GREETINGS FROM BIG BROTHER MOUSE, IN LAOS!

Or, more precisely, from BBM’s adviser, Sasha, presently in Chiang Mai, Thailand for 2 weeks. While the news centers around Big Brother Mouse, it’s heavily mixed with my own views and insights. And I typically spend about 6-8 weeks in Laos, then 2-3 weeks in Thailand. It gives the staff in Laos some experience doing things without me. Hopefully, when I return, they won't decided I'm redundant.me a chance to do some jobs that require concentration. Meanwhile, I can work on some writing and computer jobs that proceed better with fewer interruptions.

The big job for these 2 weeks in Thailand is improving our database’s inventory and sales tracking – while accommodating 2 languages and alphabets, 3 currencies, and a staff with little computer experience, all made more complicated by a local tendency, when unsure what to do, to make a random guess and see what happens; a tendency made all the worse after a tourist with a laptop demonstrated to someone that if you push certain buttons, a naked lady appears on the screen, and one young fellow on our staff was determined to figure out which buttons those were on the office computer, even after I explained that a naked lady wouldn’t pop up unless somebody had already put her in the computer (office computers are not connected to the internet, for what should by now be obvious reasons), and so far as I knew, nobody had put any naked ladies inside that computer, nor should they do so.

Two paragraphs, and I’m already talking about naked ladies! To those familiar with both cultures there’s now no question but that I’m in Thailand, not Laos.

BRIEF NEWS AND REQUESTS

Our website grows: In November-December we added descriptions and pictures of every book we’e published, and most forthcoming titles. We’ve now added a biography page for everyone on the staff in Luang Prabang, and plan to get the Vientiane staff posted soon. We’ve also added FAQs about Big Brother Mouse, and Laos. Please come visit! (www.BigBrotherMouse.com)

Translation rights received: Thank you to Christopher Trumbo for quickly and generously granting permission to publish a Lao edition of Johnny got his Gun, by his father, Dalton Trumbo.

Translation rights granted: We have given permission for our book New, Improved, Buffalo to be published in both Khmer and French by Open Book in Cambodia. It will be the first of our books published outside of Laos.

Books needed: We occasionally need copies of specific books, either to directly translate them, to use them for research, or as models for developing Lao books. Several people have already been very generous about shopping and mailing requested titles to us. If you’d be willing to help with this on occasion, please let me know, so we don’t need to keep asking the same people.

French dinosaurs: We need a volunteer who can read French, as well as many reasonably fluent in English, to help us prepare a book about dinosaurs in Laos, working from materials that are mostly in French. It will mean spending a month or two in Luang Prabang. If you can make a visit to Savannakhet in the south, as well, that would be helpful.

French textbook: Does anyone happen to have a stray copy of the old French textbook “Ecouter et Parler”? (It was widely used in the USA, perhaps elsewhere; it always had a bright red cover. The blue textbook, for Spanish, would be equally useful.) Please let me know, I’d like to get copies of a few selected pages.

Web research help: We occasionally need people who will help do online research for a variety of purposes – from finding photos that an artist can work from, to research for a book. Few people here have the English skills to do this, and internet connections can be slow. Typically we would need 5 to 15 hours for a project. If it’s text, that can be emailed to us; if it’s art, it will need to be put on a CD and mailed. If you’d like to volunteer, and I’ll keep you in mind for the next time a need arises.

Geek needed: This newsletter is going out by a semi-low-tech method: I send it to myself, and attach a blind carbon to a dozen names from our mailing list. I do that 2-3 times a day, until it’s gone out to the whole list. But the list is rapidly expanding, whereas my hours-per-day is not, and there is surely a better way. Can anyone out there advise?

Travel: In December I joined a group to bike from Chiang Mai (northern Thailand) to Laos, a 9-day trip, including a day on the Mekong, where the are no roads. It was a wonderful time, with many stops in villages when I showed books to kids. I’ve thought about putting together about a 6-day trip, combing road, boat, and perhaps bikes if feasible, for people who have sponsored book parties or books. It would probably be in October or early November. We'll send out an announcement if this comes together, but if you might be ncluded to come to Laos for it, please let me know, so we can keep you updated early enough to make plans.

