(Baonghean) -The row of boarding houses is precariously located on the mountainside, huddled together in a circle. Each tent is built with planks, the roof is open, each gust of wind carries the cold that penetrates the skin. But overcoming all, the children still cling to their dream of learning in the highlands of Nghe An border.

In a simple, bare boarding tent, student Vu Chong Kan (6th grade student, Huoi Tu Ethnic Minority Secondary School - Ky Son district -) is busy cooking dinner.“What are you having for dinner tonight?” I asked. “Vegetables and bamboo shoots,” Kan replied, his eyes still fixed on the rice pot. Looking around, I saw piles of firewood piled up around the tiny hut. Blackened pots, some missing lids, some dented were the most valuable things Kan had. On the torn mat, faded notebooks lay haphazardly along with a tattered blanket. Kan’s house was nearly 10km away from school by mountain road, and it took more than 3 hours to get there. Only on weekends did Kan return home to bring rice, a little food that his parents had saved up to last the whole week.

In the next hut, two brothers, Lau Ba Lun and Lau Ba Leng, had just returned from fetching spring water. If I hadn’t asked, I probably wouldn’t have recognized who was the older brother and who was the younger brother. Small and dark-skinned, Lau Ba Leng said: Because our family was poor, each week, the two brothers were only given more than 3 kilograms (kg) of rice and more than 100,000 VND by their parents. Every week, the two brothers took turns going home to get food and money. But during the lean months, the amount of rice their parents provided was less. To have daily food, the two brothers also had to go into the forest to pick bamboo shoots and vegetables to eat. “With such hardship, do you have enough strength to study?” I asked. Lau Ba Lun smiled and replied: “We are not afraid of hunger, we are only afraid of not being able to learn to read and write.”

Not only Kan, the two brothers Lun and Leng, but also more than 200 boarding students here still do not want to give up their dream of learning even though the road to it is full of hardships. Sharing with us, teacher Trinh Thi Nguyet, Huoi Tu Ethnic Boarding Secondary School (DTBT) said: "Most of the families of the boarding students here are poor, so their learning conditions are still very difficult. But they are very eager to learn and have the will to study."

To improve the quality of learning, since 2008, Huoi Tu Ethnic Minority Secondary School has had the initiative to organize concentrated classes at night for students. Every 7:30 p.m., the generator (Huoi Tu commune does not have grid electricity) generates electricity, students flock to the classrooms to be guided by teachers to do their homework. Sharing about this movement, Mr. Nguyen Van Truong, Principal of the school, said: "Seeing that the students do not have electricity to study at night, the school, together with the commune government, mobilized people to contribute to buy generators to generate electricity. With electricity, the students can study better, and the teachers also have less trouble teaching new lessons to them. From here, the quality of the students' learning has been greatly improved."

For many years now, the rate of students passing the entrance exams to universities and colleges in Huoi Tu has been increasing. In 2010, Huoi Tu commune had 7 students passing the entrance exams to prestigious universities. A typical example is Vu Ba Trung who last year passed the entrance exam to the University of Transport (HCMC). It is known that Trung's family is one of the poorest in the village, but Trung still tries hard to study and achieves high results in the recent university entrance exam.

Huoi Tu is one of the poor communes with many difficulties in the mountainous district of Ky Son (the poverty rate is over 80%). The whole commune has more than 1,376 students with 3 levels of education (junior high school, primary school, preschool), of which the number of junior high school students is 440 students, most of whom have to stay in boarding schools because their houses are far from school. If compared with communes located close to the town, the learning conditions of the students are still lacking in many ways. However, the achievements that the students here have achieved are really commendable. Teacher Truong told us: "Every year, the quality of the entrance exam to high school, the school is always ranked in the top 3 of the district. Moreover, Huoi Tu is a commune with many difficulties, but compared with 42 junior high schools in the district, many of the school's students are not inferior to those in the schools in the town".

Below are some pictures of the difficult life and learning conditions of students at Huoi Tu Ethnic Minority Secondary School (Huoi Tu Commune, Ky Son District).

Pham Bang