Be the Change Network

Chrauk Tiek Village, Cambodia

So much has transpired over the past 3 days, it’s hard to know where to begin. I want to introduce you to the families of Chrauk Tiek village so I’ll keep the words to a minimum and let the images do the talking.

The first day of school A LOT of kids show up. Proud parents arrive to register their kids and to meet me. It’s a bit chaotic, as no one has yet divided the kids by grade and skill level, a task, which is anything but straightforward. The age range per class can be 3-5 years, depending on how old the child was when they started and how often they miss class and thus do not pass. As usual we have nearly one hundred register for grades 1, 2 and 3, and each year thereafter decreases by 25%. There are 24 registered for 6th grade, 18 attending secondary school and none attending high school. The drop out rate has decreased by only a handful.

I asked the school director, Nhim So Bun to arrange a meeting with the parents. I want to get their feedback about what they want the school to provide for their community. It is the first step toward engaging the community, but this will prove to be a tedious process. I have a list of 4 questions for each family. What is your opinion of the quality of the school? What is your opinion of the quality of the teachers? What would you like your children to be learning at school? What is the biggest reason children do not attend school.

I ask who can read and write. Two people raise their hands—a mental note, adult literacy class needed. I have 8 literate people with me from the city that have come to observe the briquette project, including Sovann, Sam Sundoeun and our driver Bun Thon, all of whom are engaged to help the parents of Chrauk Tiek write down their answers. It is difficult to enlist the help of literate students who are too shy to display their knowledge. Thus this exercise takes more than two hours.

But you find out amazing things this way. From the 38 surveys I collected, it is clear that no one has ever asked their opinion before. If empowerment begins with participation, we have only just begun to take our first baby steps. Here is a sampling.

From Kim Vorn, age 21, mother of 1 and 3 orphan siblings. Both parents died when she was 13 years old, she has taken care of her 3 younger siblings ever since. She has never been to school.

“We very happy that we got the closer school to my house and my sibling can attend school without payment money. We hope new teachers pay attention to teach all their best. We want to follow up all students and find out why some students always make up and complain if teacher absent without asking for days off first. Sometimes they came school but teacher always absent, sometimes they absent to much and afraid to come to school. Low income families has not enough money to buy school supply. But we will try to tell and explain from our best about important to do a lot in school. We want our children to be English Teachers.”

From Tau Soka, age 25, mother of 4.

“Teacher does not pay attention on his teaching. The children doesn’t understand the lesson well because the teachers doesn’t explain enough, it waste time for their study. Sometimes the children have fever and cannot go to school. Sometimes live far away cannot get to school. If they have the way and enough money or medicine when they are sick I think that the children can study all together. I request you encourage the teacher to explain to them and to teach them some morality.”

From Khim Savon, farmer, father of 5, the oldest has finished secondary school grade 9.

“He very happy and want his children to continue their study and want to have a higher class. When my children finish their secondary school. How can they continue to high school?”

From Kong Savin, age 31, father of 1 and 1 orphaned niece.

“I want all the teachers to teach from their heart and to strengthen the discipline. Request you support the study materials, student uniform to the poor student to make a beauty for their school. Very happy that we support the Chrauk Tiek school in development in the field of education and general knowledge. I am a father and try to take the children to school on time in order to respect the school rule.”

The theme of the poor showing by teachers is consistent. Sam Sundoeun spoke to the families as well, telling them that there are many schools near Phnom Penh that do not have what this school has, makes me wonder what happens at those schools.

Local control is important and I am a little miffed that our teacher attendance bonus was not administered properly to avoid this kind of problem. Apparently, the school director had no support from his community to deal with the teacher problems, he has now fired the 3 teachers causing the problem and we have 3 new Khmer teachers and a new English teacher. We developed a system of checks and balances for the local community to assure that the teacher attendance policy is enforced by THEM.

Tune in next time to hear about the teacher meeting and my admonishment to the new recruits.

