Today we visited the Baibi Village where we helped out the local community. We arrived at the primary school early in the morning where we helped to make a better school environment for the students there. We cleaned up the classrooms, swept the courts, painted the bare walls white and pained some murals on other bare walls. We also met a few local students who were at the school. The school was very plain and in some ways depressing. There was 1 main basketball court and the classrooms were not updated. The students were quite young and were excited when we came. We were excited too. We were invited into the home of the villagers’ leader. We tasted the perfectly cooked home grown meals and were very thankful to have these dishes. People had put in the effort to grow and hand pick each vegetable.
We walked around the village after the lunch break. Some of the villagers would spend their time gathering wood for a fire at night to keep them warm. Many of the people who own farms spend their time tending their crops so that they are reasonable to sell.
Manual labour was very common in the village. Apart from the people looking after farms, we saw people fixing drainage pipes and making the bricks to build some houses or to renovate an area. The village consisted of two main house types: the older style home (made out of mainly wood) and the newer built buildings (mostly concrete with a few windows). The housing in the village was very dull coloured and from afar, the one building that stood out was the freshly painted school. The reason for the older style being wood was because when the lower classes were forced to move, they came with minimal supplies and used the the wood from the fir trees in the area.
Chilli and rice farms are very common in this rural region. As we walked along the path to a nearby farm, we saw multiple farmlands. The area had lots of hills and mountaineous areas and steep slopes were common. As part of our community service, we visited a chilli and potato farm and hand picked chilli and sweet potatoes. We were fortunate to have a local farmer to open his farm for us. The villagers would dry their own crops so that they could preserve the crops for winter as some would be harder to grow.
We were able to also go into a villager’s house and got an insight of what their life was like living there. The rooms were fairly small and the second storey was used to store crops that had been harvested and dried such as corn and rice. The house also consisted of a guest room – they would clear the storage room to accomodate visitors overnight.
In the evening, we ventured out to another local Miao village for dinner. After this, the girls were offered the chance to dress up in traditional Miao garb…see our photo below!
Ruby & Angela
