A couple of months ago, BBGV received an application to charity fund from Blue Dragon Children Foundation. The application form included photos of a kindergarten in Gia (Da) Bop, Muong Mun village, Dien Bien province. Seeing the state of the building, we did not know what to call it as it was just a wooden skeleton. This timber ‘house’ did not have a single wall nor even the simplest facilities and in addition the roof was also crumbling.

Gia (Da) Bop is located in one of the remotest and most disadvantaged areas of Dien Bien. It is home to approximately 200 Hmong people who earn less than two USD per day. Their income primarily relies on rice cultivation which is vulnerable to natural disasters. To help picture this village, it would be typical to see children in bare feet, wearing threadbare clothes, and 13 to 15 year-old girls carrying their own child on their back. Education for children is not a priority to those young parents while they themselves are illiterate. Local Government efforts to reduce the tuition fee to between zero and one USD per month would result in having 30 kids aged from three to five attend the kindergarten. However, maintaining attendance was a further challenge, especially when the school construction was in such a bad state of repair. White ants had eaten the insides of the pillars which meant the construction could collapse at any time.

Board Members of BBGV Charity sub-committee sat down together, and initial feeling of sadness went to real concern for the childrens safety and hygiene and to how could the survive in the severe winter on that mountain. BBGV decided to send BDCF an affirmative response to their project, to building a proper school for those 30 children.

With the donation and an immense amount of effort, the new school was accomplished after three months. 80 kilometres from from the airport and 12 kilometres from the centre of Muong Mun commune, the main road to Gia Bop was a non-asphalt surface in the midst of the mountains. There came a series of difficulties to surmount, one after another, from transportation of the materials, no electricity, landslides and the rainy season. As BDCF representative shared with us, the female teachers had to do whatever was needed get everything achieved successfully.

In the end, the hard-work paid off. Attending the school opening ceremony, it was not just a pride but also an indescribable happiness to see a safe place for children to study and play. The school now has a classroom, a kitchen to serve lunch, a toilet and a school yard, giving education access to 30 children for now and for many years to come.

Text and photos by Dung Nguyen.