A New Day in Laos

Laos holds the singular distinction of being the most bombed country, per capita, in history. Its former royal capital, with dozens of golden temples and tens of thousands of Buddhas, is now attracting an altogether different kind of attention.
Every morning at four o'clock, a thirty–one–year–old Buddhist monk named Say Phetchaleun gets up to pray.
He wraps himself in one of his two papaya–colored robes, crosses the courtyard of his temple, and falls to his knees for an hour of meditation on the 227 rules by which he has vowed to live. Around five he returns to his room, with its simple pallet and a rabbit–eared Chinese TV, to groom, some days shaving his head so closely that it gleams almost blue. A little after six, as the sun begins to rise from the jungle, Say steps barefoot onto the streets of Luang Prabang, the ancient royal capital of Laos, with a brass alms bowl in a shoulder sling. This bowl, about the size of a healthy honeydew, will collect from pilgrims everything Say will eat that day—a few cups of sticky rice, a couple of green bananas, a cassava pancake speckled with sesame seeds. A former auto mechanic with a love for Lao pop music, Say has begun every day like this for the past four years. He hopes to spend the rest of his life doing the same.
In Luang Prabang the gathering of alms is as reliable as dawn. The tradition began centuries ago, and no one can think of a day when it did not take place. It has outlasted every political upheaval in Laos's dark history, surviving colonization, civil war, and the current Communist regime. Today it thrives despite a small invasion of tourists like myself.
On my first morning in Luang Prabang, I rise an hour before dawn. Outside my hotel, I find a pair of pilgrims, an old farmer and his wife, perched on plastic footstools beside the road. The woman cradles a pot of sticky rice in her lap, fussing with its lid. Her husband points at my watch, indicating that the monks will arrive by six. Down the street, a woman tends an enamel coffee pot hanging over a fire in a barrel, while stacking the morning's baguettes like cordwood. As I sip my coffee and the early sun pushes above the mountains, a column of ten monks appear from around the corner, their saffron robes burning through the morning mist.

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