This village is so small it doesn’t even appear on a map with a name. I learned the house I’m staying in was constructed in 1994. All the homes here are south-facing with large windows on the south side. This house is split into three sections for different people in the family. Although the house isn’t very old, it is very old fashioned.
The biggest difference between this home and ones in a city is the lack of indoor pumping and running water. All of their water is from a hand pump. And this is an improvement since before there used to be a well used with buckets. The toilet is is a concrete outhouse with no door, only a sheet covering half the doorway. There is no shower here. To bathe, one must use a bucket of water outside or visit a town nearby to use a shower.
The kitchen is very basic here. To cook food, it is not by electricity, not gas, but by burning mostly corn stalks. These burn very quick and hot, and the reason why stir-fry type cooking is done in China. The top of the stove has a built-in curved wok. Next to the stove is a bedroom and inside the bedroom is a kang, a type of bed on top of 1m of packed dirt and clay. The idea is the fire in the kitchen will warm the kang and it will keep you warm all night. I imagine in the winter the whole family will sleep here to keep warm. In addition, they will run a stove pipe from the kitchen through the entire bedroom in the winter time for more heat.
The house is surrounded by a brick wall and two gates. Outside there are a number of chickens in a pen and one pig. There is also a garden where vegetables are grown. Most of the vegetables I’m eating here are grown in this village. Also if I eat chicken meat, it is from their own chickens. And once per year they will usually kill a big pig.
Around the village is mostly corn fields, the main income for the people here. Corn isn’t a very popular food for cooking here in China, but more so for animals or ground up and sold for other uses. I was surprised all the corn is harvested by hand here. Right now it is harvest time and people are cutting down individual stalks, peel the corn, put it in a bag, use a wheelbarrow to bring it home, and then dry it in the sun.
My friend’s father is a security guard at the village’s step-down power station. I got a tour from the 35kV source, to the transformers, some big capacitors, and the monitoring equipment. The station is only about one year old. Even though this is not a big city, I am impressed by the road and electrical infrastructure around here.