Luang Prabang: Amazing Young Monks

Of Luang Prabang’s residents, it is generally said that everyone is either a) a tourist, b) a monk, or c) someone profiting off the tourists. Though I don’t think my 5 days in Laos’ most visited city qualifies me to assess the veracity of the claim, I can say that there all three classifications are there in spades.

The thing that impressed the most on me from my time in Luang Prabang was the ability and overt desire of young monks to speak English. On our second day in the city, Matt and I stumbled upon a swimming hole at the end of the peninsular Old City, where the Nam Khan river filters into the mighty Mekong. There were about 30 children, half of which were MITs (monks in training). Clad in their sleeveless robes of various shades of orange, they were wading, splashing each other, and doing back flips off of boulders in the middle of the water. While Matt stripped down to his skimpies and went to swim and spook the lads with his now Lawrence of Arabia-esque beard, I squatted next to a group of four of the bald heads and had an even-paced English conversation with the high schoolers. Amazed at their aptitudes for my native language, I asked how long they had been studying. I had assumed that English education must begin at an incredibly young age, like their parents played BBC cassette tapes over headphones to them while still in the womb. It turns out that they had only been studying for a couple years.

Why was their grasp of English, or at the very least their willingness to speak it, so much better than my students in Japan is a mystery to me. Japanese students now study English from elementary school onwards (mandatory as of this year) and are even sent to cram schools and English conversation companies to hone their abilities, yet often times are confused in class by questions as simple as “What’s your name?” Maybe monks should teach them, too.