The Lao Buddhist Temple team was scoring big in the Dragon Boat races and its members were letting the world know it.
A chain of Temple members snaked along the shore of Sloan’s Lake singing the team’s praises in a sing-song Laotian chant.
Oun Phouthavong, 46, a short sandy-haired woman, shielding herself from the sun with an umbrella translated. “They say, “We are number one in the boat race.”
After seven years of competing in the annual Colorado Dragon Boat Festival the temple team had moved up to the adult competitive division — the top division in the event.
It is a development that has put Denver’s small Laotian community on the map, said Tom Pong, 37, the team captain.
Images of the race taken by a television crew will bounce off a satellite and be broadcast in Laos, Pong said.
The annual festival is a chance to pass on tradition to a new generation, said Pong, who owns a small insurance agency.
Like many of the attendees, Pong immigrated to the United States from a troubled nation after Communist Pathet Lao ousted a coalition government in 1975. “I came here in ’79 when I was 9. I am a semi-native, I tell people. I grew up here.”
Phouthavong, who studied to be a teacher in her home town of Vientiane, fled Laos in 1979 when she was 18.
The Communist government forced too many rules on people and intruded on even their most private decisions. “You needed approval from the government to get married.”
She almost didn’t make it out of the country, she said. “I crossed the river, people behind me got shot. I see the bodies floating in the Mekong River.”
After a year in which she met her future husband at a refugee camp in Thailand, she moved to Denver.
The Dragon Boat Festival is a big event for her, she said. “Back home we have this event. I feel really warm,” when she attends, she said.
Besides the colorful dragon boat races, the event showcases an array of traditional and contemporary performing artists, cultural customs and cuisine from Asia and the Pacific.
“This is actually pretty cool,” said Andrea Richter,28, whose fiance, David Enslow, 25, was rowing in the race for Zachry Engineering.
The couple moved to Denver recently from Las Vegas with their two-and-a-half year-old daughter, Raven.
The Zachry Power Dragons, which raced in the adult corporate division, was doing well by mid-afternoon, Winslow said. “We are undefeated so far.”
