Laos is slowly coming into its own after decades of war and political instability but governance systems remain fragile and public services woefully inadequate. New prosperity has fueled a tremendous increase in motorized vehicles in the capital city of Vientiane, with its population of 800,000. But the lack of road safety education, strict licensing requirements, traffic rules and their enforcement, and traffic management aids has resulted in a veritable anarchy of cars, trucks, motorcycles, bicycles, and tuktuks (motorized tricycles). Compounded by the absence of emergency rescue services, the road fatality rate in Laos is one of the worst in Asia. Thus the Asian Development Bank has cited road use management as a priority need that Laos must address.

In 2007, a small team of volunteers in the Foundation for Assisting Poor People of Lao PDR used a donated ambulance to create “Rescue Vientiane Capital” to provide first-aid service on the city’s roads, but only on weekends. In 2010, Sebastien Perret, a Frenchman living in Laos and a trained paramedic and firefighter, aghast at how victims are left to die because of the utter lack of emergency assistance, joined the foundation as a volunteer. Shortly thereafter, Perret, Laotian Phaichi Konepathoum, and five 15-year-old volunteers, created “VIENTIANE RESCUE” (VR) to operate a free ambulance service on a 24/7 basis, despite the absence of equipment, sponsors, and formal training.

Driven by pure humanitarianism, the VIENTIANE RESCUE volunteers (students and mostly poor Laotians) worked 20 to 168 hours a week out of the house of one volunteer and later a rented bungalow; the volunteers slept in shifts when they were not sleeping on roadsides, often subsisting on nothing but instant noodles, and sometimes unable to respond to calls for help because their ambulance had ran out of petrol. Supported by small private donations and the volunteers’ own pocket money, the first years were extremely difficult. The volunteers had little equipment and few medicines; they would remove and wash bloodied bandages and their only cervical collar once the victim was already in the hospital so these could be reused for the next accident call. At one point they even lost their only ambulance.

By dint of sheer perseverance and the passion to help, the ragtag group of volunteers improved and professionalized its services, acquired more equipment, and expanded the range of its work. Perret produced a basic first aid manual and accessed expert paramedic training for volunteers with the help of Thai partners. Gradually, the group’s heroic work attracted more volunteers and some assistance from local and foreign donors.

Today, VIENTIANE RESCUE Team has a one-truck firefighting unit; a one-boat scuba rescue team, the country’s first; a minivan converted into the country’s first EMS (Emergency Medical Service) ambulance; seven other ambulances; and three more base stations, two made from shipping containers. Its uniformed volunteers now number 200, working a free 24-hour hotline that responds to 15-30 accidents a day. In 2015 alone, VIENTIANE RESCUE responded to 5,760 road accidents, and between 2011 and 2015 the group has helped save as many as ten thousand lives.

As a purely voluntary and homegrown effort, VIENTIANE RESCUE is distinctly inspiring in the selfless dedication of the Laotian youth who have made its work possible despite the odds. Of them, Perret says: “They’re the best people I’ve met in my life … so often they risk their lives to save people they don’t even know.” And he adds: “We do not make miracles every day, but sometimes we do and that’s amazing.”

In electing VIENTIANE RESCUE to receive the 2016 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes its heroic work in saving Laotian lives in a time and place of great need, under the most deprived of circumstances, inspiring by their passionate humanitarianism a similar generosity of spirit in many others.

(The response was delivered by Vientiane Rescue Co-founder, Sebastien Perret.)

Today is a strange day. It’s quite hard for us to believe that all of this is real. When we started this service 6 years ago, we had absolutely no expectations, and not a clue about what the future could be. Not because we were pessimistic, but because building an ambulance service from scratch meant investing millions of dollars, highly qualified professionals and equipment. We were 3 adults and 4-5 kids. It sounded unrealistic for us to have other expectations than being just a small first aid team, and do what we could to take care of those dying on the roadside.

At first we heard pessimistic feedbacks from international NGOs, institutions, international organizations and companies we contacted to try to get some support. I’ll always remember an insurance company asking me “What’s your business plan for the next 5 years?”. We also heard: “This is a nice but insane idea”. “Good luck, such a project in such a country is impossible”. But the most common question we had to hear was probably “Who are you?”. “Who are you to think that you could succeed where bigger fish failed?”.

One large government organization actually tried to set up a pre-hospital emergency response ambulance service a few years ago, with a local hospital, invested a lot of money and hired many expensive consultants from abroad. At the end, the project was a failure. So how could a handful of youngsters succeed where a wealthy international organization failed?

