Village house and yard

The people who own this house are poor and not very successful farmers. They have enough land to make a better go of it, but somehow they don't. As a result they both have to spend time doing wage work for others. She does agricultural work, I'm not sure what he does, but it's in the provincial town and, she told us, he's training to be a hairdresser. I guess farming and hairdressing don't really go together! They have one small kid. The other possible reason for their poverty is that they recently inherited land in the village from his family. Most of the rest of the family lives in Thanh Hoa province, to which they had fled during the French bombing in 1946. The result is that this couple don't really know a whole lot of people in the village and it's possible that they learned how to farm in a place where conditions are quite different. Not really being plugged into the local networks means that they could be having difficulty adapting.

Everyone has a brick-paved yard so that the paddy can be spread out to dry after the harvest. Each night it is raked up, using the instrument in the foreground, and put into storage indoors overnight so that it doesn't get damp again. And, by the way, that is a pet dog, not an edible one!