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Nicest house in Sín Chải. All Hmong houses have these red and gold paper amulets over the door, and inside too. There's no writing on these amulets, simply because there was no writing system among Hmong, at least not one in wide circulation.



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Same school as below. "SIX BASIC VALUES," and they are Safety, Friendliness, Self-Confidence, Creativity, Result and Integration.

Under Safety, it is advised:

-You do not play dangerous games
-You know how to protect yourself in dangerous situations
-You follow well traffic rules

Under Integration, it is advised, most interestingly:

-You can communicate in English
-You eagerly participate in online knowledge forums
-You can search and research for documents on the internet

For these tribal kids, learning Vietnamese is already foreign...


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Same school as below, 2nd and 3rd grades in the same classroom.



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Fourth and fifth grades in the same classroom. In Bản Bánh, near Dien Bien Phu, I saw a school for 1st and 2nd graders that was manned by just one teacher.



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Elementary school. Before you can put up such a building in a very remote village, you should have a road leading to it, then electrical line, but the biggest challenge is to get and retain qualified teachers. Seeing this made me think of schools on Indian reservations in the US.



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The hazy mountains in the background are in China.



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