Nam Theun 2

At Ban Thalang, a resettled village in the Nakai area of Laos, a standing memory of a not-so-forgotten past is now being happily used as a green onion harvesting pot.

(Update Oct. 5: this entry has been published in Lao language here).

Since I took the job of facilitating communication and outreach for the Nam Theun 2 Hydroelectric Project (NT2) earlier this year in Laos, I have been listening to many people telling me that this is more than just a hydropower development project. This is evident when you read and analyze the many structural reforms the country undertook for the project. I recently had the chance to experience some other contributions – perhaps unforeseen, but still important to the project.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to the NT2 project site with some visiting colleagues from Washington, DC, particularly to the Gnommalat and Nakai areas. After visiting the site, we headed to the resettled villages to talk to locals and find their daily living realities. We talked to them as we observed the housing, complete with their water pumps, electricity, gardening, and not-so-distant farming plot facilities.

It’s now that time for me when you have to sit down and write goodbye and thank you emails, throw away all those trees you’ve cut over the years (that would be paper), wrap up work, pack up your stuff and say goodbye.

Strategically I guess I could ‘use’ this last blog posting as a way to highlight all the progress that Nam Theun 2 has made over the past two years. Don’t worry, I won’t. While that has definitely been a component of my job – highlighting progress and explaining challenges and ways to overcome them – I think the broader and most important component of this job has been access to information: Access to people, to the site, and to reports.

Over the past two years, among other things, I’ve worked on liaising with journalists, students, NGOs, academics and others to visit the site, to respond to letters, emails and phone calls with questions, suggestions, recommendations…. And I know the people working in the Lao Government (check out their updated website here), the Nam Theun 2 Power Company and the Asian Development Bank, among others, have been doing the same. Access to the project exists, and in a country like Laos, where information – for a number of simple and more complex reasons – is not always in high supply, this has been of high importance.

It’s been a while since I’ve contributed anything to this blog – many thanks to Nanda for holding the fort. Over the last 6 weeks I’ve done five trips to various parts of the NT2 project, and am starting to feel in need of salt – more on that later.

One of the trips was a joint mission by managers from the various international financial institutions (IFIs) that are supporting the project. Joint missions help ensure that all the IFIs have a shared understanding of project progress, as well as avoiding the burden of multiple missions on the government and NTPC officials who are supposed to be focused on getting the job done. Overall it went well, as measured by the fact that I have not yet been moved to another project.

During the mission a small group of us stopped off to look at progress in the implementation of the downstream program in a small village on the banks of the Xe Bang Fai. The village has already been receiving assistance to help boost their livelihoods ahead of any potential project impacts – as a form of community compensation for likely communal fisheries impacts on the Xe Ban Fai (Nanda also blogged about this a while ago).

Kids in rural Laos are now exposed to a world their parents didn't imagine at their age. How does this change their expectations for the future?

Last week, as I walked through Boun Ma, one of the resettled villages in NT2, I wondered what the villagers think when they see another falang ("foreigner" in Lao, originally referring to French people but now encompassing all nationalities). There are many, many of us coming through the villages of NT2. Last Thursday when I was there, I was accompanying a group of journalists from Finland. There were six journalists plus another six of us (five Lao), so in total seven white faces wandering aroundm looking at the children and snapping pictures. The cynical side in me thought “great, what a circus”.

 But the truth is, of course, that it is unavoidable, because how do you measure/assess/supervise/monitor progress if you can’t see it? What I find really interesting though, is how much contact these children have with foreigners as opposed to what their parents had when they were kids, and what impact that will have on their lives going forward.