1. Partnering With Schools

One of the ideas from the WWF fellow we met is to better team up with local schools,possibly through WWF's "Green Club" after school program (funded by European government). Other ways would be to offer teacher training programs. M already donates part of his proceeds to help the local school- they need lots of simple financial help for sure- and he goes out and buys the pencils and tables and delivers them. There's a lot of corruption here and he knows to do things himself if he wants to make sure they're done correctly.

But aside from the regular bricks and mortar needs, there is something unique, I've been thinking all along, that his lodge can offer, and that's a way for people to see how to run an ecologically low impact operation. Now, to be sure, the villagers up till now have always been low impact, being subsistence farmers and hunter-gatherers. But they now have electricity, and it's rare for people not to have access to TV now- mainly Thai, or Chinese period soaps dubbed in Thai, and, of course, commercials for consumer goods.

(Something that bothers M so much here is the litter-- then I realize that in the US we only had our national anti-litter campaign just 35 years ago. A big part of it I think is that Lao are used to biodegradable packaging. Just yesterday his wife handed me some khaolaam, sticky rice with coconut milk steamed inside a young bamboo stick. Just peel the bamboo to get at the rice. When you're done, toss the bamboo into the forest. No wonder then that we see tons of plastic bags all over the place... it's just like the banana leaf packaging no?)

So maybe M could participate in a program where teachers could come here and learn about the treks, and what it means to be an ecolodge. Or perhaps the older students could come here, and he could offer internships for them, to share the ethos of ecologically low impact operations. Perhaps one of them might stay on as future workers. Perhaps if he develops and maintains an active relationship with teachers, they can steer potentially good workers his way.