Kham said there were as many as 50 children in each of his school's three tiny classrooms. According to the United Nations, the mean level of education in schools today is just three years. Most teachers have had less than five years of education. Fewer than half the adults in Laos can read. And yet the country is beginning to change.
Motorbikes now buzz through the capital.
A small class of the newly affluent drive their cars across the Friendship Bridge into Thailand to shop. And in the countryside, where few villages have electricity, television antennas sprout from the roofs of thatched houses. A whole industry has developed where someone comes around and takes the batteries into town to be charged so that everyone can watch all those dumb game shows from Thailand. Inexorably, the outside world is entering villages like Na Tao, and the country will never be the same. But even these changes have barely touched the people of Na Tao.