One girl's fight against all odds to pursue education

By Nicholas Kristof

TAY Thi Nguyen is one of the mightiest people I've met, at 42kg. She has a towering presence, at a bit more than 5 feet tall.

Three times Tay Thi has fainted while at college in Vietnam, training to become an English teacher, because she starved herself to afford tuition. But she had the strength to persist and soon will become the first person in her village to graduate, and she embodies such grit and selflessness that, to me, she's the world's college graduate of the year.

Tay Thi, 20, also underscores the principle - especially important in the aftermath of the kidnapping of the Nigerian schoolgirls - that the best leverage we have to achieve social change is to educate girls.

The eighth of nine children to an impoverished farming family in the Mekong Delta, Tay Thi shone in school, but her mother demanded - unsuccessfully - that she drop out after primary school and earn money as a live-in housemaid in distant Ho Chi Minh City.

In eighth grade, her mum burned her books to try to force her to drop out, but she borrowed books and continued to excel.

Staying in school was possible because of the help she received from Room to Read, an aid group that sponsored Tay Thi and covered her fees, uniform, books, bicycle and other expenses.

Tay Thi persevered, even when her parents again burned her books in 12th grade and, as she graduated from high school, she prepared secretly for the college entrance examination. Her mother found out about this when Tay Thi left to take the exams and lashed out, saying "I hope you fail the exams". Other students arrived at the exam location escorted by cheering, doting parents; Tay Thi arrived alone, sobbing. Still, she aced the exams.

With no parental subsidy, college seemed unaffordable, but Tay Thi saved every penny she could. She had long worked every vacation - sometimes in a factory job by day and in a duck soup restaurant by night until 2am. Even during Vietnamese New Year celebrations, she worked in the fields to catch crabs for money - watching the fireworks in the distance.

At college, she confined herself to a food budget of US$3.50 (S$4.40) a week. Malnourished, she sometimes toppled over in the middle of class in a dead faint.

Professors and students discovered that she was starved and basically penniless - leaving Tay Thi feeling humiliated. "I was so upset about that," she said, but, in retrospect, it was a turning point because her teachers and classmates responded with kindness, sympathy and help.

Room to Read arranged a corporate scholarship, which gave her a bit more spending money, and Tay Thi managed to eat enough to keep from fainting in public.

Tay Thi shares a small room with two other young women, all sleeping on the floor next to each other. She set up a small reading light that won't keep the others awake. She studies until midnight, and then sets her alarm for 4am to resume studying.

She is just as passionate about education for others. First, she encouraged her older brother to return to school, after years of working as a labourer, so he could become a mechanic. When he resisted, she went and registered him as a student, picking his courses and browbeating him until he gave in. Then she coaxed her younger brother to follow her to college, where he is now a freshman. Even her parents have come around, partly because they see that Tay Thi will soon be an English teacher - and the best-paid member of the extended family.

Tay Thi is trying to arrange to teach in her own remote village school, where she wants to advocate for education. "I would like to change people's thinking," she says. "It's a way of helping children in my community," she said.

The kidnappings in Nigeria have put a spotlight on girls' education, and Tay Thi is an example of why the issue is critical. It's sometimes said that if you send a boy to school, you educate a man; if you send a girl to school, you educate a village. That's not always true, but empowering girls remains one of the best ways to empower a community.

NEW YORK TIMES

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Tears of a rickshaw rider - Tiananmen Square remembered

The Straits Times

Tears of a rickshaw rider

By Nicholas Kristof

AS LONG as I live, I'll never forget the rickshaw rider, tears streaming down his cheeks, rushing a gravely injured student to a hospital - and away from the soldiers who had just gunned him down.

That rickshaw rider was a brave man, a better man than I, and he taught me an indelible lesson.

We were on the Avenue of Eternal Peace in Beijing, beside Tiananmen Square, on the night of June 3, 1989, and the Chinese army was crushing the student democracy movement that convulsed the country that spring 25 years ago.

Millions of protesters filled the streets in hundreds of cities around China from mid-April through early June that year, demanding free speech, democracy and an end to corruption. I was living in China then as the Beijing bureau chief for The New York Times, and it was an unforgettable - and, initially, inspiring - tapestry of valour and yearning.

Protesters acknowledged that their lives were improving dramatically, but they said it was not enough. They insisted that they wanted not just rice, but also rights.

To this day, it is the most polite protest movement I've ever covered. After shoving their way through police lines, student marchers would pause, turn around, and chant: "Thank you, police!" Some students were assigned to pick up any shoes lost in the commotion and return them to the students or police officers who had lost them.

The student protesters took over central Beijing for weeks. Then, on the night of June 3, the army invaded Beijing from several directions as if it were a foreign army, shooting at everything that moved. Far from Tiananmen Square, the teenage brother of a friend was shot dead by soldiers as he simply cycled to work.

As the invasion began, I jumped on my bike and raced to Tiananmen Square, where throngs of citizens had come out on the streets to try and protect the student protesters. They were shot.

The most heroic people on that terrible night and into the morning of June 4 were the rickshaw riders with their three- wheel bicycle carts used to haul goods around the city. With each pause in the shooting, these rickshaw riders would pedal out towards the troops and pick up the bodies of the students who had been killed or injured.

The soldiers were unforgiving, shooting even at ambulances trying to pick up bodies. But those rickshaw men were undeterred.

Their bravery particularly resonated because I had heard so often that spring, from foreigners and Chinese officials alike, that China was not ready for democracy, that its people weren't sufficiently educated or sophisticated. And it's true that democracy tends to find firmer root in educated, middle-class societies.

Yet I vividly remember that one rickshaw rider, a burly man in a T-shirt who perhaps had never graduated from high school. Yet what courage! I found myself holding my breath, wondering if he would be shot, as he rode out to pick up a body. He placed the young man on his cart and pedalled for his life back towards us. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.

He saw me, the foreigner, and swerved to ride slowly by me so that I could bear witness to what the government had done. It was a terrifying night, and I can't remember just what his words were, but they were something to the effect that I should tell the world what was happening.

Sure, he couldn't have offered a robust definition of democracy. But he was risking his life for it.

A quarter-century has passed. The bullet holes in the buildings along the Avenue of Eternal Peace have been patched, and history similarly sanitised. I was staggered when a Chinese university student looked puzzled when I mentioned the June 4 massacre; it turned out that she had never heard of it.

It's also true that China has progressed enormously. Incomes have soared, housing has improved and the latest figures (which should be taken with a grain of salt) suggest that the rate of death from pregnancy and childbirth is lower in China than in the United States.

That rickshaw rider may not have the vote, but his children may well attend university. The progress is unarguable. Yet human dignity demands not just rice, but also rights.

The great Chinese writer Lu Xun once wrote, about an earlier massacre: "Lies written in ink cannot disguise facts written in blood." As China prospers and builds an educated middle class, demands for participation will grow. I've covered democracy movements around the world, from Poland to South Korea, and I'm confident that someday, at Tiananmen Square, I'll be able to pay my respects at a memorial to those men and women killed that night. I'm hoping the memorial will take the form of a statue of a rickshaw rider.

NEW YORK TIMES