ANOTHER MOVE

At the beginning of December we moved into our third location, in 1-1/2 years. It involved some difficult decisions, but now it looks like they were the right ones. When we started publishing, in 2006, I estimated that from my savings I could pay for the printing of our books for 2 years, and a bit of a third; and that donations that came in during those first three years would probably be enough to pay for the rest of the third-year printing. (Printing is such a big part of the budget that "pay for printing" and "pay for everything" are roughly synonymous.) The plan was this:

Year 1: Focus entirely on producing books. We set a goal of 30 books in the first year. Spend a small amount of time experimenting with distribution ideas.

Year 2: Keep publishing, with a goal of at least 30 more books and hopefully more, but also further develop at least one system of distribution, and experiment with others.

Year 3: Continue the publishing and distribution, and evaluate fundraising. The question was: Can we just focus on doing what needs to be done in Laos? Will enough people find us, see that we're doing good work, and support us? Or will I need to take time to go back to the US and develop a fundraising apparatus?

Year 1 went just as planned.

In Year 2 we hit a roadbump: Laos and Luang Prabang have rapidly become popular (and, in the case of Luang Prabang, trendy) travel destinations. I first came to Luang Prabang in 2003, during the SARS epidemic. Terrorism fears and the stock market drop, followed by SARS, had all taken their toll on travel. I could walk into most restaurants and be the only person there. Now, we have boutiques on the main street and several 5-star resorts going up. Real estate and rents were going into a frenzied upward spiral. We need a reasonably central location, and our landlord wouldn't give us a long-term lease. So when a large building came on the market, we bought it -- with the money I had expected to use for printing.

It was a difficult decision, but probably the right one; three people have already told me, 'I wish I'd bought that.' However, it left us short of cash for printing. I spent some time expanding the website, we got more active about encouraging people to sponsor a book party, or a book, and we've now got enough funds to get the presses rolling again. We probably won't get out 30 new books in our second year, but we have a stable base of support, we've made good headway on distribution, and we don't have to wonder -- as other small, non-boutiquey businesses in town are wondering right now -- what's going to happen when our lease is up.

NEW BOOKS, AGAIN

Last summer I bragged that we had sent 30 books to press our first year, probably more than any entity ever did in Lao history. That was followed by 7 months of no books going to press, as explained above. But now the presses are rolling again, so I can resume bragging. In the past two months:

* One book finished printing (Animals of Australia).

* Three went to press in January, including Baby Care, a book for young mothers, our second book to include Hmong as well as Lao languages, and our first book explicitly targeted at adults. (Well, physically adult, at least. It's not uncommon in rural villages for a pair of 15-year-olds to get married.)

* Three more books went to press this month: Animals of Laos; An adaptation of The Wizard of Oz, starring a Lao girl who is swept away by a flood. The Monk and the Trees, our re-issue of beautiful book published 10 years ago by a French NGO about a monk who travels through Laos, blessing a different tree for a different reason on each day of the week.

* By the end of this week, six more books should have been sent off for the government approval that we need before we can print.

* Five more can be quickly finished when I get back to Laos later this month, with just a few hours or a day of my time on each.

BOOK PARTIES

We knew all along that publishing books would not be enough. We would also need to create ways to get them into the rural villages that had never had books before. Faithful readers of our website know that our primary mechanism for doing this, so far, is having rural book parties. For the non-faithful, you’re still welcome to visit our website! Here, I should briefly explain that book parties aren’t simply a chance for kids to have fun, worthy as that goal may be. They also have other goals:

* Our young staff gets kids excited about books;

* We talk about how to take care of books, something that we have learned is not intuitively obvious to rural kids.

* Every child gets to select a book of their own, nearly always the first book they’ve ever owned.

