Lao villages

  

A new house in the traditional Lao style

House with small veggie garden in a trough 

We visited villages in both Luang Prabang and Champassak – villagers seem to be largely welcoming of visitors and keen to find ways to supplement their incomes from our interactions.  In the wet season most people in rural Laos are primarily occupied with producing rice but during the dry season they look for ways to bring in cash income.  Many times a whole village seems to have specialised in a trade, and is known throughout the area as the place to go for knives, pots, etc.

Many houses in Lao villages are built in the traditional style, out of wood, with a large communal room above and underneath perhaps a woven couch or a table and some hammocks.  Traditionally the rooves are thatched; now they are mostly corrugated iron, which must be incredibly noisy in the wet season and hot most of the year, as well as being much easier to maintain and repair.  Large rainwater jars and possessions (motorbikes, hand tractors, valuable farm equipment) are also stored underneath the house.  Most houses have a satellite dish and TV inside.  Cooking is traditionally done outside over an open fire; in some houses, particularly the more modern ones made out of concrete breezeblocks gas is used indoors.

Chicken coops, Asian style

In some villages cassava was being chipped and dried: it will be used as an animal feed for the rest of the dry season and into the beginning of the wet season, or sold for use as tapioca or starch in commercial food production.

Cassava chips drying 

In the pottery-making village river soil is carefully sifted and then mixed with just enough water to make clay.  Villagers make pots on a wheel, which they turn with one foot while manipulating the clay with their hands.  Small pots are made by one person; larger pots are made in teams of two, usually a wife assisting her husband. 

Sieving river soil to make clay

Husband and wife team making a large pot

Pots air drying before firing

Once hundreds of pots have been produced, and air dried for a few days, they are fired in the huge village kiln, which is run about once a month.  The finished pots are sold to towns and villages across a wide area.

Entrance to the village kiln

Finished pots ready for market

In the knife-making village villagers heat pieces of steel (now from old cars, I suspect previously from UXO) in small forges and hammer them into blades for all uses – hoes, axes, scythes, sickles, cleavers, machetes and daggers.  The anvils on which they worked were shell casings, “presents from the Americans.”  The blades were then sharpened on an angle grinder before being attached to bamboo handles and sold in the village or nearby markets.

Hammering a knife blade on an old munitions casing

Knives ready for sale

Arrr!!

Many women weave: in one village women had draped the windows of a house near the highway with their scarves and shawls for sale.  Each woman paid a small commission from a sale to the owner of the house in return for displaying her wares.

One of the weavers, with her scarf which I bought

In the woodworking village villagers produce small carvings for sale in situ as well as bespoke pieces for hotels and businesses all over Laos and in Thailand.  

A roughed-out elephant ready for working up.  Its mate will be carved out of the large block in the bottom left

Detail of a panel for a hotel, showing scenes from traditional life

Farmer harvesting tubers