KAMPONG LOUNG, Cambodia — Early in the mornings, children here get on their boats and row from house to house, fetching their friends on the way to a floating school on the other side of this village, located some 170 kilometres north-west of the capital Phnom Penh.

Nestled in the banks of the great Tonle Sap, the village, found in Kra-kor district in Pusat province, can be reached via National Road No. 5. To get here, one has to travel five to seven kilometres from Kra-kor market, then board a boat bound for Tonle Sap.

After school, schoolboys play some traditional games while waiting for boats to take them back to their homes in the floating villages.

These schoolchildren are actually the lucky ones, because many children from the floating villages around the Tonle Sap cannot come to school.

“Many families here cannot afford the boat, bicycle or motorcycle fare to go to high school. It is especially hard for female students given the circumstances,” explains Ban Son, director of Kampong Loung Primary School.

Likewise, while the Cambodian government’s new education curriculum requires children to attend school until the ninth grade, “in reality, more than 50 percent of the children here only get to finish sixth grade because the secondary school is located 15 kilometres away,” he adds.

Still, Son observes, the number of primary school students has increased in the last decade or so. “We now have four classes in the floating school and seven in the bigger school located further inland,” he says.

Children must at least be six years old to be accepted at the floating school. They also must be good swimmers, because children could accidentally fall into the water.

The floating schools also adapt their calendar to the fishing and farming season, since families need their children to help out, following the flooding cycles around the Tonle Sap. Thus, students in Kampong Khlaing commune, located in the north-west of Tonle Sap in Not Sikum district, start the school term in August (when they return home) and end in February (when they need to move out for fishing). Says Sar Bun Chom Rong, director of the commune’s primary school: “During the dry season, villagers temporarily move farther down the lake so they could get closer to their source of livelihood. Naturally, the children go with their parents and don’t get to come back to the village until the rainy season arrives in July or August, which is when we open the school term.” He adds that this has been the tradition in the commune since 1938.

Seventy percent of the children in the village attend primary school but 60 percent drop out upon reaching secondary school, says Chom Rong. A mere 20 percent enter high school.

The nine floating schools in Cambodia are Chnok Troo in Kampong Chnang; Kampong Loung and Raing Thil in Pusat; Koh Chi Vang in Battambang; Chong Khneas, Kampong Phluk and Kampong Klaing in Siem Reap; Peam Bang and Phat Sanday in Kompong Thom.

The situation of thousands of children living on the floating villages around the Tonle Sap and along the Mekong in Cambodia are not so different from those in the floating villages in southern Vietnam.

In Vinh Long, a town on the Mekong river, fishermanTran Van Thanh and his family have docked their boat behind a row of bars.

“I do not know anything. All I know is how to fish with my father and brother. I did not go to school,” says 18-year-old Tran Bé, Vanh Thanh’s third son, “I never learned how to ride a bicycle and never went for a walk in town. I only know what cars and motorbikes are because I see them driving along the bridge above us. I have not seen a television or a radio. All I want is to help my family,” says Tran Bé . Van Thanh, upon hearing his son’s words, could not help but cry.

Doan Thi Hao, 38-year-old mother to two daughters, lives on a boat along the Tien River east of Vinh Long. Her 16-year-old daughter stopped going to school in the fifth grade, while her 14-year-old is now in the seventh grade.

Thi Hao’s family is lucky enough to have a laundry service and lottery business in town, the income from which which help send her children to school. The family earns an average of 32,000 dong (2 U.S. dollars) per day. They, however, continue to live in their boathouse.

For her part, Van Thanh’s daughter, 16-year-old Tran Thi My Loan, shyly says: “I just want to live inland and go to school there. I do not know how to read, not even in the Vietnamese language.”