Villagers live in thatch-roof huts, and there is no functioning school or health clinic.
The poor live in thatch huts, work part-time as agricultural laborers and pull their children out of school young.
Led by Ashin Thon Data, a 30-year-old Buddhist monk, the peace marchers arrived in Myitkyina in March and traveled to refugee camps scattered around the city, where some of the 90,000 people displaced from the fighting live in thatch huts.
Some keen-eyed people in the Philippines, monitoring the satellite data remotely, spotted the roof's lack of luminosity, showing that Mr Anoche lived under thatch (not tin).
For some in the Nuba Mountains, living in thatch huts far from electricity or paved roads, the sharpest acquaintance they are making with 21st-century technology is to be bombed by Sudanese aircraft.
After decades of turmoil, during which he lived in thatch huts in the jungle, Mr. Teng Sakun now has a grocery shop in Anlong Veng and drives a Toyota Camry.
Now he rhapsodizes how Asians "who would have been stuck knee-deep in muddy rice paddies, living in thatch huts and surviving on subsistence diets now work in air-conditioned glass-and-steel skyscrapers, inhabit glitzy high-rises with stuffed refrigerators and sip Starbucks cappuccinos".
The Nags still live in a tiny thatch hut.
On one side, in crude mud-and-thatch houses, live the local smallholders.
And like them, he lives in a thatch and bamboo house, grows rice and raises goats and chickens.
