Dear Old Friend,
Little did you and Mai know, but there was a quick way to escape our village to Thailand. Remember the river we crossed to see Mai? It flowed onto a larger one at the south end of the village. That bigger one then continued collecting little streams like that all the way down hill and then emptied right onto the Mekong.
Thailand would just be an eye view away on the other side!
That was the logic of the elders. Somehow they knew that the Mekong was in lower plateau or terrains. Streams would empty onto it.
What map would be necessary? None.
The two nights before I left and abandoned you two accidentally, my father and uncle traced the bigger river the Mekong. By your father's order as village chief, no one could be out beyond dark; everyone had to return home by then or else they had to have a good reason to be late. My father and uncle's reason for coming back late that night: they were out hunting spider monkeys and they had lost their way.
We were new in the village, so your father was a bit lenient with us.
"I'm sure you two got quite a few, too," he told them. Yet they had no monkeys on their shoulders. But he just chuckled away.
That was the excuse they ultimately gave your father. But they first planned another excuse to fool anyone looking for them. As you remember, my uncle had two wives. Each was living on the opposite end of the village. (Typical, huh?) My uncle confided in the two wives on this plan: if anyone asked for him, that one wife should just say he was with the other on the other side of the village. Whoever was looking for him would then have to run around.
But your father didn't go to either wife to look for my uncle. Instead, he went to my mother to look for my father and your uncle. So, my mother had to come up with her own response, too: that they were just out getting firewood logs for all of us new families.
You can see how hard it was for us to live in this village. It was a good thing we left within 20 days of being there. We would have run out of excuses if we hadn't left.
