Mrs. Lae of Ban Sawai in Sang Thong district is 50-
years-old and has six children. Her husband died in 1988
after they arrived from the war-shattered province of
Xieng Khouang. Two of her children are married and
have left the household. The family own no land––beyond
the house plot––and she works, though only
periodically, as a wage labourer. The household could
easily have sunk into poverty but instead is relatively
buoyant with, in late 2001, a new and impressive house
under construction. This is because four of Mrs. Lae’s
six children work in Thailand, three as housekeepers in
Bangkok and the fourth as a labourer. 14 They each
send back 1–2000 baht (US$25–50) a month and their
absence means, in addition, that Mrs. Lae does not have
to feed them. Mrs. Lae is happy that her daughters and
son have gone to Thailand and, as she explained, ‘when
you are poor, you have to go’. But while labour
migration to Thailand may have been driven by poverty,
the outcome has been that the returns from this work have been sufficiently high to lever the household out of
poverty. This example highlights the degree to which
new opportunities that arise due to events and developments
in the wider political (rapprochement between
Laos and Thailand) and economic (market integration
and liberalisation) contexts can upset established patterns
of making a living and require a rethinking of how
poverty is produced and reproduced in a given location.