World of the Khmu:

     The Khmuic people make a living from their surrounding environment and their individual cultural ways. They practice the ways of slash and burn farming and their main intake is through agriculture accompanied by gathering, hunting, trapping, and fishing. Rice is a main staple in their diet, but bananas and sugar cane is also an important part of their diet. Regarding their source of income and trade, the rural villages of the Khmu people in Laos are often just below the poverty line. Some villages make a living by producing silver tobacco pipes, knives, straw baskets, wood bowls, and so on. Others sell tea, tobacco, sweet potatoes, tea, and taro.
     When it comes to shelter and village development there are many different traditions; some followed today and others are ones of the past. The village is designed to fit up to 150 families and are settled on slanted sloped hundereds of meters above sea-level surrounded by fences. Houses are built so they never intersected the direction of the sun and lie east to west. Khmu cemeteries are traditionally divided into four sections; one for natural deaths, one for accidental deaths, one for children, and one for those who died away from home. The leaders of a typical Khmuic village include the shaman (spiritual medicine), medicine man (herbal medicine), priest, and village headman (chosen by Laotian government) (wikipedia). 
     Regarding celebrations, the Khmu practice 4 major festivals: crop planting, harvesting, new year, and get rid of sin festival. Today, the new year festival is hardly practiced, but when it is it is combined with the harvesting festival (wikipedia). Also, recovery ceremonies are practiced in times of diseases and natural disasters. During the recovery ceremony, sacrifices of livestock (particularly buffalo) occur frequently. 

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