ReportageCovid-19 and the economic turbulence of recent months have exacerbated nutrition problems in this small country in full economic and agricultural take-off.
In Kokmaygnay, a village of 800 souls clinging to an altitude of 1,200 meters in northern Laos, ancestral traditions are sacred. A portal with spirits bristling with stakes and rattan braces seems to scrutinize the visitor from the side of the track. As his daughter breastfeeds her baby in the main room of a wooden house, Asu, the 68-year-old father, his face carved with a billhook and amulet on the neck, is formal: the young mother must follow a special diet for thirteen days, consisting of eggs and chicken soup. With rice, but no vegetables. No fruit or fish. Otherwise, it’s “khalam” (“taboo”). The baby’s father, Atchui, 21, who holds their 2-year-old daughter in his arms, doesn’t say a word. In the distance, a grey-blue sky splits open, pouring a curtain of rain glistening in the sun.
Kokmaygnay is populated by Akhas, a Tibeto-Burmese speaking mountain tribe who came over the last centuries from neighboring Chinese Yunnan. It is one of the fifty recognized ethnic minorities in Laos. The 20-kilometre track that leads there is barely passable by all-terrain vehicle – and by motorcycle, the only means of transport available to the inhabitants. A little higher up, among the Mongs, another “people of the peaks” whose village, Pangpor, is a few kilometers from Kokmaygnay, the egg-chicken diet must be followed for thirty days. “If this is not respected, we are afraid that something bad will happen. We’ve had bad experiences.”, breathes Peng Hua Song, 36, the chief of the village of Pangpor. His wife was no exception, he assures, for his five children.
Below, at the start of the track, among the Kamous, people of the “slopes”, more numerous and less isolated than the “mountain people”, it is the buffalo that dominates the mother’s meals after birth – giving her protein for breastfeeding, but depriving her of a varied and balanced diet.
Enough to occupy Buapha, the young Akha in charge, in Kokmaygnay, of “facilitate new social behaviors” as part of the national action plan set up every five years by the Lao government, with the help of international donors and NGOs, to fight against malnutrition. “If, in a family, there is someone from an older generation who decides, it is more difficult”, she admits about grandfather Asu. Other behaviors are in the sights of nutrition specialists: it is not uncommon for the Akhas to give a child under 6 months sticky rice previously chewed by the mother or a grandmother – which can create kidney failures.
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