Former sponsored child training to be a teacher

Ngam is a first year student at Danang University of Pedagogics in central Vietnam. The 21-year-old hopes she’ll be a teacher in her remote community in the central province of Quang Nam after she graduates in three years. 

“I want to realise my dream. I want all children to be literate and go to school,” says the girl from the Co-tu ethnic minority group. 

Rapat Thi Ngam lives with her parents and her four younger brothers and sisters at an upland village in Dong Giang district. Her parents now cultivate wet rice twice a year, raise pigs, fish and plant fruit trees. They take water from small streams to irrigate their rice fields. Their house has a kitchen, a dining room and a bathroom. 

“My parents are farmers but they can afford education of me and my siblings. It is their impressive effort. And it’s World Vision who supported my parents to achieve the work,” says the girl who is a former World Vision sponsored child. 

When Ngam was a child in primary school, her parents struggled with poverty. They used to harvest only one crop a year. They planted their rice on hills and their only water source came from rain. 

“During harvest time, my whole family stayed in a small hut on the hill for a week. While my parents were busy reaping rice, I collected wood for cooking or cutting leaves of sweet potatoes to sell for pig food,” the girl recalls. 

“I spent several hours going on foot from our rice field to the primary school in the morning and came back home in the afternoon,” she continues. “I felt scared though I walked with other children whose parents stayed at the field. I was afraid I might fall [off the side of the hill] into the abyss as the road was full of stones and so slippery.

“Worse, I didn’t understand totally what my teachers talked about when I was at the first and second grade of the primary school. My family and I only talked the Co-tu language at home while my teachers talked in the national language,” she adds. 

“But both my friends and I loved to go to school as we had joy with our classmates. I loved math because with the subject, I was able to help my mother to calculate when she sold bananas or acacia trees.”

With only one harvest a year, Ngam’s parents weren’t able to provide an adequate lifestyle for their children. 

“Our normal food was salt, chili and boiled leaves of sweet potatoes. Sometimes, we had soup of cassava leaves, fish or forest mouse that my father caught,” the girl recalls. “We lacked rice between June and August because we couldn’t harvest it during that time. We ate cassava instead or borrowed rice from other villagers. If we had rice, we paid them rice. If not, we paid them by harvesting rice or planting cassava for the lenders.” 

“I got used to having no breakfast when going to school. Sometimes I felt very hungry and couldn’t focus on studying,” she says. “I just wanted the school to be over quickly so I hurried to return home and ate any food that my mother cooked.”

Ngam’s old house was smaller than the present one. It was roofed by corrugated iron sheets and the foundation was soil. The house had only a table as a place to receive guests.

“My most treasured possession was a little plastic doll which was twice [the size] of my little fist,” she continues. “My father gave it to me as a present after I got mark 10 at Grade 1. It was the first time I had a gift and it was my first toy. I brought the doll with me when going to school and going to bed.”