* We leave more books with the school, so kids can swap their book for a new one after they’ve read it. We call this a mini-library, making books available for the first time in a village where the record-keeping and administration of a more conventional library would not be feasible.

Apologies to those who have sponsored a book party and didn't get a report yet. We had an unexpectedly large number of visitors, during the high season that began in November, who wanted to sponsor a party, and of course to attend it. So we've fallen about 6 weeks behind on the events sponsored by email.

We've added 3 more people to our staff, and as busy season drops off, we'll catch up.

Another slight glitch this week has been contacting schools. We've been to most of the nearby schools; we're now visiting schools that require 45 minutes to 2 hours of travel. Often the team goes out and does 3 parties in 2 days, sleeping in the school. But generally the only way to make our preliminary contact with these village is for someone to go in person. Khamla's motorbike, which his parents got him when he entered college (selling 4 buffaloes to get the money!) has worn out. So he was motorbike-shopping when I left Laos, this time with cash rather than cattle in his pocket, and we should be back on the road again soon.

PRICE INCREASES

The year started with a scare. The first quote from the printer in 2008 was 75% higher than he'd quoted us in August 2007 for the same book, when we needed a preliminary estimate. The quote for the next book was also dramatically higher, compared to six months earlier, and our goals for 2008 started looking remote.

Fortunately, it wasn't quite so bad. The first quote was indeed 75% higher, but was a fluke; perhaps he had low-balled the preliminary estimate, or just made a mistake. On the second one, I made the mistake, and compared two books that weren't actually identical. Overall, prices are "only" about 25-30% higher this year, and much of that is due the declining dollar. (Prices like this are often quoted in dollars, a quaint holdover from ancient days, when the U.S. dollar was considered more stable than the Lao kip.)

SPONSORING A BOOK

Toward the end of last year, we had a couple of inquiries from people who wanted to sponsor a book as a gift for someone. If they did so, could the book be printed and in their hands by the end of the year?

Unfortunately, no. Even after we finish preparing a book, it has to go through the government approval process, then get printed. Together these take another 6 weeks to 4 months, and we have no control over that speed. So if you want to sponsor a book in honor of someone as a gift, and to have it in December, the latest time to start is August, and then you’ll need to select from books that are nearly finished. For a wider selection it would be better to start – right about now. If this appeals to you, please let us know more about what type of book you’d like to sponsor, and we’ll tell you what might be suitable.

TRANSLATIONS

What should a Big Brother Mouse newsletter talk about? There are no precedents, so I’ll improvise, and the problem of translations is often on my mind lately. Of course, the subject may not interest everyone as much as it does me. A beer-maker can probably talk about hops for much longer than you or I want to listen. On the other hand, didn’t someone recently write a best-selling book about salt? So here goes.

Ultimately our goal is to see more and more books, of all sorts and on all levels, written in Lao, by Lao writers, for a Lao readership. But someone who’s never read a good story is unlikely to sit down and write one. Someone who’s never written a high school term paper is not likely to write even a simple nonfiction book. (And the problem isn’t that teachers don’t ask students to write terms papers. They can’t. With no books, and no library, the students would have no way to do the research.)

We’ve had some success getting young people here to write traditional folktales and very simple books, such as alphabet books. Currently, three of our staff in Luang Prabang are writing a book inspired by the Dr. Seuss classic, Green Eggs and Ham, which used a total vocabulary of (as I recall) only 55 words. The theme they chose was, “Do you like to read?”

But to get the range of books that we want, we often have to start with an English text, and have it translated. That’s no small job.

Even translators working in closely related languages, such as German and English, have difficulties when a concept easily expressed in one language is not so easily expressed in another. How do you say “Zeitgeist” in English?

