More teachers volunteer in mountain provinces

28/08/2007
More and more young teachers are volunteering to go to remote mountainous provinces to teach ethnic minority children in the hope of helping them catch up with the rest of their peers.

After graduating from a teachers training college in 1985, Tran Thi Nguyet volunteered to go to Hong Thu Commune, Sin Ho — a remote border district in Lai Chau Province — to teach children of the Mong ethnic minority.

As a young girl from a government official’s family, it would have been easy for Nguyet to find a teaching job in her hometown of Muong Lay in Dien Bien Province, but she decided to follow her own path in life instead of living in her parents’ shadow.

She recalls: "When I first arrived at the commune, I was struck by the miserable lives of the local people. I thought I would not overcome the boredom of life there."

"And when I was first taken to the school, I was shocked," she says. "It was made of dilapidated mud walls and thatch, with just a few benches and tables."

In the 1980s, the people in Hong Thu Commune lived in very difficult conditions, she says. Parents’ first priority was feeding their children.

After living and working there for almost 20 years, Nguyet says she feels her life is more meaningful. This feeling grows, she says, as the number of students at her school increases each year.

But Nguyet has put so much of herself into helping the children of Hong Thu commune that she has forgotten her personal life. Now in her early 40s, she has no children of her own and has remained unmarried.

According to Thao A Thai, Secretary of the Hong Thu Communal Party Committee, the commune has 16 villages and all the inhabitants are from the Mong ethnic minority.

"Forty-two per cent of the households in the commune are rated as poor, according to pre-2005 criteria," he says.

Doan Trong Tuyen, headmaster at Hong Thu lower-secondary school says student attendance is about 70–80 per cent. "That figure drops to 50 per cent during the harvest season," he confides.

Tuyen says the school has 493 students and 47 teachers. Sixty per cent of the teachers came from the delta provinces.

Bum To school

Hoang Thi Dua from Thai Binh Province has been teaching at Bum To school, in Bum To commune, Muong Te District, Lai Chau Province, for nine years.

She says teaching children of the La Hu ethnic minority was a big challenge for her and the other teachers.

The La Hu ethnic minority is very poor – o­ne of the poorest ethnic groups in the country and they live in a very isolated area high in the mountains.

With help from the Party and State, the lives of the La Hu people have improved considerably in recent years, she says.

With better learning conditions, teaching equipment and more teachers coming from the plains, over the last three school years the Bum To school has welcomed many more students.

Dua is in charge of a third grade class of 14 students.

"I’m very glad that the attendance rate in my class is very high," she says.

Like Dua, Do Van Duc, volunteered to go to the Bum To school after he graduated from the Bac Ninh Physical Training and Sports University in 2004.

Duc says that in the beginning he missed his family terribly. But, with the support and assistance of the other 12 teachers, who also came from the plains, "Little by little I got used to the life here," he says.

Pham Xuan Doi, 27, is the headmaster of the school. He says that in the whole commune there are o­nly 35 classes from grades 1 to 7, with o­nly 18 students in grades 6 and 7 together.

Encouragingly, however, there are 11 pre-school classes, he says.

All together the commune has 592 students from pre-school to grade 7 and 45 teachers.

Doi says all the nine villages in the commune now have satellite schools and 90 per cent of the classrooms are made of brick.

Transferred to Bum To school last year, Doi is convinced that with the enthusiasm, energy and dynamism of their young teachers, the children of ethnic minorities living in the northern-most province of Lai Chau will be able to catch up with their peers in the plains. 

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