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The Beautiful Side of Globalization

July 22, 2008 2:18 PM

By Nick Schifrin, ABC News Digital Reporter, New Delhi

VIENTIANE, Laos – ABC News producer Clark Bentson and I were covering the Myanmar cyclone from neighboring Bangkok, Thailand, when we thought we might be able to get a Myanmar visa by applying from Laos.

The capital, Vientiane, is about an hour and a half from Bangkok and is one of the unknown jewels of southeast Asia.

It is a sparsely filled place, with one traffic light on the 25-minute drive from the airport to our hotel. It is perhaps most often noted by tourists for the local suds -- Beerlao, a beer that would be akin to naming Budweiser "American Beer."

After failing to get a visa, we set out to explore. We saw the beautiful Buddha Park on the outskirts of town, filled with statues of the Buddha -- reclining Buddha, fighting Buddha, meditating Buddha. We (actually, Clark refused) ate frog legs with our driver Sari, and we climbed up Patuxai, Vientiane's version of the Arc de Triumphe. 196 steps, 3 tourist shops.

But despite that ratio, the city is wonderfully calm and left alone by the Westerners who usually fill Bangkok and Hanoi instead.

We came across one American woman who'd been living there for 19 years. Her shop is hard to miss. Lao Textiles is located in a beautiful old French colonial mansion in the center of town and is the headquarters for Carol Cassidy, a professional weaver who has spent her adult life combining indigenous Asian and African talent with her own designs. In so doing she has created industries in India, Cambodia, Lesotho and Laos that sell exquisite local textiles to an audience from Hong Kong to Rome to New York.

"I build on indigenous culture and skill to create an international product of a high standard," she says. "The goal is to enable these rural producers to benefit. We're the beautiful side of globalization."

Her Next Big Thing: a bag made out of jungle vine by the women of Pakor, a village of about 100 people in Northern Laos filled with members of the minority khummu.

Through two translators, one of them told me by phone: "I hope the bag generates income and gets our products to someone who's interested. I hope it helps the women here have an income. Because usually it is the men who earn and decide everything."

Asked what she knew about the United States, another villager told me: "I don't know where it is. It's a country far away with many, many people who could get to know about Laos and our people through our bags."

Read the full story here.

July 22, 2008 in Nick Schifrin | Permalink | User Comments (0)

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