Dream of having a bicycle to school

(Baonghean)The dropout rate of children in mountainous areas is higher than in lowland areas. There are many reasons, but one of them is the difficult roads.

Moi village (Luc Da commune - Con Cuong) is 7 km from the commune center, not to mention a residential area in Moi village (local people call it Thin village) nearly 10 km from the commune center on a mountainous road. If Luc Da Secondary School had not recently taken the initiative to give teachers' dormitories to Dan Lai students, who knows when Thin village students would have the opportunity to study in secondary school? Thin village is not the only remote village in this disadvantaged commune, students in the rest of Moi village and Xang village are also very far from school, students who want to go to class have to wake up very early and walk for 2 hours. By the time they get home from school, it is already late afternoon. But the number of rooms is limited, so they have to be reserved for students in Thin village residential area.



Going to school. Photo: Cong Kien

An elder in Moi village said that out of the entire community of 150 households, only 5 households have escaped poverty. People's lives depend almost entirely on foraging, so buying a bicycle worth about 1 million VND for their children to go to school is a distant dream!

At Moi village, it was almost 13 o'clock when we met La Thi Mo, carrying a backpack, climbing uphill towards the village. She is an 8th grader, and for 3 consecutive years she has had to walk nearly 15 km every day. However, there are very few people like Mo. Many students get discouraged early and drop out of school.

In Con Cuong district, there are many communes where students have to go to school dozens of kilometers away from home such as Chau Khe, Yen Khe, Luc Da, Don Phuc... The situation of students having to go to school far away, even having to stay in camps is common in Tuong Duong, Ky Son, Que Phong.

Ngan Thi Mao, a 6th grader at Don Phuc Secondary School (Con Cuong) told us that her village is nearly ten kilometers away from the school, so she has to wake up at 5 a.m. to get to class. If her parents had the money to buy a bicycle, things would be easier for her. "The first days of school, my legs were very tired, but because I like going to school, I don't want to quit," Mao added.

A mother in the Hua Na Hydropower resettlement area (Dong Van commune - Que Phong) confided: "The family moved to a new place and there was no place to study, so they had to stay in a shack near the old village to go to school. The school is about 10m from the house but the road is quite convenient. If she had a bicycle, her child would not have to work so hard!"

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