The problems multiply when the languages, and cultures, are quite different. A lion in the original “Dr. Dolittle” is described as “proud and angry.” Khamla flatly told me, “That can’t be translated. If the lion is proud, he can’t be angry. And if he’s angry, he can’t be proud.” “Sure he can,” I wanted to say. “Just put down the word for ‘proud’, and then the word for ‘angry’.” But often the best way to understand cultural differences is to look for an analogy. If I were translating a book that seemed to say, in another language, “The girl was tall and short,” I’d say, ”No, whatever sense that might make in the original language, it makes no sense in English. Sure, I could write the words, but really, it just can’t be translated.” So Dr. Dolittle’s lion is merely proud. He’ll have to get angry some other time.

Translations also require context, background information, and reasoning skills that often just have not yet been developed here. The English text for one book included the phrase “When the first humans reached the Americas, about 15,000 years ago...” This became, “When the first humans reached the United States, about 15,000 years ago...” The translator didn’t know that there were no countries at all, and definitely no USA, 15,000 years ago. With a little thought, she might have realized that there would not have been a country already established, awaiting the first human arrivals, but reasoning skills of that sort were never taught or encouraged in the schools she attended.

Finding vocabulary is also a problem. Words that were not needed in a rural village a hundred years ago often still do not have a Lao equivalent. The exception is objects that are now common in the cities, where a foreign word has been adapted, or existing Lao words are strung together to the new concept.

So there are words for computer (‘kom’ or ‘kompeu’) and airplane (choose between the Lao words for ‘flying boat’ or ‘flying machine’, or ‘nyon’ which perhaps evolved from the French word ‘avion’), but no agreement about what to call wheat. One dictionary lists the same Lao word for both wheat and corn; another gives the same (different) word for both wheat and barley. For our astronomy book we found several possible ways to translate “comet” – including ‘star-with-tail’ – but no agreement, and much overlap with the words for asteroid, planet, and star. Always a sucker for anything cute, I decided to use ‘star-with-tail.’

“Mammal” does have an accepted Lao synomyn, but it’s a long one: “Animal-that-feeds-milk-to-its-young”. Three hours of research turned up no word at all for the mammal sub-category of which we are all so fond, the primates. (I believe, quite seriously, that in the past the major classification system for plants and animals has been ‘edible’ and ‘non-edible’. Thus there are different names for two species of cricket.)

There are consistent, widely-accepted terms for Laos’s neighboring countries and a half-dozen other major nations, but not for the rest. As we translate, we are contantly addressing such questions such as, “How do you say ‘Turkey’ in Lao?” (The country, that is. For the animal, said to have been imported by American GI's longing for a traditional Thanksgiving, there's already a word: "Chicken-with-trunk". But it doesn't seem suitable for the country.) Then we try to keep track of what we used, so we can be consistent next time.

Often we’ve ended up coining a word, if we couldn’t find any record of it having been used already. For Africa’s ‘secretary bird’, so named because feathers protruding from it’s head reminded someone of a 19th-century secretary’s quill pens, we merely used the Lao words for ‘secretary’ and ‘bird’. Warthog became “African wild pig.”

“Stegosaurus” is a challenge. In any language, there are some letter combinations that aren’t allowed; you can’t start an English word with “ng”. In Lao, a word cannot begin with “st”, nor can it end with “s” (or “r”, “l”, “g”, “d”, or many other letters). Should we try to devise a Lao spelling and pronunciation that follows Lao patterns? Or one that more closely follows the pronunciation of other languages?

As an abstract question, I’d prefer the first. But I’ve spent many hours helping students with their English pronunciations, particularly with letters at the ends of words. While I think English is often over-rated as a solution for problems in less developed countries, being able to speak English is indisputably useful. And age 20 is too late to train your tongue to say “bar” differently from “ball.” If kids can learn to say “Stegosaurus” and “Pterodactyl” at the age that western kids learn to say these words, it will save them many frustrating and often fruitless hours of tongue-twisting, later on. So this particular dinosaur is now a “sa-tay-go-saw-rus”.

Even after a text is translated, we’re left with vastly different, and firmly-held, opinions about what is proper Lao. But having already covered everything from naked ladies to Stegosauruses, I’ll leave that subject for the next newsletter.

with best wishes for the year,

Sasha, Big Brother Mouse