A Strong Woman
Makes a Difference

By Barbara Crossete

Khanla Xaysombath is an earthy woman with a hearty laugh and a ready repertory of good stories to tell. There's the one about the wooden penises, for example.

Some background: Laos did not have much family planning or safe-sex campaigns until the mid-1990s, after a policy to increase births in the under-populated country ended and the threat of an HIV/AIDS invasion loomed in neighbouring Vietnam and Thailand . Over the last decade there has consequently been a scramble to devise programs and explain to people for whom a dozen or more children is the norm.

The tale is apochryphal, but everyone likes to talk about how health workers who first demonstrated the use of a condom unrolled it over a thumb and held it up for all to see. Before long, the story goes, village men were complaining the condoms did not work. They had dutifully put them on their thumbs just like in the demonstrations.

Khamla, an official of the once stodgy, quasi-governmental Lao Women's Union , wanted better props for reproductive health kits being assembled for village health volunteers in a rural programme she directs with help from Family Planning Australia . Determined to make the education material as realistic as possible, Khamla hit on the idea of commissioning rural wood crafters to carve some lifelike penises for the kit. These, she thought, would leave no doubt of how to use a condom.

The wood cutters she approached were scandalised by the bold request. Though surrounded by woodlands, at least one of them pleaded that he was out of wood. Khamla howls with laughter at the absurdity. She persevered, however. Eventually she found the sculptor and the props were duly created. In village gatherings, the erect wooden penises still shock some people, entertain others but educate all who watch the demonstrations.

Khamla, who comes from remote Hua Phan province in northern Laos and has an instinctive understanding of culture and first-hand experience of rural deprivation, is getting a chance to make a big difference to the delivery of reproductive health needs and safe sex messages in Laos, in part because of a government decision to decentralise more social services, giving provincial leaders at least some freedom to introduce innovative programmes.

It is a slow and uneven process. In southern Laos , I visited a village dispensary that had been waiting two years for an allocation of funds to partition a corner of their dispensary in a former rice warehouse to provide privacy for women being counseled. There was no attempt to enlist villagers for an afternoon of volunteer work to create a private corner with simple walls or screens. Meanwhile, women were staying away.

Khamla, who works in the women's rights division of the Lao Women's Union, is obviously a much more creative and impatient actor. With a little money she can do wonders. She also had a hand in the making of a reproductive health education video for rural villagers, shot under Australian direction in the village of Phoudindeng , in the mountainous Vang Vieng region. One of her wooden penises gets a supporting role in the UNFPA-supported video, by the way, with shoe polish for makeup to get the color right.

Phoudindeng is not without attitude problems. Socially, conservatism is strong. It was here, a local official said, where a man beat his wife over the head with a stick because he thought she was spending too much time with the women's health project. Making the video was a challenge.

But even before the video was completed, family life in Phoudindeng was changing with unbelievable speed through the work of the Lao-Australian project. Villagers said that only four children had been born this year, where not many years ago there would have been many more.

In Phoudindeng, I watched the premiere of the finshed video with Khamla and her Australian partners in the Lao women's project, Kathryn Sweet and Vimala Dejvongsa, who was born in Laos and raised in Australia . Sweet represents the Lao women's project sponsor since 1998, Family Planning Australia , a voluntary organisation that is part of the London-based International Planned Parenthood Federation.

The video, titled ‘Find Out First', was in three local languages: Lao, Hmong and Khmu. The stars were the villagers themselves -- men and women -- talking about birth control. Their comments interspersed with explicit diagrammatic pictures or animations of how male and female organs work, and how various methods of contraception are used. There was rapt attention in the room crammed with local women of all ages, and only occasional nervous titters over graphic illustrations of erect male penises and intercourse.

When the video show ended, women talked animatedly about what they had seen, and several said they had never before understood how reproductive systems work, let alone how to prevent pregnancies or sexually transmitted infections. Some admitted that these topics were not traditionally discussed so openly.

“But whether we like the film or not,” a middle-aged woman said, “we watch it because we get information.” Another woman remarked that now she knew why she suffered menstrual pain as part of a normal monthly cycle.

“We understand these things more because now we have seen it with our own eyes,” a talkative young woman said. She and others agreed the men should watch it too, and with their wives. Some men had in fact peeked through windows to catch the video, but did not want to comment on what they had seen.

“It is a very good idea that men should see this video,” a woman said emphatically. “Men play around and bring disaster to their wives and children. Some men want to help their wives but they don't know how.”

“Play it again,” someone asked. “I don't think I understood everything.” Before lunch was over, there had been two more screenings. This is one video the makers hope will be pirated and sold in the markets.

Why are these traditional village women so willing not only to talk about their most intimate lives but also to express their determination to learn from the video and the women's project more generally, and adopt new contraceptive measures?