Helping kids in rural areas

My wife and I have been volunteering as Math tuition teachers for a few kids from a Vietnamese hill tribe who have recently migrated to the US as refugees. It has been a challenge as well as a blessing and our experience of teaching these kids led us to draw comparisons between them and some of the Orang Asli and Sarawak and Sabah Bumiputera and even Malay kids in rural Malaysia.

We teach 3 or 4 kids out of the 8 kids in the family and we focus primarily on Math. We teach them on a Tuesday evening and other volunteers teach them English, History and other subjects on the other days of the week (not including weekends). These kids are really sweet and innocent but they also come from a background where many things we take for granted are just not taught or not known.

For example, when we told them that we were from Malaysia, they didn't even know where Malaysia was. To them, we might as well have been from India or Africa since they couldn't place Malaysia on a map. (They also had not heard of Siem Reap in neighboring Cambodia) I won't be too surprised if many orang Asli kids in Peninsular Malaysia or Iban kids in Sarawak or Kadazan kids in Sabah in the interior areas do not know where Vietnam was either.

They also had a very limited understand of what money was which made it difficult for me to teach one of the kids - a 12 year old - about money. He had some difficultly in answering me when I asked him how much would he have left if I gave him a 20 dollar bill and asked him to give me two 5 dollar bills in return.

Also absent was any understanding of what geometry and geometric shapes are which makes it difficult to explain concepts such as the difference between area and perimeter.

They have made vast improvements since coming to the US probably because they have had volunteer tuition teachers come to them almost every day of the week for the past year or so. They receive very little personal attention from their own class teachers because of the large class sizes in their school. And yet, I suspect that they are still some way behind their peers.

This experience made me think the following - If these kids, with the help of volunteers who come to them everyday of the week, have trouble keeping up with their peers, how much more challenging is it for the Orang Asli and Malay kids in the rural areas to keep up with their urban peers? I think many of them would have the same kinds of problems of context which these Vietnamese refugees face. Many things which urban kids take for granted, such as the concept of money, geography, travel, newspapers, etc... are more or less absent in the rural areas in Malaysia. It is not that surprising, given this context, that some schools in Sabah have a 100% fail rate when it comes to UPSR or PMR exams!

My heart really goes out to these kids in the rural areas since very little is down to help them with their educational deficiencies. I know of some social organizations and programs which are organized by people in urban areas to travel to some of these more rural areas to help the people out but these efforts are mostly restricted to development projects or activities. It is much more difficult to sustain an effort which ships in volunteers to give tuition to these kids on a weekly much less daily basis.

One way to rectify this shortcoming is to send in more teachers to teach in these rural areas. I remember hearing about the MOE giving more hardship and transportation allowances to teachers who have to travel long distances to teach in rural schools in Sabah and Sarawak. Perhaps these sorts of efforts can be increased. Also, a similar program to the one in the US called Teach for America, where recent college graduates commit themselves to teach in an under resourced urban or rural school for 2 years can be introduced. This can be done with subsidies from the government as well as strategic partnerships with local companies. I think as Malaysians become richer and more educated, the willingness to serve in these volunteer and semi-volunteer capacities will also increase. The challenge here is to create the infrastructure for these volunteers to serve.

Another possibility is to give financial incentives to parents of many of these kids from disadvantages families which are contingent on these kids staying in school. Such a program, called Opportunidades, has been implemented in Mexico for the past decade or so and is in the process of being copied in certain urban and economically deprived areas in the US.

I really think that education is the most important means by which these kids in rural areas can escape from a cycle of poverty and want. Government policy is one way of helping these kids out. Another is through the efforts of dedicated and motivated young people. We all can do our own little part.

P.S. I'm well aware that many urban kids who come from less well to do families face similar challenges. I remember trying to give tuition to some kids from a Chinese Village just off Old Klang Road. Most of them preferred to play with the computer instead of sitting down and revising their Math problems. But these challenges are multiplied in the rural areas because of the lack of resources in their schools.