Birth of the Mekong River Super Hero

The Mekong was flooding rather badly and in some part such as Luang Prabang, the water level went up as high as 23m, well above the river bank height of 18m. Archer mentioned that 4 people were killed in the flood in Laos.

Went to help out last week on Wed and Fri. It was a back breaking moment, and Wed was exceptionally bad as I didn’t expect it to end so late, 2am which I reached home. And I still had to teach the following day! Darn! They should totally cancel classes! I had 3 full lessons on Thurs!

Basically, what I did was to drag the sandbags to the side of the road (the river banks had already burst, and we had to prevent the water from flooding to the road), pile up the sandbags, and make a sandbag wall.

What I didnt understand was that some people were just standing around and watching… I had to literally use my kay poh attitude and ’suggested’ to them to help out! Haha… And being the efficient Singaporean with some army background lah, I came up with the human chain line, to pass the sandbags, instead of everybody dragging it for about 10 metres or so.

Worked for a while, then everyone preferred to drag the 10m, so I developed more muscles along the way lor.

Fri was more relaxed as I took to shoveling the sand into the sandbag. It was quite fun actually, and good exercise! And compared to dragging the sandbags, shoveling was so much easier! No wonder some people refused to release the shovel!

Anyways, now I am nursing a stiff and painful left shoulder. Jerking, spasm kind of pain if I move too much. Darn…

So, the highlight was that I was interviewed by the T.V station! I mean, the camera was just in a car moving up and down, when they decided to stop at where we were (I went in the name of MoFA- Ministry of Foreign Affairs). And, suddenly, everybody went doubly hard at work (I must qualify by saying that MoFA staff were all very helpful and hardworking). So, someone just said, ‘Oh there is a Singaporean here!’ So got interviewed. Was asked something like how I felt about helping out and I gave some answer that I think the National Education Dept in MOE would be very proud! haha…

All in all, went well and a toast to the Laotian spirit of helping one another! In fact, many people were so high spirited one would think it was a festival of sorts!

Luckily, the situation is much better now. Woot.