Laos Breast Milk In Eye!

Taking a small break from our kayaking

Me and Dutch veggie vet Esther journeyed to Luang Nam Tha for a spot of trekking. We did a days worth of exhausting research to find the most ethically conscious and eco-friendly trekking operator in town. On day one we kayaked downstream. The captain of my kayak was one of the guides which made my kayaking easy as we easily navigated the shallows and tight rapids, and even though I thought I was working quite hard my arms didn't feel the pinch the next day. In the time it took me to find a spot to pee my guide, Ped, has set up a barbecue for our fish! Impressive foodie skills. We laid our food out on two huge banana leaves and feasted on lots of sticky rice (which we ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner. No complaining from me mind as I love the glutinous stuff!) and other bits and bobs including tofu, barbecued pork, barbecued fish dipped in a simple chili and salt dry dip... Yum yum!

Ped preparing the fish and our kayak

Eventually we reached the village where we stayed the night in a basic, single-roomed wooden hut on stilts with an outside toilet and the river as our bathtub! After another delicious meal a thunder storm whipped up and threw dust in my eye. This pesky dust would not budge and continued to plague me well into the second day of trekking. My right eye and nostril were just streaming. A woman from the village who made our lunch thought I was crying because I missed my boyf and carried my water for me in sympathy. She was pretty old, I felt so bad, but she was very insistent, plus a lot more sure-footed than me on the slippery rocks and leaves!

The village on the second night. We slept in similar accommodation.

At one point the pain got so bad and the vision so blurry that we all had to stop and try and resolve my eye situ. Esther and a Frenchie trekker fashioned a contraption with a water bottle and pierced lid and shot water into my eye to dislodge the dust. No luck. And so I trundled on with water tears streaming down my right eye as my tear ducts tried to dislodge this foreign body. I looked and felt a mess and was having a miserable time and for most of the second day that I barely saw the jungle. Although I did spy a few tiny leeches trying to burrow their way through my socks with sandals (definitely a look to be kept to the jungle, for sure!!). I picked a few off but a few wriggled through to suck my foot blood. But surprisingly I was the least squeamish of the trekkers despite having the most inappropriate footware for a leech invasion!

We reached the Lan Tan village late afternoon and they presented their handicraft wares before us. I really couldn't see at this point and kept my head down and my eyes covered. One of the older women in the village noted my state and asked our guide what was wrong. She then offered to sort my eye out. She grabbed my eyelid and turned it inside out and saw the glob of dust then grabbed at her stringy, fabric necklace and dabbed at my eyelid with one of these threads. It worked!! The dust was all gone!!



Action shot! Cleansing breast milk being dripped into my eye!!

 For extra measure she asked, via our guide, if she could drip some breast milk into my eye to soothe the pain...I was hesitant. But in these few seconds of thinking that it would be the most gross and weird thing to have breast milk dribbled into my eye versus the desperation of being in so much scratchy pain for such a long time, she had already grabbed a villager and pumped out a few drops of her breast milk and collected it in a handy scrap of banana leaf. She then tipped my head back and dripped the milk into my eye!! It was warm! It was hilarious!! A trickle made a road towards my mouth but that would have been too much and I swiftly wiped  the milk away. I was saved!! It honestly felt like I had got my life back after being in so much pain for so many hours and fearing blindness (it was in my one good eye after all...I know, I was internally being somewhat of a hypochondriac!). I obviously repaid the woman who saved my life by buying a bracelet off her which will forever remind me of this bizarre, lifesaving event!!