Lieutenant Hoang Thanh Hop from Border Post 591 based in the commune said that a class opened early last year, as dozens of local people were found to be illiterate and others were on the verge of losing their reading and writing skills.

Hop and Major Hoang Van Duc were assigned to organise the class and they encouraged local residents to enrol.

Duc said that at the beginning, they knocked on every door in Ban Village to urge people to attend the class because most of them thought they were too old to go to school.

However, he said after one month they went voluntarily, and there are now 23 students, aged 15 to 50.

Bien, 27, said that she dropped out of school after seventh grade and that her border guard teachers not only taught her how to write and read Vietnamese, but also passed on other forms of knowledge.

Forty-nine-year-old Dinh Xam, a father of eight children, said that attending the class was a way he encouraged his children to study harder.

"Old villagers have led a hard life due to illiteracy, and young people need to be educated to escape poverty," he said.

Some celebrated the fact that as class members, they were given free textbooks and notebooks and did not have to pay tuition.

The class usually takes place in the early morning because afterward, local people start their working day. Lieutenant Hop said the schedule was quite flexible to work around peak farming times, especially during the harvest.

He said that so far, the students were divided into four groups from first to fourth grade reading levels.

"All my students now can read and write Vietnamese and do four basic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division," he said happily.

Phan Thi Tuyet, vice head of Bo Trach District’s Education and Training Department, said that before becoming teachers, the border guards took a department course that trained them to plan lessons, manage the class and assess students’ performance.

She said that people attending the class were taught Vietnamese language, maths and sciences, just like students at mainstream primary schools.

"In mountainous border areas, the school drop-out rate is quite high, and people face illiteracy despite the fact that they used to go to school," she said.

Major Duc said that the guards had to learn about the daily life and culture of the Ma Coong people, in order to plan effective lessons and make them useful to their students.

The border guards have also incorporated information on State and Government policies into the lessons, especially in the fields of population, gender and agriculture.

Source: VNS