Extension professionals are not challenged on a daily basis to look through the lens of an individual or a group that holds cultural norms so different from their own. To move from studying the list of a population group's cultural ways that was handed out at an in-service or is part of a textbook we purchased is the point. To take the responsibility and, as previously noted, the risk to internalize why and how those cultural norm manifest in the behavior of a group or an individual is the point. To emphasize the need to and potential challenge of taking off one's spectacles due to vast cultural differences, I provide some pictures. As in most villages in the area, there is no electricity or running water.
Women wash their clothes and bath their children in the stream.
Chickens and pigs roam free throughout the village. Villages are organized in a communal system. Basic crop rotation is not always practiced. Figure 2 depicts harvesting rice with a sickle at Silver Creek Village. By age 14 to 16, young women are engaged by their parents to acceptable young men.