![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.craigpratsch.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/01\/P1030666.e.jpg\" "\\"Hmong")
<\/a><\/p>\nThey live in Northern Vietnam, next to China, and over the centuries, they’ve built spectacular terraces to grow rice and feed the surrounding villages.<\/p>\n
I asked our guide (woman to the right of me in the above picture with the green head scarf) how they grow and harvest the crops. \u00a0She said there are multiple rice harvests per year. The villagers walk the roaming buffalo across the terraces to perform the function of plowing. \u00a0They plant the rice, divert the river to keep water flowing into their patties, and everyone helps. \u00a0She said it’s hard work. \u00a0She lives in a village with minimal electricity and running water, when she says something is hard work, it must be incredibly hard.<\/p>\n I asked her what is the furthest place she’s traveled to, fully expecting an answer of no further than Hanoi (closest big city) or China, which is about 20 miles away. \u00a0Her response shocked me. \u00a0She said she’s never been out of the valley we were in! \u00a0The furthest place she ever walks, is to the hotel where she picked us up, on foot, to trek us down to her village. Ten miles max. \u00a0Such a different world than my own. \u00a0I\u00a0literally\u00a0took planes, trains and\u00a0automobiles, in that order, and traveled thousands of miles to stand in a valley that she’s never left. \u00a0I wonder what she thinks of the tourists visiting her\u00a0village, taking pictures and leaving. \u00a0I wonder if she realizes her world is so different than the rest. \u00a0I wonder what she thinks when she sees a commercial on TV of cities, buildings, or air planes. \u00a0Things that she has never seen in person and may never see in her lifetime. \u00a0I can’t think of anything comparable to my own life. \u00a0Of all the places I’ve lived, no one’s visited to take pictures of my daily life. \u00a0Everyone knows how I live. \u00a0I can’t think of something I’ve seen on TV that I’ve not seen in real life. \u00a0The moon? \u00a0Other countries? \u00a0I’ve never seen the moon up close, but I believe people have been there and come back. \u00a0I haven’t been to all the countries in the world, but I understand geography and the distances between these places. \u00a0She has never seen a city, where billions of people on this planet live. \u00a0I wanted to speak with her more, but the language barrier became too great. \u00a0Maybe the outside world is not her concern. \u00a0She married at 17, has a child, is now 20 years old and has another baby on the way. \u00a0She’s worried about feeding her family, she probably doesn’t care that cities and planes exist. \u00a0How is that going to help her in her daily life?<\/p>\n I just love this picture.<\/p>\n Side note: Many Asian speakers have a really hard time pronouncing the letter “L”, so the word people, comes out like pe-po, temple, comes out like tem-po, etc. \u00a0The Hmong pe-po were awesome to meet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My favorite experience in Vietnam was visiting the Hmong people in Sapa. \u00a0Their life and world is so unique and so different than my own it’s almost unbelievable that our two worlds exist on the same planet. \u00a0In the below … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n