Rice Harvesting Week. :)

       Woke up as early as 6:30am in the morning to get ready to go rice harvesting. It is my first time ever and never in my life thinking I would be harvesting rice. Have absolutely no idea what is going to happen, just know I will have to get down and dirty with the mud in the field since it rained couple days before. The muddy field definitely added to the experience of harvesting rice. As soon as I stepped into the mud, from that point on its pretty pointless to keep myself as clean as I can. The mud makes me no longer worry about the dirtiness nor the bugs in the mud. Enjoy this experience was all that is left in my mind. I think we were pretty lucky to be able to be such a good weather. It was not as hot as we expected and the breeze was just perfect!
       After harvesting, we came back and enjoyed a wonderful lunch prepared by our lovely colleagues and drank some rice wine (ruou). The life in the village seems very chill and easy everyone living their day by day. After lunch, our team headed out to talk to the locals and I played with the local kids near the pagoda. As I took the two kids to the village gate to get ice-cream, the locals we passed by were very friendly as they were asking me many questions about my muddy pants. It was heartwarming talking to them in which they kept asking if I'm itch from the mud and if I am tired. They were surprise that we would be harvesting rice and chuckled a bit when I told them I liked it a lot!
      Since younger folks are no longer interested in the traditional rural agricultural work that's why the older people at the village thought it was strange that we are actually enjoying doing work like this. After talking to one of the local while he is fishing at the pond, we see how rural agricultural changes in the village. During the war, the government would divide up land according to the number of members in each household; more people more land. However, after the government set the birth control policy, every household get the same amount of land, don't matter how many members are in their family. Rural agricultural is slowly becoming less popular as an occupation the younger generation would like to take on. About 40% of the youngsters work in the urban area like Hanoi during the day and travel back to the village at night. While the rest had to move to the city to go to school like Chu Khoi's daughter, Yen. The field work is now belonging to the older generation to continue and they are the ones that still live in the village.  Now transportation is available to everyone, commuting from the city to the village is no longer a problem. It allows people to migrate and move around or away from where their hometown to work elsewhere. With the young generation moving away from the rural agricultural labor, how long will this survive in the future? How will development with the new technology affect traditional farming? Will it help or will eventually make farming slowly disappearing?