Project Sekong 2012: The cold doesn’t keep us from work when work’s the only way to stay warm.

Report 22

Bad weather moved in.  It’s turned cold.

Last night, an hour after dark, a heavy fog oozed down and drove us from the fire where we usually sit after dinner, alternately warming our hands and our feet.  After we retreated to our tents, all we could do was layer on our warmest clothes, slide into our sleeping bags, and hope that sleep would spare us pain.

Judging from the talk around the campfire this morning, I’m not the only guy on the team who feels robbed of a night’s sleep. I pity the team in weather like this. I’m more accustomed to frigid weather than the Lao guys; I have warmer clothes and the best sleeping bag; they make do with far less.

What ruined the night for me wasn’t the dampness and the cold, but the fierce winds that whipped up shortly after we zipped ourselves into our tents.  For the first hour, worried that my tent would split at the seams, I remained alert, mentally formulating plans for the quick assembly of an emergency replacement shelter.

Eventually, I simply resigned myself to fate; my tent was either going hold together or blow apart.  Mid-storm, there certainly wasn’t anything I could do to improve its stability.  I resolved to put my faith in the workmanship of whatever Chinese woman stitched the thing together. (Am I the only person who wonders how much craftsmanship a worker in a distant, low-wage country will put into a luxury item that they can’t fathom ever owning themselves?)

What kept me awake throughout the remainder of the night was the incessant drumming of the tent and fly.  My earplugs would have helped but they were god-knows-where and I wasn’t about to leave the warmth of my sleeping bag to search. I foolishly told myself that getting up to look would surely pull me back from the brink of sleep; “You’re close,” I lied to myself.  “You don’t need ear plugs.  You’re almost asleep”.

Hours later I was still awake, now angry with myself for being too lazy to search for those ear plugs, for foolishly thinking that I was ever going to fall asleep in a tent flapping louder than machine gun fire.

Though tired and cranky, the whole team was up early.  I’d stayed warm in my sleeping bag but needed coffee.  My teammates were cold and eager to warm themselves before a fire.  Usually I’ll set my coffee pot on glowing coals but today there were no coals.  The guys kept feeding fresh wood to fuel the flames.

After breakfast, we moved faster than usual to our first job of the day, clearing land for a couple of fish ponds, hoping that work would warm us better than the campfire.

It’s mid-morning now but we’re still fogged in.  The sun must be somewhere overhead but where is anyone’s guess.  Put this sky over O’Hare and you’d have flights backed up ‘til a week from Tuesday.

So… today, the best thing that could happen for the team’s health and morale would be for the sun to burn away the milk we’re walking through and give us all a good roasting.