Village life

‘As the sun begins to set we hit the Dak Lac province and notice more civilisation as we speed through a fairly large town. We are staying in the outskirts of the town amongst the M’Nong minority people. Most of the buildings in the village are built out of bamboo in the traditional longhouse style.

We eat in the house of the village chief (we are dubious about this fact but anyway…). He is 87 and his wife who must sit behind the men out of the circle is 92.

After a delicious dinner of succulent pork and noodles the rice wine is flowing.
For every new glass we down we

have to clink glasses and shout “yo!”. Much to our dismay, after 3 or 4 glasses this homemade brew becomes no less disgusting! Then the songs begin as our hosts sing their traditional folk songs. Unfortunately we totally let the side down as we can’t remember any words of our songs but we manage to remember enough words of the “yellow submarine” to form what might have been described as a song! We giggled all the way back to our long-house and battled with our mosquito nets trying to find the entrance.’

Day 2

‘5am and we are rudely awoken by farmyard sounds. The rooster’s actually sound like they are in my bed and as the screeching pig predicts its imminent slaughter, I suddenly begin to feel guilty about the succulent pork I tucked into last night.’

The people of this village get up at around 4am and head down to the lake to start fishing. At around 8am they go straight out to the fields where they will undertake backbreaking manual labour until dusk. The advertisement billboards in this area do not bombard us with familiar brand images of trans national corporations, rather they are an array of often quite amusing communist propaganda illustrations. Lulu tells me that many of the ones in this village are encouraging workers to work harder to increase productivity thus improve their living standards and the overall nation’s economy. What continues to baffle me is that for people who work the hours I have mentioned above, is it possible to work any harder? Having seen the ways these people live, they work harder then anyone I have ever met, yet they have absolutely nothing in terms of material wealth. They like in bamboo shacks dress in tattered old clothes and eat whatever livestock they maintain or food grown locally.

A taxi home from the fields, rural Vietnam style!