Skywatch Friday 6 June

Since I didn't post anything last week - it was quite a week - I have some catch-up to do. The monsoon has come in and the changes in the sky are incredible. On Wednesday, just after lunch, the light suddenly darkened in my office - a giant black cloud slid over the sun and the rain poured down.

This is my neighborhood temple. The top picture is looking out across the Mekong River to Thailand and the picture below it is of the temple buildings and the sky behind them.

Going back through the week - we drove back from southern Laos on Monday, and crossed the path of a thunderstorm. The clouds were this weird:

I didn't really fool much with the above picture. Though I fooled with this one:

Going further back into the week and weekend - we had some guests visit our program and we took them on a trip to a remote district. I was worried for much of the trip - what if it rained like crazy and we got stuck out in this remote district, or worse still, on the road. In fact, everything worked out, much better than we expected. The clouds moved in on Saturday morning but it didn't rain.

This village above is a grouping of bamboo and thatch houses, some of them built in a long house style with several generations living in the house. A few people in the village seemed to have bicycles, a few less had motorcycles and no one had access to a car. Since it took four hours to drive the 70 kms. from this village back to the province capital, you can just feel how isolated this village is. Imagine a villager being struck by appendicitis.

Fortunately, our work has helped people in these villages - part of what we've been doing with our project is to upgrade medical and emergency care at the district hospital - so folks in villages like these have better access to health care.

And my last picture was taken on Sunday, 25 May. Across the river, in Sri Chiang Mai, they were holding a rocket festival. Communities depend on rice cultivation in the fickle weather patterns in Laos and NE Thailand have festivals where they shoot homemade rockets, fashioned out of bamboo and PVC pipe, into the sky. They can go very high before dropping back to Earth.

I heard the whistling of the rockets and decided to watch them near the market. By that time, the clouds were blowing up - as in this picture - and all the people in the market were securing their stands so their goods wouldn't blow away. A moment later, the sky opened up.

They continued shooting the rockets into the sky - even though the spirits of the sky had gotten the hint and provided some rain.

This is my contribution to Skywatch Friday which is hosted over at Wiggers World