The Village of Eight “Nots” — A Forgotten Land in the Mountains of Vietnam’s Central Highlands
My trip to Dak Nong happened on a whim. I was caught between choosing the mountains or the sea during a short break, and eventually decided on the mountains. I made the decision early in the week and packed my backpack by the weekend. With a YOLO mindset, I set off with almost no preparation and barely any idea of what awaited me in this unfamiliar land.
Tucked away among winding mountain ridges, this Hmong ethnic minority settlement seems to have been completely forgotten by time.
It is known as the Village of Eight “Nots” because it has no name, no electricity, no roads, no medical station, no clean water, no phone signal, no household registration, and no birth certificates. There is only one small primary school with four classes.
Although the distance was just three kilometers, our group spent nearly an hour bouncing along a muddy, rugged trail in a farm tractor, with a steep hillside on one side and a ravine on the other, before finally reaching the village.
Yet, in my eyes, this might be the richest place in Vietnam—rich in laughter, rich in joy, and rich in love.
As our tractor arrived, the schoolyard came alive with children running around, playing together, and getting covered in mud. The scene took me straight back to my own primary school days in the countryside, when smartphones and modern forms of entertainment had not yet become widespread.
On Sunday mornings, local men dressed neatly in white shirts and trousers would drive their tractors from the fields to the district town to attend services at their Protestant church. Even the dogs were a surprise: intelligent and friendly, they never fought over food and followed us all the way from the village to the main road.
There were so many unexpected and fascinating things I never imagined I would witness in this day and age.
The days when our volunteer group visited felt like a festival for the entire village.
Some of the little children had to wake up at four or five in the morning and walk along dirt paths winding around the hills just to reach the gathering point by ten. Girls and boys as young as fourteen or fifteen already had one or two children to care for, carrying them on their backs. Some women, barely in their thirties, already had five or six children.
This was a place where money alone could not buy you even the most basic necessities. The community was almost entirely self-sufficient, relying mainly on corn for food.
I made this trip alone, expecting nothing more than to enjoy nature and do something for the children. Yet the people I met along the way, complete strangers at first, turned out to be incredibly wonderful—kind, considerate, and genuinely good-hearted.
Amid the mountains and forests, nobody cared who I was, what I did for a living, or what kind of person I was supposed to be. The labels attached to our jobs, education, and wealth—and even the worries and stress we carried—seemed to fall away and stay behind us.
All that remained in this place was who we truly were, united by a shared compassion for our fellow ethnic communities. We simply gave what we could, wholeheartedly, and embraced the experience.
After everything, this journey left me with quite a few questions and things to reflect on.
The children here attend school just long enough to learn to recognize and use the Vietnamese language. Once they become comfortable listening, speaking, reading, and writing, many stop studying. When I asked why they didn't continue their education, their answer was simple:
“What's the point of studying?”
And I, too, wanted to leave this land with a question of my own:
“I wonder... who is truly richer than whom?”