Teacher Nguyen Van Thanh travels 100km each day to bring the joy of music to blind children at a school in HCM City. Van Dat attends a class and learns from the master.

Thanh trains his students in class with Braille scores, the students then sing the notes they read.

For decades, interesting melodies have resounded from small groups of children in an unassuming classroom on Nguyen Chi Thanh Street in HCM City’s District 10.

Nothing unusual about that, you might say. But the children at Nguyen Dinh Chieu School are not attending a typical public school.

Since 1926, when the school was opened by the French, the school has accepted blind or nearly-blind students for free. It remains the only one of its kind in the city.

On a recent afternoon, I visited teacher Nguyen Van Thanh and five of his students, who were in the middle of a guitar and singing lesson.

Struck blind in 1973 at the age of three following a serious illness, Thanh says he has lost count of how many students he has taught over the last 10 years.

It was time to review the class, and Thanh slowly grabbed a shabby guitar in the corner of the classroom and began to play background music.

His students, aged seven to 15, started to chant, with their hands touching Braille music books.

“I teach them how to play the guitar, and they sing with the hope of how to live well when they are mature,” he said, adding that many of them cannot secure responsible jobs and work as massaeurs.

His passion shows in his tireless dedication to the children. Thanh says he believes music can help disadvantaged people overcome life’s difficulties.

Long hours

In 1998, he graduated from HCM City Culture College as a music specialist. He can play many instruments, but his favourite is the guitar.

Every day at 5 am, Thanh travels by bus from the outlying district of Cu Chi to the school in HCM City, a 70-minute trip.

After classes end, he follows the same route and arrives home at 8pm. On the days when he teaches extra classes, Thanh gets home when everyone else has fallen asleep.

His journey seemed longer, he says, when his wife, who is also blind and a teacher, was pregnant.

Now, after the birth, Thanh travels to Tien Giang Province to visit his wife and baby girl, who are living with relatives.

He says he doesn’t mind the amount of time assigned to traveling and teaching because of his love for the school.

Many of his students idolise him, and I could see why.

Besides working at Nguyen Dinh Chieu School, Thanh also provides music therapy for children with learning disabilities.

He says the task is much more challenging than his lessons at Nguyen Dinh Chieu School, because there is no specific methodology.

At the beginning of each class, Thanh asks students if they would like to learn the drums, guitar or organ. If they seem shy, he will try his best to convince them to learn, he says.

To teach them how to count from one to 10, Thanh uses drums.

As we ended our chat at the school and said good-bye, I watched the 39-year-old teacher as he quietly groped his way up the staircase to his class.

He seemed to know the exact number of steps to reach his students — far fewer than the number he has had to climb over the years to achieve unheralded success.

VietNamNet/VNS