At the end, the only thing that helped us to believe in this project was a common idea: we were sure that this was the right thing to do. No matter the hardships, no matter the time it would take. We thought that we had to try. That was the most important. To try.

Today, we haven’t changed. What has changed is that now people do believe in our capacity to move forward, and listen to us.  Today, if we’ve achieved so much, it is still unbelievable for us. Not just only about the quality of the training we get, not just about all the new services we provide and equipment we buy to be able to face any kind of emergency situations. It’s not just about figures on a sheet of paper. Not about statistics. It’s way more than this. It’s about the way we do it. The way we care for the victims of the road.

With love. Love and compassion, when our volunteers do their best to alleviate the suffering of victims and their families.

With respect. Respect because we treat people with the same humanity without any discrimination based on ethnic origin, sex, language, wealth or religion.

With generosity. If in today’s world, generosity can be define by “Give and take”, our volunteers give in an old fashion way. They give their time, their energy, their skills and sometimes even their own money to sustain our service. Some of our volunteers are on stand by 24 hours a day for weeks, taking only one day off per month to go back to their families. This means more than 700 hours a month on stand by. Do you know any other place on earth where you have volunteers giving the way OUR volunteers give, for people they don’t even know?

And passion. An amazing passion that we have, each and every one of us, deep in our hearts. A passion that keep our volunteers on stand by day and night while they have to work besides to earn a living, no matter their tiredness. A passion that binds us together when we witness road crash victims dying in our hands due to the violence of the accident crashes in Vientiane and despite our efforts to resuscitate them. A passion that help us stick together when one of our volunteer is killed by a reckless driver on Vientiane roads, like it happened last December. A passion that transforms people around us. A passion that we are spreading around the world through international TV and newspapers coming to witness the work of our amazing volunteers.

While we’ve been working on this Rescue service for 6 years now, our volunteers are the last people on earth to realize exactly what we’ve achieved.

So, we would like to thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and its board of trustees today, to give our volunteers the opportunity to be proud of themselves.

Over half a century of war and authoritarian rule has ravaged Laos, resulting in large-scale destruction, loss of lives, and a country that remains one of the world’s poorest. Yet it is a testament to the Laotian people that despite all this, here greatness of the human spirit has not been extinguished.

Born into a farming family, KOMMALY CHANTHAVONG lived through all her country’s tragedies. Losing her father in the Indochina War, she was a refugee at age thirteen, walking barefoot over six hundred kilometers from her village in eastern Laos to Vientiane to escape the bombings during the Vietnam War. Through sheer perseverance, she pursued her studies in Vientiane and in 1966 earned a nursing diploma; in 1972 she married and raised a family. After the communist takeover of Vientiane, life was extremely difficult and she had to walk long distances from village to village buying and selling goods between Laos and Thailand.Through these turbulent changes, one thing remained constant for KOMMALY—her love for silk weaving, which she learned from her mother when she was only five years old; in fact, fleeing her village in 1961 all she took with her were heirloom pieces of woven silk handed down from her grandmothers. In Vientiane, seeing war-displaced, rural women in desperate need of work, she used her meager savings to buy looms, and in 1976 started in her home a weaving group of ten women, whom she called the “Phontong Weavers.”

Thus began KOMMALY’s valiant efforts to help women earn a living and revive Lao silk weaving, a deeply esteemed tradition rapidly disappearing because of the convulsions of war. Her original group grew to become Phontong Handicraft Cooperative—a network of Lao artisans now spanning thirty-five villages and connecting over 450 artisans. Impressed by her success, the Lao government leased to KOMMALY in the early 1980’s forty-two hectares of land in northeast Laos for use as a silk farm. It was barren, heavily bombed-out land, littered with unexploded landmines that KOMMALY and her group had to personally dig out before they could start planting trees. This has since become Mulberries Organic Silk Farm, dedicated to the revival of Lao silk production, with hectares planted to mulberry trees, specially-built temperature-controlled buildings to house all stages of silk production, a large garden providing raw materials for natural dyeing, and a cattle-raising area producing manure as organic fertilizers. Since its establishment, the farm has trained over a thousand farmers and weavers and has created over three thousand jobs.

