A place to find peace

Coming to The Little Forest, visitors will definitely have new experiences. Photo: NVCC

Started operating in 2023, The Little Forest of Mr. Luong's family is hidden in a valley full of green spaces of acacia and eucalyptus gardens, with a clear stream flowing through. Building a peaceful place for people from the city to come here on weekends to change the atmosphere, urges them to work hard and be creative.

With the experience gained and the learning process, this teacher couple has built a pretty decent place, with a central house, in the middle of a cool green lawn is a small stage, a homemade swing and a small forest about 2 hectares wide. The common house has no door, only two sets of tables and chairs, where guests can sit and drink water and rest.

On the wall there is a lovely bookshelf, visitors can borrow books at will when they feel like reading among the trees or lying down among the green grass. Following the host, we followed a small path through the sim forest in full leaf, with only a few mua bushes blooming with purple flowers fluttering the wings of bees looking for honey. Further away is the acacia forest in harvest season, with the silhouettes of people sawing and sawing, the acacia trees are ivory white, with a light fragrance. Ms. My boasted to us that this place had welcomed up to 230 students from Danang University who came to rent land to set up camp and organize team building.

It was a happy, unforgettable memory for her family. Ms. My also said that last sim season, the harvest of sim fruit was quite good, she soaked jars of wine to treat guests, many foreign guests came here to experience sim picking with her family. At night in the middle of the mountains and forests, by the campfire, enjoying "homegrown" dishes with garden vegetables, wild boar meat, country chicken, grilled stream fish... with a glass of sweet sim wine as an appetizer, surely visitors will have a new experience.

In front of the central house is a bamboo gate with two stone pillars, a large yard divided into many sections, with patches of lettuce, mustard greens, and herbs; on the porch are clumps of wild daisies with deep purple colors standing out among the green areas. To have a patch of la-ghim in the middle of the hill required a lot of effort; Mr. Luong had to use a wheelbarrow to push sand over the newly dug soil, mix it with ash and fertilizer, and then sow the seeds; when the plants grew a few centimeters, the whole family would transplant them to the adjacent patch of land; on weekends, the children would come up to weed and water the plants.

The rows of mustard greens and vegetable patches are the crystallization of the whole family's efforts to nurture them, and through that, the teachers want to teach the children to live in harmony with nature after a stressful week of studying. After walking around The Little Forest with the host, we walked along the 3m concrete path, the low houses on the hillside hidden in the strangely peaceful bushes. At the foot of the hill, the green rice fields stretch out, the water from the small stream brings a golden season to the midland land. I wish I had time to come back, to see the yellow color of the ripe rice fields, interspersed with the green carpet of the forest, to wade barefoot in the dry stream, to pick up colorful, clean, smooth pebbles eroded and washed away by the water.

Only when we come to this land, we can learn the story of teachers who, in addition to teaching and cultivating knowledge for many generations, in real life, are actually manual laborers. The contributions of the teacher couple in the hilly land of Trung Nghia village, though small, left a strong impression on me. And I remember the saying of Frank KA. Clark: “Everyone wants to do something big, but they do not realize that life is made up of very small things.”

NGUYEN THI THU THUY

Source: https://baodanang.vn/channel/5433/202504/noi-tim-ve-binh-yen-4003538/