We traveled past many schools on the way out here, none with the support that this school has, which strengthens my belief in the mission of Sustainable Schools International: to empower Cambodian communities to sustain schools through economic development.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Thank you to everyone who donated to the “Bring Sovann To America Fund.” Even though we are $90 short of our goal to raise $3,000 for his travel and tuition, we started the visa application process yesterday. He is both nervous and excited, his hands shaking as he filled out the application form. Sovann has an appointment to submit his application on Monday Oct. 6 at 7:30am. Keep your fingers crossed. I was struck by how the authority of the American government can strike the fear of God in someone. After hearing Kerri Evan’s nightmare immigration story yesterday, I feel a little of it too.

Interest in our briquette project is taking hold in the city. Sovann has done a good job of targeting customers with an interest in conserving the environment and supporting education. Now that the price of charcoal has tripled to 1800 riel (50 cents) per kilo, we can double the price of briquettes and still be more competitive. And that’s all the majority of people care about – a cheaper price. Quite a few complain that the briquettes smoke too much, but not Sundoeun Sam who served us an outstanding meal of grilled fish he cooked with our briquettes.

Sundoeun is unique, a soft spoken man in his fifties, fluent in three languages and a member of the Sam Rainsy opposition party. How he survived the Khmer Rouge purge of educated people is a miracle. Now is he is a self described naturalist, and he runs a boarding house on the outskirts of the city for gifted students from the countryside who want to study at University. He provides about 35 students with room and board from his own pocket. He’s devised a completely sustainable system to support his cause. The large house is surrounded by gardens growing fruits, vegetables and medicines which supply all the produce they need to feed the students. A fish pond collects rainwater for irrigation and provides plenty of fish for the kitchen. Sundoeun says he also swims in it. Additional protein is provided by the 12 chickens in the chicken coop. He says that meat from the market is not good because it contains chemicals, his little farm is completely organic. He also collects rainwater into cisterns which is then filtered in the kitchen for cooking and then sent through pipes to provide drinking water to the lower level dormitories.

Next to the compost pile of chicken manure and veggie scraps, he’s cooking up pickled radish in a large crock of salt. Every inch of his quarter acre homestead is devoted to food production and beauty, his goal is to plant 100 different varieties of plant, ever vigilant that diversity is the key to sustainability. He learned about our briquettes on the radio last January, and is very excited about this simple solution to a daily need. He has bought a press and collected scrap coconut peel from the market. He has tested a few batches and intends to begin selling coconut briquettes in the market soon, as much to educate people as to make a profit. It is possible that our villagers can sell from his storefront once it is ready, there is still work to be done to create the shop space in front of his 3 story Chinese style rental house that adjoins the market square. I am excited about our potential partnership with Sundoeun, as it is people like him who must lead by example for others to see the benefit of making small changes for a better future. I’ve invited Sundoeun to visit Chrauk Tiek with us to see the briquette production facility. I want him to consult with the school supporting committee on the development of land behind the school for our volunteer tourism program. A guest house and forest garden similar to his boarding house in the city would be a perfect peaceful place to house volunteers and demonstrate to the students and their families a sustainable living system.

Sovann made an excellent selection with our new English teacher. I met Rattana for an interview late in the day. What an impressive young woman. Her name means precious gem, and she truly is a gem. Rattana explained to me how excited she is to have the opportunity to teach the very poor students, because she was also very poor. Her family of 9 lived off the Phnom Penh dump, both parents and all 7 children scavenging the garbage to live everyday. Then one day when she was 7 years old, she and her siblings were taken in by the Smile of A Child Center, a French NGO dedicated to giving dump children education, health and hygiene. She thrived there, studying for 12 years to gain skills in sewing, computer and English. She’s just completed a Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages course, provided to us by the kind generosity of Language Corps, and she is excited to go to work. She will be teaching 50 students, beginner and elementary level, divided into 3 classes, 6 days per week. Imagine what a loss it would be for the world if this gracious and quick-witted women had remained in a the hell hole of the Phnom Penh city dump to survive like a mangy dog until an even more exploitative situation swept her away. It makes me shutter and keeps me passionate and dedicated to our mission. She is going to the countryside to teach the children of Chrauk Tiek a life saving skill, for it is the families in the countryside who migrate to the city in search of work and without literacy or job skills end up scavenging the dump to survive. Our mission is to stop this cycle where it starts, in the poverty of rural villages where the school is a lifeline to a different future.