But KOMMALY’s initiatives went even further. In 1990 she started Camacrafts, a non-profit project that markets traditional Lao and Hmong handicrafts, working with hundreds of women in twenty villages. Three years later, she created Mulberries, a social enterprise that initiates income-generating projects around traditional arts and crafts, including the production of mulberry tea, wine, and soap. More than two thousand villagers in five provinces have benefitted from this. In 1993, the Lao Sericulture Company was launched to oversee and manage KOMMALY’s many initiatives. Her amazing work has covered the whole cycle of silk production, from growing mulberry trees, raising silkworms, creating natural dyes, to training, research, provision of tools, and local and international marketing of highly-prized handmade silk items. Despite numerous adversities, she has traversed villages to personally teach and encourage weaving, and to patiently set up silk houses where young women and men can weave world-class products. The soft-spoken KOMMALY says of her decades-long work, “Our goal is to strengthen the position of women by giving them a dependable income and thus improve the chances of their children.” Clearly, she has done this—and much more.

In electing KOMMALY CHANTHAVONG to receive the 2015 Ramon Magsaysay Award, the board of trustees recognizes her fearless, indomitable spirit to revive and develop the ancient Laotian art of silk weaving, creating livelihoods for thousands of poor, war-displaced Laotians, and thus preserving the dignity of women and her nation’s priceless silken cultural treasure.

I am very happy on this occasion to accept the prestigious Ramon Magsaysay Award. It is a great honor for myself and all my co-workers in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR). This distinguished award will light the way into the future of our work, and will give energy and strength to the small community of silk producers that I lead.

In the past women in remote rural villages, in mountainous regions like the place where I was born, did not have the same rights as men because women were only given the responsibility of raising children and doing household work. In those days women had limited opportunities for education, and were, therefore, unable to contribute to the family by earning money the way men did. But producing silk and weaving were ways with which women could make money to assist in caring for their families. This gave them a voice with which to speak to men regarding their families and communities; slowly this livelihood raised the status of women in our society.

Silk production and weaving are the proud ancient knowledge of Lao women, and many rural women passed on this knowledge from mother to daughter for many generations. Lao women have a responsibility to guard and develop this wonderful cultural heritage.

Silk production and weaving have created livelihoods for young women in their rural villages, thus reducing the need to flee to large towns and cities in search of work. In these places, many of them are at risk in so many ways.

The things you are hearing from my heart about the rights of women, the effort to preserve the proud heritage of silk handicrafts, and the flight of women to the cities to find work—these are all things that have motivated me to pour all my abilities—body and soul—into establishing this small concern that I have led since 1976.

It is my observation that the handicraft production that my co-workers and I are supporting has reduced the destruction of our forests caused by slash-and-burn upland rice farming. This is also protecting our water resources for developing agricultural production, in accordance with the policy of the Lao PDR government, which has called on all sectors to implement with urgency.

My co-workers, the villagers, and I are working with energetic enthusiasm to build an auspicious stairway on which we hope our future efforts will ascend until we achieve the lofty goals we have set for ourselves. It is the responsibility of our young people—especially our young Lao women—to take up the role of continuing this enterprise.

The strength and generous hearts of hardworking young women in this effort may encounter difficulty, so the cooperative assistance of the Lao Party and government, private citizens, international organizations, NGOs and other organizations will be needed. These young women will need our financial investment, our collective wisdom, and our technical expertise to help them continue our courageous endeavor.

We confidently believe that a good quality of life—and lasting security for individuals, families and communities—will require the support of the people from within Laos and all those with hearts to help, who will together build a new and bright generation that understands their responsibility for the future of their community.

Finally, I want to again express my deep gratitude to the president of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and the foundation’s trustees for choosing to honor me with this distinguished award. Thank you!

The small landlocked nation of Laos is one of the world’s poorest. Not so long ago, wars and revolution drained away many of its educated people. Even now, thirty years after the establishment of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in 1975, infrastructure, industry, and public services remain rudimentary. More than half of the country?s population is under twenty. For these three million young people there are few opportunities. Social problems are on the rise and many look for better lives abroad. Yet these young people are the country?s best hope, says SOMBATH SOMPHONE. As executive director of the Participatory Development Training Centre (PADETC) in Vientiane, he is preparing them to build a better future for Laos. 

SOMBATH SOMPHONE’s early life took place amidst uncertainty and turbulence as Laos was swept into the Indochina War. He eventually escaped this by winning a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, where he earned degrees in education and agriculture. By 1980, he was home again. That same year Sombath helped launch the Rice-Based Integrated Farm System Project, to help Laotian farmers achieve food security. The ensuing years exposed him intimately to the world of rural Laos and to the complex obstacles awaiting development workers in its remote scattered villages. 

