice called tak bat — that begins before sunrise.
The baci ceremony — a ritual of blessing performed at significant life moments: weddings, departures, arrivals, recoveries from illness — involves tying white strings around the wrists of the person being honoured while elders offer prayers and good wishes. The strings carry the good intentions of those who tied them. They are worn until they fall off naturally. The ceremony is Buddhist in framework but older in feeling, rooted in an animistic tradition of welcoming a person's multiple souls back into their body at moments of transition.
