Chapter 2 — Wind Village Robot Team

Station Hill was not high, only a fifteen-minute walk from the school yard, but it was the only place within a two-kilometer radius that received stable 3G signal - thanks to an old broadcast tower built when the ranger station was still in operation, now only a rusty iron frame and a few dusty solar panels remain. Khanh Dan stood at the foot of the pillar, raised the phone above her head, turned it corner by corner as if in ceremony, trying to keep the signal bar from falling below two bars.

"New teacher?"

She turned around startled. A man in his fifties, wearing an old, worn-out shirt, was sitting on a flat rock a few steps away, holding a fishing rod in the ground even though there were no lakes or ponds around, only a phone placed on his knee, the screen lit up.

"Yes, I'm Dan, I teach Computer Science." She replied, a bit confused by the fishing rod. "Do you... fish here?"

The man laughed, a dry but sincere laugh. "No, Miss. This is a homemade antenna rod, tie the phone to the rod's head to increase the height by half a meter, and capture half an additional wave line. Enough to send the score file to the district education office." He held up the lever for her to see. The tip of the lever actually had a clothespin that held the phone securely. "I'm Toan, teaching Math for grades 8 and 9."

Khanh Dan laughed, for the first time in nine days she felt truly relieved. "That's a good idea, uncle."

"Living here is all about initiative, ma'am." Teacher Toan lowered the handle, took out his phone, checked his messages, and put it in his pocket. "What are you doing up here, calling your lover?"

"No, I was going to find out if our school had any programs to support IT. I downloaded some documents, but the school's network was too weak to download."

"What documents are so heavy?"

Khanh Dan hesitated a bit before answering. "I plan to learn about Arduino kits, a cheap microcontroller used to teach programming to students. There is a video with instructions for assembling basic circuits, the capacity is a bit heavy."

Teacher Toan raised his eyebrows, not hiding his curiosity. "What is Arduino, sounds like a football player's name."

"It's a type of small control circuit that people often use to teach students how to make simple robots. It's cheap, easy to learn, and for skilled students like..." She was about to say Nam's name but stopped in time, not wanting to tell the story of a student who wasn't in her class to another teacher when she wasn't sure. "For students who are skillful, this can be learned very quickly."

"What are you going to do with that?"

The question made Khanh Dan pause. That was a question she hadn't asked herself clearly, just a lingering thought since she saw the mouse repaired with copper wire that morning. She looked down at the valley below, where the red tiled roof of Long Phong Secondary School was nestled between terraced fields, further away was the Gio Long pass crossing between two mountain ranges, the wind blowing continuously made the grass bushes on the hillside fall into layers of waves.

"I don't know yet." She is honest. "But I think there are some students here who are better than they think."

Teacher Toan doesn't smile anymore. He looked at her for a moment, then nodded slowly, the kind of nod of someone who has been teaching long enough to recognize when a casual statement isn't actually casual at all.

"You just came back so you don't know yet, let me tell you the truth." He sat up straight again on the rock. "Our school has dropped in the district's competition ranking for three consecutive years, because the graduation rate did not meet the target. Teacher Nghia - the principal - is called to the education department every year to explain. You see the budget, six computers live in fourteen, the roof of the warehouse behind the kitchen has been leaking since two years ago and no one has fixed it. If you propose to open something that wastes students' time, Mr. Nghia will not stop you because he hates you, but because he is really afraid. Afraid of losing more competition points, afraid of losing more competition points, afraid of losing more competition points. Parents reported being afraid of all kinds of things that girls in the city may never have had to fear."

"I know." Khanh Dan said, and she truly understood, in a way that made her feel a little guilty. At NovaTech, she used to be the person sitting on the other side - the person who had to explain why the Falcon project spent two years of budget without having a commercial product, the person who had to hear the sentence "the company cannot sponsor something that has not proven effective" in the last meeting before the project was closed. She had been in Mr. Nghia's position more times than she wanted to admit.

"But." Teacher Toan added, standing up and brushing off his pants. "I've been teaching here for twenty-two years, Ms. Dan. I've seen all kinds of young teachers come and go. Most of them come because of contracts, and when they finish teaching, they go back to their rooms and close the door. You're the first person in three years to climb up Tram Hill just to find materials to teach students how to make robots. That says something."

