We came across one American woman who'd been living there for 19 years. Her shop is hard to miss. Lao Textiles is located in a beautiful old French colonial mansion in the center of town and is the headquarters for Carol Cassidy, a professional weaver who has spent her adult life combining indigenous Asian and African talent with her own designs. In so doing she has created industries in India, Cambodia, Lesotho and Laos that sell exquisite local textiles to an audience from Hong Kong to Rome to New York.

"I build on indigenous culture and skill to create an international product of a high standard," she says. "The goal is to enable these rural producers to benefit. We're the beautiful side of globalization."

Her Next Big Thing: a bag made out of jungle vine by the women of Pakor, a village of about 100 people in Northern Laos filled with members of the minority khummu.

Through two translators, one of them told me by phone: "I hope the bag generates income and gets our products to someone who's interested. I hope it helps the women here have an income. Because usually it is the men who earn and decide everything."

Asked what she knew about the United States, another villager told me: "I don't know where it is. It's a country far away with many, many people who could get to know about Laos and our people through our bags."

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How achingly lovely to think of someone who lives in a beautiful place and does not know where the United States is!


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