Special journey to Pa Di villages

The Pa Di are a local group of the Tay ethnic group and are found only in Muong Khuong district, Lao Cai province. Among the 25 ethnic groups in the province, the Pa Di are probably the ethnic group with the least information and documents.

After “knocking on the doors” of many sectors and localities, searching for documents, our group of reporters realized that only this community is the most valuable “living archive” of our people. The thirst and desire to understand this mysterious ethnic group motivated us to travel to all the villages in Muong land for 2 years to learn about the history, life and identity of the Pa Di community.

The Pa Di have their own language but no written language. Moreover, the Pa Di community is only about 2,000 people, living scattered in a number of villages, so we went to almost all the places where this ethnic group lives to meet, talk, connect, and string together small, separate stories into a longer story.

For example, when searching for documents about the education of the Pa Di people, through the district's Education Promotion Association, we learned about the Trang family. From the information provided by the head of the family, we went to the first village where the Pa Di people stopped to establish a village after migrating from the North; then, with the help of the local people, we met the first cadre and party member of this community to go to school, and met the illiterate woman who worked hard all her life but raised two children to pass the university entrance exam. Next, we met the poet Po Sao Min to hear him talk about his journey to become the first Pa Di person to be sent abroad to study.

Not stopping there, we contacted the localities to grasp the situation, asking for help in the process of learning about the education of this very small ethnic community. There were many periods of waiting and connecting, gradually, we got to know the studious Pa Di children who were working in and outside the province, even Pa Di PhDs who were settling abroad.

Each journey, each character we met was a slice of the articles. From the stories told by one person, we learned about and met others; the stories of this land were connected to other lands. The fewer the people, the harder it was to find the unique features of this ethnic group, perhaps that was why the journey took much longer than the group of reporters had planned. But the material we gathered helped us create a series of quality articles, winning prizes in competitions at the Central and provincial levels, worthy of the effort for the long journey along the Muong land.

Source: https://baolaocai.vn/hanh-trinh-dac-biet-den-nhung-ban-lang-nguoi-pa-di-post403626.html