Ban Tha Din Daeng Tai School

What did I do when I went to visit Laos for the third time in December 1999 and how did I learn about the small Hmong village of Ban Tha Din Daeng Tai, about a 45 minute drive south of Vientiane? This blog will share how I got involved with this village and provide more of a background for the YouTube video. The Lao word “din” means dirt. “Daeng” means red, “tai” means south and “ban” means village. So the village name in English would be the Southern Red Dirt Village.

When I was visiting Laos for the third time in December 1999 I met Tavivanh, a tuk tuk driver who was to become by good friend and informal Lao teacher. I told him I was interested in visiting a Hmong village during Hmong New Year and he told me he knew of a Hmong village about a 45 minute drive south on his motorcycle. So, one day we headed off and after turning off on a dusty dirt road we drove for about twenty minutes until we came to the Nam Ngum river. Here, we had to take a “ferry” across and I have a photo of Thavivanh and his motorcycle on the ferry as we crossed the river. We located the village and sure enough they were celebrating Hmong New Year. We walked up the path and as I took some photos the village leader (naibon) came up to us and asked if we would like to talk to some of the elders. We met in one of the classrooms and they talked about how most of the people in the village had been relocated from the mountains in the north. It wasn’t easy for them living here, but the biggest benefit they saw was having access to meaningful education. This was a big concern for them, and so was their dilapidated school and they wondered if I could do anything to help. I said I would try and I knew there was something I could do relatively quickly as the Refugee Educators’ Network had given me $300 to donate to a worthy cause. I’m a member of REN and they were one of the leaders in Sacramento in supporting and promoting the cause of our Southeast Asian refugee populations.

The next day I visited the US Embassy and told them I wanted to help out the village. As it turned out the Political Officer had recently visited the village and the naibon had also asked him for some help and he realized maybe he could have me work with the village, rather than himself, since he wasn’t supposed to work directly with any villages on his own. First, he suggest that I buy some school supplies to donate to the school and then he wanted to talk to me about ways I might be able to help the village raise money to build a new school.

I first changed the $350 into 2,000,000 kip and then Thavivanh and I visited the Ministry of Education where we bought a variety of school supplies. There are two photos in the BTDDT gallery that show the bundle of 2,000,000 kip on the counter of the store with two female clerks and then there’s a photo of all the supplies in the back of Thavivanh’s tuk tuk. The Political Officer then arranged for a handover ceremony to take place (the Lao are very formal in this regard) and we were accompanied by an official from the Ministry of Labor and Welfare. There are photos in the gallery that show me talking to village leaders and teachers, a group photo and then a photo of students posing with the supplies. I think they were very appreciative of the supplies, but were still hoping I could help in some way with getting a school built.

You have to realize that I was currently on vacation time during my Christmas break and since I had asked for an additional two weeks leave, I was in Laos for about four weeks. On Beyond Tourism in action!

I met again with the Political Officer and was introduced to Michael Peyra, Director of the Consortium Laos, an NGO that was a collaboration of three long established US NGO’s; 1) Save the Children USA 2) World Education, Inc. & 3) World Learning, Inc. The Consortium was the NGO used by the US Embassy to implement many of it’s projects and the Political Officer told me that if I wrote a grant  through Japan’s Small-Scale Grant Assistance (SSGA) program, the Consortium could act as a guarantor for this project.

So I then made many trips between the village of Ban Tha Din Daeng Tai, Japanese Embassy, Consortium and the US Embassy putting this grant together. In reading through the grant I see that the village size was 780 and the problem necessitating this grant was:

“ The major problem facing our village currently is the lack of a permanent school building that is sufficient for the number of children in the village. We have one school building that was constructed b villagers, but the building is not securely built and is not large enough to accommodate all the children. The children are currently attending school in two sessions, morning and afternoon. In addition, the children above Primary Grade 3 have to go to school in the neighboring village. We hope to be able to have Grants 1-5 within the village. The poor condition (particularly the roof) means that during the rainy season, the children are frequently not able to be in the school because of leaks in the roof.”

In a letter, Michiel Peyra, Consortium Director wrote to the Director of the Small-Scale Grant Assistance Department at the Embassy of Japan he stated that:

“It is my understanding that since Mr. Whittlesey is acting in a private capacity, his application requires an established Non-Governmental Organization to back-up the development initiative, and to act as a guarantor for the intended small project. The Consortium, through its Group Guaranteed Lending and Savings program in Xaithanee, has established a long-standing working relationship with the people of Ban Ta Din Daeng Tai and with the government authorities of the district. Based on this relationship, we believe that we are well placed to assist the actual implementation of the project in a monitoring and advisory capacity.”

All went well and the grant was tentatively approved before I had to return to the states and get back to teaching. It was after I got home that I received an email from Michiel Payra, the Consortium Director and he told me about a dilemma they faced. After I left they were offered a Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) grant for drug prevention control that was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. That was great, but, Japanese Embassy informed Michiel that the Consortium could only receive on grant at a time and they had to choose between the school construction grant for Ban Tha Din Daeng Tai worth about $40,000 and JICA grant worth about $300,000 in revenue. He was very apologetic, but said he was going to have to back out of supporting the Ban Tha Din Daeng Tai grant.

I went back to Laos in the summer of 2000 and talked to the village leaders of Ban Tha Din Daeng Tai and they of course, were disappointed, and I tried to find another NGO to act as a guarantor, but was unsuccessful.

Now, as I write this in January 2007, as far as I know they never got a new school built. It would be a great school for an American school to “adopt” as it’s close to Vientiane and would be easy to work with. Be sure to check out the video clips of the teachers, students and school.