All this week Vientiane has been host to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, for which over 100 nations are here. For those of us who live here, it’s meant heightened security (the highest police presence I’ve ever seen here) and heavy traffic, but for the country, this is a huge deal. It’s not that often that delegations from this many nations come to Laos, and it represents a major development for the country, which is considered the most bombed country in the world (thanks to years of bombing during the Vietnam War). Cluster bombs still cause casualties and injuries in the rural provinces of Laos every day. During the convention, the represented countries signed a treaty to ban the use of cluster munitions. Disappointingly, though the US was a major contributer to the history of bombing in Laos, it is not taking part in the convention.
Yesterday, the six of us Princeton-in-Asia fellows had lunch with one of our predecessors who is here for the convention: the first ever Vientiane PiA fellow, and author of the successful book about life in Laos, Another Quiet American. He was posted here from 1998-2000, and offered an interesting perspective on how much the city has changed in the last ten years. The Vientiane that he described had no traffic lights, unpaved roads, hardly any cars, and a thriving black market to buy and sell US dollars. Now getting from one end of Lane Xang to another takes a frustratingly long time thanks to poorly-timed traffic lights, and you can’t drive a block without passing a new Toyota Hilux. Growth and development in Laos seems to have increased exponentially over the past ten years. And there’s no end in sight–the whole city seems like a construction zone at times, with new roads, new houses, new buildings all over the place. It’s unclear what kind of city Vientiane is going to become–despite all of the shiny new things cropping up, lifestyles and habits in someways seem unchanging, and it’s certainly not going to be Bangkok or Hong Kong anytime soon. My image of the city, based on descriptions from guidebooks, was so different from the reality I discovered when I arrived, and sometimes it seems like things are happening so quickly that it might be totally different again when my time here is over.