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Old 07-28-2004, 04:07 PM
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dave_a dave_a is offline
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Default Re: And Baby Makes 178

If you are interested in this sort of family arrangement you might want to check out the Hmong in the US. These are refugees the US brings here mainly from Laos. They only have a significant population in a few states, one of them being my own in Wisconsin.

You can read a bit about them here although it doesn't mention the extended family living arrangements many of them have.

Their extended family arrangements are more the result of poverty that first generation immigrants experience coming here without being able to speak English and having no skills in the US market beyond manual labor than any cultural preference. Not all of them stay this way, in many respects they are a very industrious people, but they almost all start off in poverty because of the situations they come from in their "home" countries where they are persecuted and despised.

Examples of them that I have witnessed are while fishing along a river in SE Wisconsin a "family" of 10 to 20 will be fishing and putting every single fish they catch, legal or otherwise into 5 gallon buckets. Largely their illegal fishing habits are ignored here as it is understood that 1. They don't understand the law, the law isn't written in Hmong and my understanding is the Hmong don't actually have a written language at this point. 2. They need the fish to feed their families, they aren't fishing for sport. 3. They tend to eat a lot of trash fish like carp and suckers that nobody cares about and aren't regulated anyway.

They tend to work in manual labor positions where they are misunderstood by their coworkers and generally ignored due to communication difficulties, but almost universally they are workhorses who don't complain about the job, they just do it.

As far as living arrangements, they are often found in medium to large sized groupings where they can pool their economic resources.

Frankly if the rest of America's poor had their ethics and willingness to live semi communally while bettering their marketable skills we wouldn't have any ghettos in the US.

They are a completely respectable people who are mistreated and misunderstood in pretty much every place they exist. To top it all off, they don't complain about it, they just work their way out of it taking care of each other along the way and enduring persecution with dignity.
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