The pool I go to in Vientiane uses so much chlorine that my teeth get fuzzy after two laps and there shouldn’t be much living there. That’s why I’m surprised, soon after a swim, to feel like something with five fingernails has attached itself to my eyeball. By the next morning, I have to pull my eyelids apart as they’ve crusted together. In Lao, it’s descriptively called red-eye. In English, it’s called conjunctivitis.
Someone tells me it’s caused from watching dogs mate. That’s why I take their advice for cures with a grain of salt. People vow that boiled Betel leaf or the drip of fresh milk does the trick. I’m told, “The next time you see a woman nursing, just go up and ask for a few drops.”
Don’t really know if that’s a joke or not, but when I go to the hospital, not for Dengue or Dysentery or Red-eye, but to take photos for a new text, I’m told that short of a pap smear, I’m perfectly free to take any pictures I want. Privacy of the patient? At first, I try to explain why I’m there, but nobody seems to care a bit. No signs of alarm that someone is walking into their examination room and snapping pictures. Can you imagine that in an American hospital? I’d be arrested.
I took the first batch of 400 pictures on the wrong setting. The next time, I was less shy about asking people to stick out their tongues. The woman in this photo came in for her ears, not her throat.
Let’s call this one “Communion: the consecrated tongue depressor.” Intimate, yes? We always see a sense of intimacy expressed with a mother a child. Sometimes intimacy is suggested in a Vemeer with the pouring of a milk jug. As we can see, intimacy is also created when peering into other people’s orifices. On the other hand, people tend to shut off the lights when having sex so as not to see what’s inside.
