The last bell no one heard: A quiet death of a village school

Twenty-three years ago, I was nineteen years old, fresh out of school myself, and terrified. In 2003, before you could undergo a bachelor's degree in teaching, there was this practice of sending aspiring teachers to schools all over Bhutan. Apprentice teacher, they called us. For a kid who grew up in a city, Korphu in Trongsa might as well have been the edge of the earth. I remember the bus ride, how the road kept getting narrower and narrower until I wondered if we'd simply run out of road and have to walk the rest of the way. 

Korphu village as seen from Nabji

The road did run out. From , Reotala, it was walk for an entire day to reach Korphu Primary School. 

Those first few weeks, I survived on noodles and homesickness. The school was modest, a few buildings huddled against the hillside, with the kind of quiet that makes city ears ring. Slowly, the children pulled me out of myself. They were shy at first, peeking at me from behind doorframes, giggling when I tried to pronounce their names wrong. By the end of my first month, they had me playing football/volleyball and I'd stopped caring about the mud.

The Academic Block 

What I remember most clearly now, standing in these ruins, are the Lhotsham students. They came from Reetiand other southern villages, places whose names I cannot remember now, all part of Sarpang Dzongkhag. To attend school at Korphu, they built small huts nearby. Tiny shelters really, just enough to keep the rain off. Every morning, they'd walk to class with their books wrapped in plastic to protect them from the dew. I think about that now, how they had to build their own homes just to get an education. I feel ashamed of the times I complained about the cold walk from my home to the classroom.

Classrooms 

The school drew students from nearby Nabji village too. You should see the paddy fields there, terraced like steps leading to heaven, impossibly green when the rice is young. I used to stand on the school grounds and look across at Nabji. 

And then there was my friend.

I am sorry to mention this, but I lost someone that year. A fellow teacher, with a laugh that could fill the entire staff room. Heart issues, they said. One morning he was there, and the next, he wasn't. In a place as remote as Korphu, the news travelled slowly and hit hard. We held a small prayer for him under that flagpole, the same flagpole that still stands today. I remember thinking how unfair it was, how the mountains just kept being beautiful while we mourned a friend.

My dwelling and classrooms 

Twenty-three years later, I got a chance opportunity to visit this place for a second time. I hadn't planned it. Sometimes life pulls you back to places you thought you'd left behind forever. The road is better now, smoother, and the drive didn't feel as long. 

The classrooms where I once stood trembling before thirty pairs of watchful eyes are now cow sheds, essentially. I don't know what makes a school die. Maybe it's the same thing that makes a village fade, families moving to towns, children born in hospitals instead of homes, progress that doesn't look back. The enrollment dropped by the years, like water seeping through cracked clay. One year, twenty students. The next, twelve. Then four. Then none.

Nabji in the background

The last bell must have rung so quietly. No one was there to hear it. I heard of the closure when I was studying for another degree. 

But standing there, in the ruins of my past, I didn’t  just feel sadness. I felt a strange gratitude. This aboandoned place still holds everything I carry forward, the discipline of that flagpole, the faith of those prayers, the friends who are now scattered across the world but still line up in my memory, waiting for a whistle that never comes.

I think of the Lhotsham students and their little huts. I think of Nabji's paddy fields, still green as ever, unconcerned with the fate of a small school. I think of my friend, whose laugh I can still hear when the wind is right.

I am saddened by the fate of Korphu Primary School. 

Note: Written in grattitude for those who remember Korphu Primary School, for the Lhotsham children who built their homes, for the farmers of Nabji who still bend over those terraced fields, for a friend who left too soon, and for every apprentice teacher who found themselves far from home and somehow, impossibly, found themselves later, anyway.