ABSTRACT
We met 50-year-old Mrs Chandaeng on a cool December day in 2001 outside her house in the village of Ban Sawai in Laos, one of the world’s 49 ‘least developed’ countries (Illustration 1.1). She had been born and raised in the war-torn province of Xieng Khouang, where she met and married her husband, Udom. They settled in his home village and had six children. In 1988, however, when their youngest daughter was just two, Udom died suddenly and after a dispute with her brother-in-law, Mrs Chandaeng moved to Ban Sawai, settling there with her young family in 1991. As a newcomer, Mrs Chandaeng was unable to secure any land beyond her house plot and, in the context of a village economy based on farming, she struggled to feed and raise her six children. Yet when we interviewed Mrs Chandaeng ten years after she had first settled in Ban Sawai she was in the process of building a new and
Illustration 1.1 Village scene, northern Laos
impressive house. Her ability not only to survive but, ultimately, to prosper as a landless, widowed mother of six was surprising given what we knew of structural patterns of poverty and prosperity in rural Laos. Landless, female-headed households, and particularly those with young families, are usually among the poorest in an already very poor country.
