Teaching Amid Terror

If the painful march toward democracy begun by Saigon's Soldier-Premier Nguyen Cao Ky is to have any real meaning, South Viet Nam must produce a literate electorate. But how can this be done in time of war, when rural schools are as much a target of Viet Cong grenades as American military encampments? More than 90 teachers have been slain by the V.C. and another 260 kidnaped since 1960, and many a classroom in the countryside has had its singsong language lessons abruptly interrupted by the staccato racket of a nearby Communist machine gun.

The answer has been a combination of U.S. money and Vietnamese grit. It is called the Hamlet School Project, a scheme that has put half a million Vietnamese children in school since 1963, and which aims eventually at putting a school and trained teacher in every "secure" hamlet in the nation. In the en tire U.S.-supported pacification program, no project has proved more popular with the war-battered rural populace.

Typical is the pair of two-room buildings in Tan Thanh Dong, a tiny cluster of huts in the Mekong Delta, where the teachers' voices must compete with the rumble of armored convoys on the road outside. Communist slogans, painted on the classroom walls by Viet Cong by night and whitewashed away by day, are faintly visible. Bullet holes stand out more starkly. On their way to school along a pot-holed road, children step carefully, watch for Viet Cong mines. One enemy mine recently killed two South Vietnamese soldiers near the school, and both sides ambush each other along the trails in the area. Sometimes the Viet Cong block the road--and that day school starts late.

Time to Cry. Teacher Diep Thi Kim Khanh, a shy 22-year-old who was born near by, concedes that conditions are sometimes terrifying but, she says, "I cannot leave these children." She recalls the afternoon when shots burst out around the school, and Vietnamese soldiers from a nearby government fort rushed into the building to fire back through the windows at the Viet Cong. "The children began to cry and were very afraid," says Mme. Kim Khanh. "I was very afraid and on the point of crying myself." After a half-hour fight, the Reds disappeared.

Despite the dangers, the building of a school wins friends for the Saigon government. At Soc Don, another Delta hamlet, all but twelve families moved off into the jungle when government troops arrived to secure the community. But when classes were opened in a deserted hut, using ammo boxes as tiny desks, people drifted back. Now 120 families live in Soc Don, the school is crowded, and a new classroom building is going up.

The Hamlet School Project has built 6,278 such classrooms since it began as a U.S. AID program four years ago. At first the Saigon government put up the buildings, but when the Viet Cong burned them down, the local people were indifferent. Now it is common for Saigon to provide the cement and aluminum roofing and let the residents do the work. That way, notes Ho Van Chieu, primary education chief for Phong Dinh province, "the V.C. are afraid to burn them down for fear of infuriating the people who built them."

Toward a Better Life. The Hamlet Project is also trying to cope with Viet Nam's tremendous teacher shortage. Of the 31,286 primary grade teachers in the country, only 10,500 have had any training at all. Nearly 9,000 of these were pushed through a crash three month training program under the Hamlet Project at centers in each province. These "90day wonders" are assigned to hamlets as soon as an area is considered secure.

A massive textbook program financed mainly by the U.S., Taiwan and Australia has supplied more than 10 million books to Vietnamese schools--to the considerable irritation of the V.C. One Communist woman in black pajamas appeared at a school in the hamlet of Thoi Binh, looked at the books and warned Teacher Tran Thi Tarn: "You must not teach these things." Despite the warning, Mme. Tam, a mother of eight, goes on with her work. Says she: "It is important that our children have knowledge--then perhaps they will have a better life than we."

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