A visit to a Hmong village

We were very privileged to be taken to a Hmong village one Saturday, by a Wycliffe member who had grown up there. It was about 1.5 hours from Chiang Mai, up some very winding and steep roads. Chiang Mai is at an altitude of 310 m. The village is at 1100 m - just a bit higher than Calgary. There is a larger town about 5 km down the valley.

The land is very steep where the village is located, and most buildings have one side held up by pillars.

Houses have electricity and water. The water is piped from a stream up the mountain to a set of tanks, from where it is distributed to the houses. There's a good cell signal in the village.

The village has a restaurant and a couple of small stores, and what looked like a government building with flags outside.

There is also a church.

The land around the village is all farmed. There are a lot of terraced fields for vegetables, and groves of fruit trees.

Here are a couple of shots of the village. In the second picture the larger building on the left is the school.

There is a large trough (carved from one large log) for making large quantities of sticky rice at festival times, and a communal mill for grinding flour, with a collecting trough carved from a log.

When we were there John's parents were away working in their fields, but he showed us their house. When he was young they had lived in another building just below this one. Hmong houses are typically one room, with a cooking corner, a sleeping corner, a corner for ancestors, and floor space for children and guests to sleep. A concrete deck provides more living space and room for smokier cooking, washing machine, fridge, etc.

The deck: