"For the past three weeks, every morning before the primary school starts in Ngon Laung village in Myanmar?s northwestern Chin State, Ba Thein, the principal, looks for a teenage student who has been absent for nearly one month. Because of the late start to their education, some 17 percent of the primary school population is up to 13 years old, which is beyond the usual age of nine when most pupils finish primary school, said Bertrand Bainvel, the UN Children?s Fund (UNICEF) representative in Myanmar. He noted that older students are often at high risk of having to abandon their studies due to pressure to earn money. ?We wish she [would] come back to school,” said Ba Thein, looking out the window of his one-room wooden school in the valley where Ngon Laung is located ? home to 184 inhabitants and a two-hour motorbike trip over rough terrain from Kanpetlet, a township in a mountainous area near the border with Bangladesh. Chin is the poorest state in Myanmar and also one of the most remote. Around 52 percent of the students leave school before the age of 10, in part because they are called to help with housework or traditional hillside farming, said Ba Thein..."