Rattana also learned how to make bracelets from scrap plastic bottles and string while at Smile of A Child and she will bring this teaching to the students of Chrauk Tiek, so they can make bracelets for our supporters, sister schools, and Ambassadors! Rattana’s salary is $120 per month. We need a sponsor for her, if you would like to contribute, please click here.

Today we leave for Chrauk Tiek with a new set of English books in the trunk for the first day of school tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This is weird. The city is completely quiet. I mean quiet, no traffic and all the storefronts shuttered, it’s eerie and peaceful and beautiful. It’s P’Chum Ben, the festival of the dead, a deeply spiritual holiday. For 4 days the city is vacated, everyone traveling to the countryside to visit relatives in their “home village” and pay respects to the ancestors. I decided to stay in town to catch up on jet lag before traveling to Kampong Speu province for the first day of school, which no one seems sure will start October 1st or 2nd.

To see the city empty like this gives me a glimpse of where the Khmer Rouge leaders got the idea to empty the city on April 17, 1975, in a forced evacuation that began their 4-year reign of nightmares from which Cambodia is still recovering. The order was based in tradition, a mass migration of city dwellers to their roots in the country, so it actually seems like a sensible place to start if your motivation was to bring peasants to power in an agrarian utopia.

Umm yeah…well that didn’t work out so well…seems you do need educated people, even in utopia.

Thus we find ourselves here in 2008 trying to figure out the best way to help a rural Cambodian village support it’s own school and provide their children with an education that is relevant and accessible. Over the years, I’ve learned that they have as much to teach us as we have to offer them. Over the next week I am going introduce you to the people of Chrauk Tiek, the condition of their lives and their hopes for the future. Our mission is not easy, we need your ideas and support.

But it is P’Chum Ben, no work can be done so I spent the afternoon with one of the most remarkable woman I have ever met. Her name is Kerri Evans and I delivered her a package from friends in the US, along with a box of cocoa and a bottle of acidophiles. She hasn’t been home for 3 years, since the day she met her adopted daughter Chenda, now age 12. Kerri is a 43-year-old American women with 5 kids she’s raising in Cambodia, one grown and off to college in the US, and another who passed away at age 10 from heart dysfunction. To say the woman has tenacity is an understatement. She picks me up in a long school bus yellow tuk-tuk with all 5 kids in tow, and she is driving! This is the family wagon.

Three years ago, Kerri, her husband and 4 kids came to Cambodia in hopes of finding their youngest son Kameron’s birthfamily. They discovered his older sister, Chenda, living in horrific conditions. The birthmother had died and Chenda was essentially a domestic slave to extended family members with multiple diseases racking her body and a head full of lice. She was a sweet, unloved 7-year-old at the time, and Kerri felt sure that she was months away from either dying or being sold. So Kerri and her husband decided to do what any loving parent would do, they adopted her. Chenda was their son’s biological sibling, they could not walk away, instead they brought her into their safe and loving family. This should be a happy ending, but is was the beginning of an immigration nightmare.

The US Embassy will not issue the Evan’s family a visa for Chenda because of the US moratorium on adoptions from Cambodia, even though Kerri has full and legal custody of Chenda from the Cambodian court. The US Embassy refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the adoption. Kerri is unwilling to pay the bribes necessary to smooth the paperwork problems, conscious that she would be putting all her children’s futures at risk, so for 3 years she has been fighting the US Embassy for a visa. Under US law, after 2 years of custody the parents should have legal status and the child a right to US citizenship, but the US is unwilling to follow its own law in this case. In the meantime, Kerri has taken in and adopted another child, Noah, who was living on the street in front of their home. He is a sweet boy, hard to believe that someone could just leave him on a box in front of their home to beg.

Kerri home schools the whole crew, carts them around in a tuk-tuk, and cares lovingly for their 10-year-old sister adopted from Thailand who has cerebral palsy and is autistic—in Cambodia, where special needs services are non-existent! Did I mention that she is also a single mom, the whole time her husband has been working in the states to support his family in Cambodia.

Next year I am going to nominate Kerri and John Evans for National Parents of the Year. The sacrifice they are making to keep their children together in the face of an obscene immigration policy is bold and inspiring! Click here to read their full story “Trapped in Cambodia”.