It’s a fun gig, he says, because the station broadcasts across the Mekong River to Vientiane, the tiny capital of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, which gives him the chance to take requests from listeners in two countries. Last year, listeners started calling more than usual, but not to ask for the folk songs Sathian likes to play. They wanted to know what he thought of reports that a Thai company was planning to build a $3.5 billion dam a few hundred kilometers upstream on the Lao-Thai border in a remote and impoverished mountain area.