Pros and Cons and What To Do

This week was interesting but also a hard week at work. It ended with a large monthly NGO meeting, that Mr Khanthone was suupposed to be coming to, to give a presentation. He bottled it! He sent Khansome instead, who wasn't prepared, so made us and the oragnisation look like a bunch of muppets. Sam and I were not happy. It wasn't Khansome's fault, he was given all of 2 minutes notice. What annoyed us was that his phone kept going off during the meeting, Khanthone ringing him. Also that Khanthone wasn't too busy to come and pick us up after the meeting, but too busy to attend.

Not happy puppies we declined the offer of the lift and grabbed a tuk-tuk into the old town to see our friends. We went back to TT Guest House and saw Joy. We have not seen him since we left, so it was good to catch-up. He makes us laugh so much. I mentioned before the 'lady-boy but different' quote, whioch was his way of describing a lesbian. Well we have a new one for the Joy list of cracking quotes. We were talking about a bar called Samlo (whose symbol is a BIKE TAXI), which we have been in a couple of times. He mentioned he no longer went there as it had a bad reputation. We said we knew what he meant, as there are a lot of girls hanging off various fat falang. He confirmed this with the line, 'yes a lot of TAXI GIRLS go in there, you know what I mean?' Yes we did, and now taxi-girls goes into the vocabulary as a new term for working-girls, ladies-of-the-night, prostitutes.

After we left Joy we headed down to Sticky's, spending the rest of the night proping up the bar with teh Brit NGO workers, so we could have a damn good moan about the week we had had. Lao Style is starting to wear thin. We feel that we maybe fighting a loosing battle to get these people to anywhere near international working practices. We will keep trying for the next month at least, if we are still getting nowhere, then we will reconsider our options.