Our Village

If you ever come to visit us, you’d probably get the impression that we’re living in a fairy-tale’s setting. Our house is located on the slope of a mountain where streams flow to water the nearby rice-farms. Not far away, there’s a waterfall and hundreds of acre of harvest field – green in sowing season, gold in harvest time.
Yet closer to the peak of the mountain stand a hundred mansions, some of marble, some of granite, some are large, some are very large, some look like castles, some like palaces and shrines. It greatly resembles the pictures in bedtime stories that depict a great palace overlooking towns and villages where the subjects of the nobles live.
But we prefer being the subjects, not the nobles.
Why, you might ask?
Because… The nobles live in the city, immersing themselves in projects of making money to pay for their mansions’s bills and housekeeping. They are only able to visit their lofty mansions four times a month (maximum), on weekends and public holidays.
They don’t live here. They have no idea how luxurious it is to live here.
We dwell in houses of bricks and stones. Most of us don’t even have fences to mark the boundary of our homes. Some of us are farmers, some are herdsmen, while others are teachers, merchants, and grocers.
Every morning, we rise before the sun luminates the horizon, say our prayers and light the firewood on the hearth. We breathe the fresh air tinted with pine scent and drink water straight from the spring. We work our fields and take our cattle out for grazing. We walk to the woods to collect firewood and none of us dies before reaching 70 years of age.
And none of us ever dreams of becoming a nobleman…!