Mom dressed as Santa and a boy dressed as Santa's helper posing under the water in the pool on December 15, 2016 in Odessa, Ukraine. (Photo by Andrey Nekrasov/Barcroft Images)

Local boy Faddei plays in a destroyed Russian military truck in the village of Kolychivka, in Chernihiv region, Ukraine on April 27, 2022. (Photo by Vladyslav Musiienko/Reuters)

A boy shoots a World War II ages machine gun with blanks at a weapon exhibition during a military show in St. Petersburg, Russia, Sunday, July 10, 2022. (Photo by Dmitri Lovetsky/AP Photo)

An Afghan boy covers himself with a plastic sheet as he rides on a donkey after rains in Argo district of Badakhshan province on March 20, 2023. (Photo by Omer Abrar/AFP Photo)

Actor Will Smith attends the Los Angeles Premiere of Columbia Pictures' “Bad Boys: Ride Or Die” at the TCL Chinese Theater on May 30, 2024 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Eric Charbonneau/Getty Images for Sony Pictures)

Indian artist Sudarsan Pattnaik works on a sand sculpture depicting drowned Syrian boy Aylan Kurdi at Puri beach, some 65 kilometers away from Bhubaneswar, on September 4, 2015. Charities helping refugees saw a surge in donations on September 4 across Europe as people shocked by the heart-rending images of a drowned Syrian boy on a Turkish beach dug deep to help out. The photos of the lifeless body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, lying on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, have triggered a wave of emotion across the continent, despite deep divisions among European governments on how to deal with the crisis. (Photo by Asit Kumar/AFP Photo)

A Tai Yai boy waits for a ceremony to begin at Wat Don Chedi on April 7, 2014 in Mae Hong Son, Thailand. Poy Sang Long is a Buddhist novice ordination ceremony of the Shan people or Tai Yai, an ethnic group of Shan State in Myanmar and northern Thailand. Young boys aged between 7 and 14 are ordained as novices to learn the Buddhist doctrines. It's believed that they will gain merit for their parents by ordaining. (Photo by Taylor Weidman/Getty Images)

Laos, officially the Lao People's Democratic Republic, is a landlocked country in Southeast Asia, bordered by Burma and China to the northwest, Vietnam to the east, Cambodia to the south, and Thailand to the west. Its population was estimated to be around 6.5 million in 2012. A third (33%) of the country's population lives below the international poverty line which means living on less than U.S. $1.25 per day.