Rough “road” to learning

 Please fasten your seat belts.

The road to learning is rough: one has to survive the transportation to and fro, bullies and academic pressures.

“it’s the same river, same ferry, and coconut trees along the banks, but, it’s different today. The difference is, …today, I am back to school” (paraphrasing a poem by Thanh Tinh)..

When their age, I got picked up by various adults in my household: father, brother, sitter and sister (my mom was a school teacher at another school, so she couldn’t have due to schedule conflict). They picked me up by VeloSolex and Mobylette. Twice my little foot got stuck in the back wheel (once I ended up in the emergency room).

Rough road to learning.

Seeing school children in An Giang getting ferried to school brought back some memories (last week, on PBS Newshour, on the subject of the Keystone pipeline,

one commentator even mentioned that current climate change was due to global increased energy consumption in countries like Vietnam and China etc… That prompted a rebuff from the environmentalist, who said “how much an average Vietnamese uses energy per day compared to the developed world”. We should chroma-key in above picture to make his point).

School could never equip us with survival instincts.

The best teachers can do is to create a sense of normalcy, habit-forming, and hopefully,

plant a desire for further learning.

Besides, they already got “tiger moms” at home who ensure conformity to village life.

Those are end-products based on century-old Mandarin system (to supply new blood to run the admin system).

Except now, we don’t face shortage of labor at all (fewer people are required to produce the same amount of agri and aqua products, fewer employees per factory/offfice square foot etc…No more “where is the white-out”.

Yet, children are risking their young lives to get to school across the river.

Quite a “distant” learning.

Could someone throw a safety jacket?

Here, people blog about  (wearing) “White after Labor Day“.

I just hope that one of those children will make it to the big city, and propel into the big league (statistical outcome of a large gene pool of 90 million). Perhaps through IT, or Math (one already won the most prestigious award).

One charity in the West was exposed for trying to build schools in Afghanistan while pocketing the rest.

He even wrote a book about it. PR man. Opportunist man. Spare a jacket?

I am sure these schoolchildren pick up on some survival skills during their one-hour commute (team work, social awareness etc..) before setting foot in the classroom.

And should one of them be drowned, (as already happened) I hope for the rest a quick move forward over survivor’s guilt.

Those scars take a long time to heal.

I know what I am writing about.

I still have the aching ankle ground by Mobylette to prove it.

It took place from a rough road back from school.

It’s the same road that I saw every day, but the difference was, that day, was the day I arrived home via the hospital. Rough “road” to learning, I tell you.