Ann Hughes, a Lodi artist and teacher, has been traveling back and forth to Laos for ten years. Once known as French Indochina, Laos is a tiny land-locked country of five million people in Southeast Asia that borders Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, and China and is home to sixty-eight language groups.

Arriving in Laos as an English teacher in 1999, she had limited Laotian language skills, and found it necessary to find an alternate way to communicate. In the classroom if the students didn’t understand her she drew pictures and they would draw back. At the market she would draw what she couldn’t say and often the women responded with a picture of their own. Thus her world of communication through art began.

During her travels, she became fascinated with the country and started collecting stories and textiles, and began writing and painting about the life and people in this remote part of the world. These experiences inspired her to record her life in Laos through painting, writing, and teaching.