A bumpy hour long ride on the local bus north of Pleiku put us in the Kon Tum. Set among the mountains of the Central Highlands the town is a hub for the Montagnard (French for people of the hills) that call the region home. The term Montagnard refers to a number of different minority tribes that are ethnically and culturally different than the Viet majority of the country. The CIA recruited the Montagnard to fight for the south during the American war, an alliance that has brought them much persecution since the conflict. Undercurrents of tension erupted on the surface in 2004 with violent protest against government police, an incident that closed the region to all tourism until 2006. Today the many of the 700 hundred villages that dot the area survive on subsistence farming in relative poverty to their Viet neighbors.
Selling the fruits of the forest
The Wooden Church built by French missionaries in 1913. Many of the Bahnar people (the tribe of our guide) subscribe to a religious belief system that fuses Catholicism with animism.
The church's curved rafters are bamboo, a fast growing highly abundant alternative to wood that lends itself kindly to such forms.
Many hill tribe children end up in the orphanage run by the church
The orphanage's onsite farm
Home of the chief in a Bahnar village
The chief making his bamboo xylophone sing for us
Our guide
The Bahnar are small people with big hearts
Cob (a straw and clay mixture) is a common building material for non-structural walls
Each village has one of these buildings, a meeting place for unmarried men.
Bamboo lattice, the other traditionally used wall system.
Chief of a Jarai village
What a smile on that kiddo...# pic.
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