Looking at the photos we’ve taken was a good wake-up call for what I felt was like a good, long dream; two weeks in Laos. My post-expedition life has been marked with bouts of avoidance, maybe it’s the fear that, in remembering, we forget. That too much re-visiting of the past would cause these cherished memories to lose its lustre, and one day, fade away to nothingness. Also, it’s the question of how much to say and what not to write for this would blur the boundaries between my public and private space. Although sitting down and writing this in the wee hours of the morning is indeed a terribly challenging task, just like how goodbyes are hard to say, but still have to be said, I’m here to share my two cents worth.

I could deliver a day-to-day description of what happened over in Laos, where the days are numbered and unnamed; Mondays Tuesdays Wednesdays lose their significance to be taken over by Day One Two Three, in true reflection of the laid-back Laos lifestyle. But, “memory, I realize, can be an unreliable thing; often it is heavily colored by the circumstances in which one remembers”, I quote the writer Kazuo Ishiguro, and “no doubt this applies to certain of the recollections I have gathered here”; the nature of memories is never constant and this makes the search for authenticity a tough task.

Or I could, wistfully, write about the little things that mean so much to me that they almost become meaningless; the mute and deaf little boy at the back of a motorbike carrying his pet fish in a plastic bottle to school, the flies above our bowls of noodles, the clasping of small hands in a thank you, buckets of cement, kampong games played, the whirring of the ceiling fan in a dusty classroom, a trembling wrist as white threads are gently tied on, pressed with blessings whispered so softly you can't hear them until you bend lower and closer to the sadness in their eyes etc. But words wouldn’t do justice to what we’ve experienced, much as it’s the only means we can use to share what we’ve seen and felt.

One of my most memorable experiences was playing with the children (despite them having exams the next day) in the rainpool, I had the time of my life! A beautiful scene of children playing, carefree and joyful, riding their bicycles in the pool, embracing the rain, jumping, throwing ‘skipping’ slippers (replacement for stones), running for running, getting all wet without worries. When I think about it, if I were to do that everyday of my life, I wouldn’t be happy. Still, it was and is happiness captured in the eternity of the moment.

I feel lost for words when friends ask me “What for?” when they find out I’m going to Laos. It seems right to answer, in a nutshell, for community work, yet I find that term not entirely encompassing in its entity. Perhaps it’s due to conventional, traditional labels we tie to ‘community service’ at the societal level, we do love to classify the whats and nots of our existence under compact categories, maybe out of the psychological distortion that that makes our life easier, but in doing so and focusing too much on the black or/and white, we neglect (subconsciously deliberately?) the grey areas that lurks beneath the surface, seemingly invisible yet invincibly real.

Therefore, I feel that the emphasis shouldn’t be on how we’re here to help, wow, us gracious Singaporeans. Of course I’m not totally ruling out that possibility, (I wouldn’t dare, I’d be setting myself up against the humanity of mankind), ultimately, at the end (where it’s really a new beginning) of an expedition, it’s more of how much you have gained personally, not in monetary value, not merely in skills learnt and knowledge obtained, but in how others have touched you, and how you have touched others. How others give themselves to you, how you give yourselves to others. To me, that is the very meaning of our existence. We’re all bound by the same starting and ending points; birth and death, in any case, rich or poor, happy or sad, young or old (note that there’s only two sweeping categories rooted in the extremes due to complications in pinpointing the many grey areas, I have not forgotten the greys),we’re all undeniably human.

Perhaps it could be considered lucky that we had such wonderful living conditions, all our daily essentials and more were being taken care of, I started with the thinking that this comfort in the physical aspect doesn’t really enable a person to step out of the usual mental capacity and be challenged to see things in differing perspectives. This is because I believe that the body, mind and soul are somehow interconnected and only when you step out of your physical comfort zone will you move out of the familiar way of thinking about and seeing things. Along the way, I realized that instead of harping on the factors we cannot change, it’s all in the mind, really. Everything is a state of mind, it’ll do one no good to think about thinking too much.

In a way, this expedition is akin to the long bus journeys we had, where we caught glimpses of Laos life in those fleeting moments; cows in different shades of brown, acres and acres of paddy fields, Laotians on bicycles and motorcycles, communal gatherings outside attap houses and so on.You’re barely done looking at this, and the bus moves on. Sometimes it’s just like that; you don’t even get the one last look. And even if you get the chance to pass by the same road again, something would have changed. Maybe it would already be dusk, and the light falling on what you’re seeing is fading fast. Before long, everything would be clothed in darkness save for the occasional orange lamps as there’s barely any streetlamps in Laos. Everything is lost to shadows; such is the transience of life as seen through a bus window.