Tân Quang: a kindergarten with 300 pupils

The school

Tân Quang kindergarten

The school is located in Xuân Hòa hamlet, Tân Quang commune, Tuyên Quang province. It has 28 groups and classes for 660 pupils, spread over several sites, and 79 people work there (teachers and staff).

The 660 pupils come from ten different ethnic groups: Kinh (258), Dao (91), La Chí (65), Hmong (60), Pà Thẻn (55), Hoa (55), Nùng (39), Cao Lan (35), Sán Dìu (1) and Bố Y (1).

A difficult economic context

The commune lives mainly from farming, with unstable incomes, and has many poor or near-poor households. The school currently takes in 83 children from these disadvantaged families, whose family situations are often complex.

A well for clean water

The children attend as day boarders: they eat and nap at school, which must therefore guarantee hygiene, drinking water and food safety. Yet at the Tân Lập satellite school, where 300 children eat and sleep on site, water is currently drawn from a spring: it is cloudy in the rainy season and in desperately short supply in the dry season. The teachers have to ask the neighbours for buckets of water.

After a few days of drilling, water was found 39 m down. The new well will bring a clean, reliable source of water to the Tân Quang kindergarten (Tân Lập satellite school).

Blankets and pillows for the youngest

In the two satellite schools of Nậm Khá and Minh Thượng, 132 young children (aged 1 to 5) spend the winter in the high mountains, a very harsh season, without enough warm blankets and pillows. The photos sent by the teachers, showing the little group fast asleep and huddled together, cannot leave anyone unmoved.

Still missing: 28 winter blankets, 28 summer blankets and 107 small pillows.