He lifted the homemade fishing rod onto his shoulder, preparing to go down. "The warehouse behind the boarding kitchen, do you know where it is? It used to be a place for old school supplies, but now it's empty, only rats and termites. If you need a place, just use it, I'll keep the key."

Khanh Dan stood still for a second. "You don't know what I'm going to do yet."

"I don't need to know exactly." Teacher Toan smiled, turned and walked down the slope. "I just need to know that you are the type of person who climbs hills to find ways to teach students better, not the type of person who climbs hills to find waves to surf social networks. In this commune, distinguishing between those two types of people is enough for me to believe."

Khanh Dan did not go down immediately. She stood a while longer on Tram Hill, watching Master Toan disappear around the bend, then turned to look at the entire valley for the first time since coming here without being in a hurry for anything. From above, she noticed that scattered on the hillsides around the terraced fields were upright wooden wheels, fan blades made of bamboo slats and shredded corrugated iron, spinning in the wind, connected to a system of plastic pipes that carried water zigzagging between the fields. Not one, but at least six or seven, spread across the valley like giant mushrooms growing from the soil.

On the way down, she passed by the nearest one and stopped to look closely. The rotating shaft is made from welded old bicycle rims, the fan blades are flat sheets of corrugated iron cut into curved shapes screwed onto bamboo slats, and the water pump below is an improved hand pump. Each rotation of the wind wheel pulls the pump rod up and down one beat, pushing water through the pipe to a higher field. An old lady passing by carrying fertilizer saw her standing there watching, stopped, and explained in an undisguised proud voice: "My grandfather made this mortar when he was young. Now my grandson has repaired it and runs better than the old one. It's windy here, so if you don't use it, it's a waste."

Khanh Dan stood silently watching the windmill rotate, suddenly realizing something she had never thought of in the past nine days: the students here had not "never seen a machine" as she implicitly assumed when writing the first lesson plan. They grew up surrounded by these homemade machines, watching their grandparents and uncles fix them over and over again every windy season, but no one ever called it by the name "technique" or gave them anything more complicated to try.

***

That night, Khanh Dan sat in the dormitory room, laptop open on her knees, and downloaded three instructional videos on how to install basic Arduino circuits by taking advantage of the time she was standing on the hill — each video took nearly twenty minutes to download six minutes of content. She watched and took notes, occasionally pausing to rewind the sensor wiring, trying to remember what she had known since she was in Falcon's hardware design department - knowledge she never thought she would use again, let alone use it to teach a group of middle school students who had never held a soldering iron.

Her phone lit up with a message from her old number, a colleague at NovaTech with whom she still had sporadic contact: "I heard that the old team just sold the Falcon patent to a foreign company. Not a bad price. You must be sad."

Khanh Dan looked at the message for a long time, her fingers hovering over the keyboard, unable to type any words. She turned off the phone screen, placed it face down on the table, then returned to the video that was stopped midway — a hand in the video was inserting the ultrasonic sensor pin into the correct breadboard hole, precisely, neatly, without a single extra movement.

She thought of Nam's hand this morning, wrapping the copper wire around the broken switch.

Then she reopened her laptop and typed in a new file: "List of supplies needed for the first test." The first line she wrote was "1 Arduino board — ask Mr. Toan or buy at the district." On the second line, she sat still for a while before writing down: "A student knows how to repair a mouse with copper wire — already there."

She looked at those two words on the screen. The laptop light was the only light source in the room because the light bulb above had burned out before she arrived and no one had replaced it. Outside the window, the wind still whistled through the cracks in the eaves, as steady as the breath of the whole valley. She typed a third line, slower than the previous two: "The remaining job: convince Mr. Nghia to do it." Then she closed her laptop, turned off the head flashlight, lay down on the rickety bunk bed without bothering to pull the mosquito net, her eyes still open, looking up at the old leaky ceiling, thinking about what she would say tomorrow at the meeting with the principal that she had not yet scheduled.