Drawing on these lessons, SOMBATH founded PADETC in 1996 to foster sustainable, equitable, and self-reliant development in Laos. Up till now it is the only officially recognized organization of its kind in the country. SOMBATH has led it to emphasize eco-friendly technologies and micro-enterprises and to enhance education-by introducing fuel-efficient stoves that spare women hours of daily labor collecting wood; by promoting locally produced organic fertilizer as an alternative to imported chemical fertilizers; by devising new processing techniques and marketing strategies for small businesses such as organic mulberry tea and brown rice and sun-dried bananas, pineapples, and berries; by initiating garbage recycling in the capital city; and by organizing stimulating extracurricular programs for the youth. Today, PADETC is designing new child-centered lesson plans for primary schools. 

Although SOMBATH heads a full-time staff of forty-three, much of this work is carried out by teams of young volunteers and trainees who exemplify his commitment to participatory learning. In any given week, these volunteers-cum-trainees reach as many as nine thousand people. As they do so, SOMBATH makes certain that they are also learning to think, plan, act, and lead. 

PADETC’s high-school-aged “weekend volunteers,” for example, lead grade-schoolers in content-rich games and learning activities and write children’s books and plays; at the same time, the Centre mentors them in leadership, teamwork, and gender awareness, and coaches them in writing, speaking, and teaching. PADETC’s university-level volunteers, called Green Ants, promote organic foods, recycling, and environmental awareness and are taught to conduct surveys, write reports, and to plan and manage projects. The Centre’s post-graduate trainees conduct fieldwork in drug abuse prevention, human trafficking, HIV awareness, and micro-enterprises, and gain practical hands-on experience at the grassroots. SOMBATH also ensures that PADETC’s young volunteers become media savvy. They learn to use colorful story boards to reach children with lessons on hygiene, life skills, and caring for nature; to write and broadcast youth-oriented radio shows; and to produce effective videos on good farming practices and urgent social issues. 

Fifty-four-year-old SOMBATH presides unobtrusively yet restlessly over PADETC’s many projects. His hopes rest with the young. He urges them to remain mindful of their country’s traditional values even as global forces grow stronger. Development is good, he assures them, but for development to be healthy, it “must come from within.”

In electing SOMBATH SOMPHONE to receive the 2005 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, the board of trustees recognizes his hopeful efforts to promote sustainable development in Laos by training and motivating its young people to become a generation of leaders.

The honorable Chief Justice Hilario Davide, trustees of the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, distinguished guests, fellow awardees, ladies and gentlemen, good evening. 

It is a great honor for me today to be here receiving the 2005 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, and I would like to sincerely thank the Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation and its board of judges for conferring on me this important award. 

This award is not just for me or for my staff in PADETC. This award is also for our young Lao volunteers and youth leaders, who have demonstrated to us, the adults, that they have the capacity, and indeed the right, to claim the space to determine their own and their community’s development pathway. I believe that it is their passion and their hopes and dreams for a better future which are recognized and celebrated through this prestigious award today. 

For me and my organization, PADETC, this award is a major encouragement and validation that there are critical roles in the development of Lao society for indigenous civil-society action groups like ours. I hope the award will further give confidence to other Lao-led organizations to develop and thrive. 

What I have accomplished so far is only a small beginning. To have long-term impact, we will need more coherent and comprehensive development approaches that place human dignity and economic and social justice for all at the center of development. To achieve this, it cannot be just the work of a few organizations or a few committed individuals; it should be a sustained movement that involves everybody: the government, the private sector, and people from all walks of life and from all age groups, and especially our young who comprise more than half of our population. 

Measured in terms of Gross National Product or GNP, Laos is poor and we are constantly reminded of this by mainstream development specialists. Laos may be cash-poor, but we are wealthy in many other ways. We have a rich tradition and a wealth of indigenous knowledge and local experience; our communities are known for their strong sense of social solidarity and cohesion. And we have a vibrant and young population who are still relatively unspoiled by mindless consumerism and commercialization. We should turn these attributes into our development capital and not trade away our precious heritage by adopting development models which emphasize economic growth but jeopardize social and environmental sustainability. We have to chart our own development pathway and balance our development strategies to strengthen self-reliance and avoid the mistakes that mire so many developing societies in debt, social disintegration, disease, and environmental degradation. 

PADETC’s approach to development has always been to balance the development lessons from outside Laos with our local experiences and knowledge. We seek such a balance through broad-based consultation and the involvement of young people at the forefront of the development movement. These measures have worked and we have gained increasing support. We believe that through our own efforts and with the support of our well-wishers, we can build a socially, economically and environmentally balanced society which ensures stable livelihoods for all, and for future generations. 

