Mountain of Rice

What would prompt a group of 5 MCC staff and several district partners to crawl over +1000 bags of rice piled high in the living room of a Lao home?

A few weeks ago I (Jeffrey) had the privilege of going with the team to inspect the first shipment of this year's rice for the food-for-work program. This rice will be given to villagers who have invested work in building the irrigation system and paddy land that are currently under construction.

Rice Piled High

The process of inspecting the quality of rice should be simple right? Check a few bags...take a few samples...do some analyzing. But how do you take a good representative sample from a mountain of rice bags 8 ft high, 20ft wide, and 15ft deep? Well that is where the crawling comes in!

Climbing on the Piles

To get to the bottom of the pile we had to 'dig' holes randomly in the mountain as deep as was possible to get a random sample from the bags.

Using a slick rice sampling tool (a hollow pointed tube with a handle attached) we would pierce one bag at a time. Rice would then flow out into small sample collection bags (sort of like taking blood samples...just less need to be precise in the puncture!). The bag's weave would then self-seal once the tool was removed. After enough rice was collected from each row the sample bags were collected and sent to Vientiane to be analyzed by a rice quality testing facility.

Kong Withdrawing a Sample

Vone Extracting a Sample

Rice is analyzed on a variety of points such as: hardness, % of broken grains, % of red grains, % of un-husked grains, and softness once steamed. Once the rice passes quality control MCC will distribute the rice as payment to villagers for their work on the construction projects.

Wendy Organizing Samples