Waiting for clearer skys

I finished this painting for a friend. Its of his wife's family as they prepare to leave the Thai refugee camp they were in to immigrate to America(California). Keven's wife was the baby in this picture being held by her mother. Her grandfather on the right was a governor of their tribe. 

This family was from the Lao and Mein Tribes which supported the Royal Lao Government and which the father holding the sign in the painting was a general. They were also supported by secret American involvement. 

After the Indochina war in the mid-50's Laos gained its independence from France. Which was followed by a subversive militant Communist uprising that drew the country into an agonizing civil war. Every Tribe was somehow effected by the war, or involved in the war, during the 1960's. Especially when the elements of war arrived on their door step, leaving them no other option but to flee, suffer, die or resist. 

These, and other honorable Tribal identity peoples of Laos, produced self-sufficient men, women and children of great courage, who survived the hardships of poverty, drought, isolated lifestyles, who sacrificed and suffered the attributes of generations of war-after-war thrust upon their peoples by other Tribes of their own countrymen, and even by other Clans of their own Tribe, and by hundreds of years of foreign invaders.

Kennedy