Last Updated on October 10, 2024 by Alice Benny
Rural Life in Laos has one of the smallest population mass in Asia and villages tend to be dispersed, secluded and isolated from fundamental services. In Laos, each village tend to be a home to a distinct ethnic group.
In towns, ethnic groups may exist side-by-side, but in the rural areas, they create new villages consisting of members of their own group, instead of joining a village inhabited by another ethnic group.
Towns And Villages In Laos
Ten to several hundred of Lao families live in villages. Usually, the village houses crowd around each other, but in some cases they spread out in a rectangular or linear pattern along a principal road, river, stream or long thin piece of public land, with rice fields encircling the village.
Only a minority of Lao villages have families from other ethnic groups.
Village Life In Laos
The economy of most Lao villages is sustained by paddy rice cultivation, and several village activities and daily life is connected to rice production. Gelatinous, or sticky rice is the staple food in Laos, and due to its high starch content, sticky rice must be cooked with steam rather than boiled.
Villagers dip the rice in soup or a vegetable or a meat dish, and eat it with their fingers. Nearly all Lao Loum villages are independent and can cater for themselves through rice production. However, the production rate of different households within a village varies.
Household work focuses on paddy production right from when the rains begin in May, till December when all the rice has been harvested and brought gathered for storage.
Majority of the work is done during transplanting and harvesting, and interdependent work groups are often set up among different families, to help get the work done within a short period of time.
Additionally, so many households in Laos have a small vegetable garden and a few fruit trees situated either in the house compound or close to a stream.
They also grow in very small quantities for personal use:
- Cotton
- Tobacco
- Sugarcane
Villagers also rear domestic animals like chickens, ducks, and pigs, as well as one buffalo or two for breaking the fields during cultivation and maybe two cows for pulling a cart. Furthermore, hunting and fishing help in sustaining the household economy.
However, the increased population and degraded wild areas has made accessing these resources difficult. Hunters use homemade rifles to chase small deer, wild pigs, and small game like squirrels and birds, while fishes are caught with nets and traps.
Traditional Lao Homes
Traditional Lao houses are built with wood or bamboo and are erected on stilts above the ground. Villagers live on the first floor of houses erected on timber stilts. Most households keep animals, craft equipment, and food processing equipment like big wooden mortars and pestles beneath the house.
As you advance into the highlands, the standard of housing changes. The villages in lowland Lao have better houses than those living in the highland.
Everyday Rural Life In Laos
In Laos, almost everyday, you’ll see women pounding rice with big mortar and pestles, men breaking logs into planks with their axe, women and children washing their clothes and bathing themselves in the river, and villagers formulating deep blue indigo dyes used in making traditional textiles.
In some places, children run away in fear when they see foreigners, while in other places, loud speakers awaken villagers and announce the activities for the day.
A bulk of their diet includes forest products they gather, the crops they grow, and fish and wildlife they catch. The girls in the villages gather grubs for food and carry heaps of firewood. Hunters shoot birds with rifles and slingshots and capture wild animals with traps.
Are You Interested In Visiting Laos?
If you’re interested in visiting Laos, you can get your visa. Their agents assist travelers to obtain travel authorizations from governments. Their services include the proper review of all answers, assistance with completing the application, review of the application for accuracy, completeness, spelling, and grammar; their services also include the translation of information.
They may also contact their clients via phone or email if they require additional information to complete the request.
Once the application on their website is complete, an immigration expert reviews it and will submit an eVisa Laos request to the Government of Laos.
eVisa Laos applications are subject to approval by the Government of Laos, but their expertise ensures an application that is 100% free of errors. In most cases, applications are processed and approved within 3 business days. Please note that incomplete or incorrect applications may be delayed. Their experts follow up with applications, and approved Laos eVisas are sent via email with detailed information and tips on how to use the eVisa Laos to enter Laos.
