Flashback: "The day I was a tree and a toilet"!

Chapter one.

I guess that many will agree on this one; Christmas evening’s day can be pretty predictable in terms of what is going to happen. Here I do not think about what could be inside the wrapping paper around the foreseeable Christmas presents tucked away under the unavoidable Christmas tree in the obvious Christmas decorated living room.
This is needless to say that this is when you come from a certain culture, and a culture where this Christmas thing is something and important.
For the writer of this Blog Christmas evening’s day –last year it is already- turned out this way.

We’d arrived in the city of Luang Prabang in Northern Laos on the 23rd of December by bus from Vientiane.Friends of ours -Bob, Yvonne and Larissa, who was also touring in Laos and Cambodia- had arrived the day before us, and had not surprisingly explored the city and the surroundings a bit. When we arrived I had a txt message on my phone to call them at their hotel, for the reason that they had an idea, what we could do on Christmas evening’s day.

Here I need to make a little excursion in the story, and go back one month in time, to tell something related to our work at an International School here in Hong Kong, and show a video.
The students in year 12, has to do something called CAS week. That means that they will take some action including Creativity, Activity and Service, That can be done in many specific ways, such as going to for example Laos and Cambodia to help an organisation called “Schools to Schools”, with their work setting up and supporting schools.
In November a group students and two teachers went to exactly Luang Prabang to help and sponsor a project there called ‘Library Boats”. These boats is a typical Mekong river boat, equipped with books and designated to go up the Mekong river to remote villages hidden in the jungle, and where they do not have normal access to books and or other educational material.

A group of students went to Laos to help and support the Library boat in Luang Prabang.

From this trip we got to know this noticeable project, and naturally this was in our mind when we decided to go to Luang Prabang.

Now in the story we're back in Laos at Christmas time last year, and we'd arrived in Luang Prabang, and the text message from our friends.
So when I called the hotel where our friends was living to get to know what the idea for Christmas evening’s day was, I was not so surprised of their suggestion for the next day.

They had already been to the library and talked to the manager. Obviously she could remember the work our students had done one month previously, so we were welcome. We decided to sponsor some books, some pens and notebooks and some balls and other toys. So the deal was that we should meet at the Library early in the morning, to go with the Library boat up the river to a little school in a village, which had not yet had the visit of the Library boat, and there we could hand over the book gift our-selves.