For years, children from a rural hamlet in southeastern Vietnam have been dropping out of school after finishing elementary education because they cannot travel the 15 kilometers between their homes and the nearest middle school.

The hamlet in question is Hoa Loc Hamlet in Dau Tieng District, Binh Duong Province, where around 50 children have virtually no access to secondary education because the school is too far away to travel by bicycle.

Located some two kilometers from the main road of Hoa Loc Hamlet is the Cham Village, where over 100 Cham families live scattered among rubber tree farms.

Every year, around ten children in the village graduate from elementary school, but for many years these children have had to stop going to school after this graduation because their homes are located 15 kilometers from the middle school.

The sorrow of children

Chau Gia Pha, 14, and Chau Mach, 13, are brothers who studied in the same class in elementary school.

Last year, the two graduated from their school in Hoa Loc Hamlet and, like many other children there, the brothers have been staying at home since.

Carrying his one-year-old brother on his side, Chau Mach beamed at Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper reporters, saying, “When I was still in school, I was awarded the certificate of merit for doing well, while my older brother was only an average student. We both passed though.”

Since dropping out of school, the brothers have been using school time to take care of household chores such as looking after their younger brothers, helping their grandmother prepare the meals, as well as some other seasonal tasks.

Chau Gia Pha seemed less chatty than his younger brother, nodding reluctantly when asked whether he wanted to go back to school.

“I do want to go to school very much, but our middle school is too far away. It would be exhausting to ride a bicycle through several slopes along the way. My parents are busy fetching food for our family so they don’t have time to drive us to school,” Pha confessed sadly.

Seeing that his father, Chau Van Xa Leh, had come home from work, Pha quickly ran to his motorbike to help unload the fishing net with dozens of kilograms of fish inside and carried it to the kitchen.

“Since we’re poor, both their mother and I have to do laborious jobs to earn some hundred dong a day, which is barely enough to buy food and cover other expenses. So we don’t have time to take them to school,” Leh said.

Looking around the battered house and back at his sons, the father continued, “Much as I want them to continue their study, I just can’t risk letting them ride a bicycle for 15 kilometers to school under the sun. Even if they make it to school safe and sound, they will be too exhausted to study. I also want them to learn but it’s too difficult for us.”

There’s a long way to go… to school

Kho Sanh, an elder in the village, recalled, “Back in the day, there was a villager called Tro Hia who would volunteer to take the children to school and back on his tractor. However, since his death six years ago, nobody has replaced him, so they just gradually drop out. For some years there hasn’t been a single kid in this village that’s gone to middle school.”

Ho Sanh, a resident in Hoa Loc Hamlet who has a three-year-old daughter, also expressed his concern, “No matter how poor our family is, we still want our children to go to school to have some knowledge and lead a better life than our own.”

“There hasn’t been a student from Cham Village attending our school for a few years now,” said Nguyen Ngoc Dung, vice principal of Minh Hoa Middle School. “There’s now only one Cham student in the whole school, but I guess that’s just because the family has moved nearby.”

“I can’t help but wonder how they would come to be with the knowledge of a fifth grader. I’m worried about our future generation,” Dung added.

Ta Tan Tuan, deputy head of Dau Tieng District's Office of Education and Training, said a middle school could not be built in the hamlet since there were only around 50 children in the area, while the regulation from the Ministry of Education and Training requires at least 150 attending students to open a new school.

“The office has proposed a plan to the Dau Tieng People’s Committee to operate a bus to take these children to school,” Tuan added.

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