While cruising down the Mekong after visiting elephants, a number of local villages and the Buddha Cave, we ended up inadvertently in an international game of comparing scars and injuries with our guide.  We noticed a small scar above his eye and he told us it was a shaving accident when he was studying to be a monk.  One of his brothers got a bit sloppy with the razor.  This moved on to various other scars and wounds that we all showed off in a sort of escalating back and forth exchange.  Finally, he pulled our his trump card, a huge scar running all the way around his index finger ending in a bump the size of a marble on the side near the second knuckle.

He proceeded to tell us that when he was four years old he lived in a village in the hills.  No power and no running water, needless to say no hospital of any kind.  Anyway, he was using a large knife and when the knife slipped it cut off his finger.  The finger dropped to the ground.  He quickly grabbed the finger away from the chicken that had grabbed it thinking it was a quick snack.  His parents took him to the local shaman.  The shaman had been taught many years ago how to put fingers and toes back on but this was his first real experience the reattachment of parts.  The shaman stuck the finger back in place wrapped it in some kind of medicinal plant and after what sounded like many weeks and months the finger was back in place and working, albeit with a large scar and the bump.