Thank you.

A people only come to feel themselves a nation when they share in common institutions for accomplishing valued public purposes. Nowhere in Asia has the task of creating these facilities been more difficult than in Laos. 

Isolated by geography and French colonial policy, the more than two million inhabitants of Laos felt the first stirrings of modernization after World War II. Over the centuries the once proud Buddhist Kingdom of Lan-Xang had disintegrated before more aggressive neighbors until the remaining small state of Luang Prabang welcomed French protection in 1893. Thereafter, incursion by Tonkinese and Annamese was condoned by allowing them to take over trade, commerce and petty administration. Lao Issara, the freedom movement prompted by Japanese occupation, crystallized a national consciousness among younger elite and members of royalty. In 1949 Laos became an autonomous kingdom within the French Union and in 1954 won full independence. 

A keen participant in this struggle, KEO VIPHAKONE was convinced that agitation must make way for building. At his first post as Chief of Water and Forest Service for Champassak Province in late 1945, he showed his courage and principles in enforcing regulations against the rich and powerful. Serving briefly in 1949 as Chief of the Forests and Land Division of the new government his understanding of the country?s needs soon led to his appointment as economic representative to high councils of the Associated States of Indochina in Saigon, then as a senior diplomatic representative to Paris, Washington and the United Nations. 

When the Royal Lao Government in 1958 decided that lowland farmers and tribesmen in the hills must be reached with modern systems of education, transportation, water works and health services, KEO was brought home to improvise something entirely new for his country as Commissioner of Rural Affairs. In a land where there were only a dozen university graduates at the close of World War II, he had to enlist from without or train from within an entire range of skills. It is a measure of his competence that each of the rightist and neutralist governments that rose and fell in rapid succession over the next nine years retained his services. 

Roughly 20 per cent of the population of Laos has now come under programs he today directs as Secretary of State for Social Welfare and concurrently as Commissioner of Rural Affairs. Starting with relief and resettlement of refugees, KEO trained manpower and fruitfully utilized such outside organizations as Operation Brotherhood International, United Nations specialized agencies, and bilateral aid from several countries. His rural self-help and public works include well-drilling, building schools, roads, bridges, crematories, markets and dispensaries. More than one-half of all U.S. economic assistance to Laos is under his management. Repeatedly he has urged the Americans to be more patient in giving help so villagers can become involved in building and cherishing innovations. 

As a particularly underdeveloped new nation that has become a cockpit of the cold war, Laos has experienced tortuous military and political changes and offers easy temptation to ostentatious official corruption. In contrast to many leaders for whom independence has been an avenue to personal wealth and power, KEO has remained true to his Buddhist faith of simplicity in personal living and honesty in official dealings. Now at the age of 49, he has shown that even under the most adverse circumstances a man who claims his office as a public trust can bring progress to his people and foster their faith in government as a means to serve them. 

In electing His Excellency, KEO VIPHAKONE to receive the 1967 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, the Board of Trustees recognizes his sustained initiative and integrity in inaugurating public services for Lao villagers under handicaps that easily could have excused defeat.

I am happy to accept the Ramon Magsaysay Award and, with deep humility, the signal honor bestowed on me. 

In accepting the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service, my first thoughts are of the people of my country, the Royal Kingdom of Laos, whom I tried my best to serve during the last 25 years, and of the others in my Government with whom I had the privilege of working and sharing the responsibilities of public service. It is they, not I, who made this award possible. I consider myself only a human instrument, one might say, in the government machinery of my country to implement the policies and programs designed to promote the welfare and well-being of the Lao people. 

I would be less honest and frank if I did not say that the work for which I was cited is just begun and, therefore, the Award is yet to be fully deserved. We still have so much to do and with only limited resources of our own. I am happy to say that it is in our need for trained human resources that the Filipino people have been most helpful to us. Our problems are increasing in magnitude and complexity as our population is increasing. And, as if these vicissitudes are not enough, we are also plagued with the problem of peace and order, as we have been for many difficult years. 

It is in this context that I consider this Award as both a challenge and an opportunity: a challenge to continue with the task we began, inch by inch if need be, hut with increasing vigor and, hopefully, with clearer imagination, and with the tenacity of the elephant, our national symbol; an opportunity to accomplish more in the service of our people so that the Ramon Magsaysay Award with which I am being honored may be more completely deserved.