Lao at last

The last time I had a “real job” was nearly 8 months ago, as an engineer for a little medical device company. When I started with them as an Intern Engineer, which was 3 years earlier, I was a snot-nose inexperienced book-learned new graduate. I was lost, and it took me a couple of months on the very steep learning curve before I started to feel even remotely productive.

During my first year at the company, I worked crazy hours... long days, and sometimes nights. It was during that first year, that I began working with Som, Kham and Kheo.

The three ladies, all refugees who immigrated from Laos decades earlier, were hourly manufacturing assemblers at the company. I didn’t know it until I started working in the field, but it seems the medical device industry primarily hires immigrant workers to assemble their products.

15 or 20 years my senior, it felt strange when I became their defacto-supervisor when the company hired me as a permanent manufacturing engineer. I wasn’t their boss really, we were more like a small team within a burgeoning project, and I was kind of a captain. We worked a lot of stressful hours together… equipment wouldn’t work, deadlines were insane, processes weren’t defined.

Through it all, the three ladies were like older sisters, or maybe even mothers to me while I tried to figure out my professional identity. They provided me a buffer from my neurotic and obsessive feeling of responsibility for everything that went wrong… telling me, it’s okay… go home. I tried to provide them with a buffer from the management decisions that would affect what would be demanded of them every day. Start-ups a crazy place.

To this day, I haven’t met or worked with anyone who I respect more than those three. They came to the States with virtually nothing. The three of them and their husbands all work grueling hours to find that American Dream for their young kids. They’ve sacrificed, given up their educated professions (Som taught science in Laos), saved their money, bought homes, started families. And through it all, you’d never know how much they’ve done.
Today I find myself in Pakse, Laos. I’d always hoped that I would get to see the country these ladies came from.