I heard them before I saw them.
Counting together. One, two, three, four. It rose out of the hills so clearly that I stopped walking to listen.
I had been walking for a long time by then. My legs were tired, and my shoes were soaked, but the counting pulled me forward like a hand.
You leave the road and go on foot, about four kilometers, into the hills of Lama, in Bandarban. You wade a river. You cross spring after spring, some at your knees, some deeper. Where someone could, they laid a bamboo bridge. Where they couldn’t, there is only a tree trunk, cut down and left across the water. You step onto it and try not to look down.
And then, at the end, there is a bamboo school. Open windows. Children in uniforms upstairs counting.
I had come to see what a school looks like when everything about it is so hard to reach, even the money to keep it open. What I found was a room full of students with eyes full of hope.
A flower garden in the hills
In the Mro language, Pawmum Tharkla means "flower garden."
In 2016, it was one small room on a hilltop, surrounded by four villages. Two men, Shahriar Parvez and Man Rong Mro, had come to Lama for a different project. They found villages full of children and no school at all. The Karbari, the local headman, gave the land and chose the name. And the school, Pawmum Tharkla, was born.
The founder, Shahriar Parvez, remembers those first days clearly: “The children had no formal way of getting an education. They played, and the days slipped by with nothing in them. No books, no classroom.”
“Nothing to do” was not a phase for them. It was their childhood.
He was still a student when he began. At first, he says, he simply thought it would be good for the community. He had no grand plan, only a feeling that he could not walk away from what he had seen.
Then something shifted. The idea became a responsibility, and the responsibility became a part of his life. The better he got to know the people, the more it pulled at him.
Today, he says, they are his family.
You can hear it in the way he talks about them. He does not speak of a project. He speaks of people he loves and cares for.
So they built a school from what the hills already gave.
No brick. No concrete.
Bamboo, wood, teak, and thatch; about 1,000 pieces of baijya and 15,000 of paya, and nearly half of it donated by the villagers themselves. Families who had almost nothing gave what they had, because this was their children’s school, their future.
The main building rises 25 feet under a thatched roof 52 feet long. Beside it is an open amphitheater, built for the whole community to gather. There is room for about 100 children. For now, there are 76. And it is the only school that four small paras have.
Three people holding up a school
The children learn in Krama, the Mro script, and Bangla, alongside English, math, and science. They learn handicrafts, sustainable farming, and self-defense. They learn to be Mro and Bangladeshi at the same time.
Three teachers hold all of it up. Man Kong Mro teaches English. Puk Duk teaches the mother tongue. Reng Wai teaches math, and when the day is done, he goes on to care for the hostel.
Almost every one of them earns less than Tk10,000 a month. But still they stay. They are dedicated, and each does whatever they can from their side.
Some kinds of love do not come with a salary.
The chairs that go empty
Grade one has 23 children. Grade two has 24. Then it begins to thin. Where did the others go?
Maybe the school was small when its oldest classes began. It is only nine years old. But money is part of the answer.
Education here costs nothing. The hostel, which opened two years ago, does. A boarding child is spared the long walk home, which turns cruel in the rains, but the fee climbs gradually with each class: less in grades one and two and up to Tk12,000 a year by grade five. For most families here, even that is more than they can pay.
Behind every empty chair, I think, is a family doing arithmetic no parent should have to do.
When someone falls ill
Out here, you understand how far this place is from everything.
If someone falls sick, there is no road. They are carried the whole four kilometers on foot. In the rainy season, the paths turn to slick mud, and the bamboo bridges sometimes collapse. I kept imagining a sick person, carried across the water, one slow step at a time.
For the families here, that is not imagination. It is a fear they carry every monsoon.
In front of the school stands one tubewell. It works, and it never rests, because there is no other clean water. The only other source is a spring, shared by the whole community. The children bathe and wash in it.
We were told the spring water carries disease. A doctor on our team provided free care and found scurvy and skin diseases among the children. Scurvy comes from too little vitamin C in the diet. The skin diseases were linked to the shared water.
Who holds it up
The school runs on crowdfunding. The founders were told a school not registered in a government name would never get a state grant.
To register it or move the land into a government name would cost money they do not have. So it stands because people keep choosing, again and again, to keep it standing. Strangers, supporters, villagers, teachers.
Each one a small yes.
One boy
Before I left, I spoke with a boy of about eleven or twelve, Kain Pong Morung.
I asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. He said a teacher so that he could help his community get an education.
He is barely a child. And I stood there on the hillside thinking, “He is already carrying a whole community inside his plans.”
I hope someone helps him carry it. I think someone will.
A flower garden is not planted in a day. But this one has already bloomed once, where there was nothing. Somewhere beyond the river, the children are still counting.
