Be the Change Network

Summit Daily News By Nicole Formosa

LANDER, Wyo. — It took a trip almost to the highest point in the world for Kari Grady Grossman to discover her professional calling in life.

In spring 2002, Grossman was tracking the Ford-sponsored women’s expedition to the summit of Mount Everest (local Jody Thompson and former local Kim Clark were two of the climbers) as a writer for Discovery Channel online. On Mother’s Day, at 18,000 feet elevation and 8,000 miles away from her 2-year-old adopted son, whom she desperately missed, she realized that adventure writing was no longer her dream.

“That was a real defining moment,” Grossman said.

She redirected her efforts toward researching a book on Cambodia, from where she adopted her son, Eric Ratanak Grady Grossman, in 2001 and where she and her husband sponsor a school in his name.

Four years later, she realized her goal, publishing “Bones that Float” a memoir of her experience adopting a child from poverty-stricken Cambodia and attempt to locate her son’s anonymous birth mother intertwined with two stories of survival from native Cambodians. The first is the compelling, often heart-wrenching, recollections of Amanda Prom, a neighbor and friend of Grossman’s in her hometown of Lander, Wyo., whose family lived through the cruel Khmer Rouge regime before escaping to the U.S. in the early 1980s. The second is of Sovann, an early 40s friend of the Grossmans who also lived through the Khmer Rouge, but stayed in Cambodia and his struggles to make a life for himself and his family in an economy devastated by war, even with an education.

The idea of weaving together the three stories, Grossman says, was to bring Cambodia’s troubled past, including enduring U.S. bombings in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to a mainstream audience.

Her inspiration came when she brought her new son home to the mountains of Wyoming in late 2001.

“I was shocked and amazed that nobody around me seemed to know anything about what had happened in Cambodia,” she said, referring to four years in the 1970s when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia. Anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 million Cambodians died or disappeared during the brutal reign.

“Bones that Float” is on the shelves at both Weber’s Books and Hamlet’s Book Shoppe in Breckenridge, and has sold well.

Courtney Phillips, manager at Weber’s, just placed in a second order of 15 books after the first six copies sold out.

“People really generally love it,” she said. “They’re comparing it to (Greg Mortenson’s) ‘Three Cups of Tea’ as far as tone and the way it made them feel. It’s just really giving people some hope in a time when those kinds of feelings are few and far between for most of us.”

Similar to Mortenson, who began building schools in Pakistan and Afghanistan after a failed K2 bid in 1993, the Grossmans quickly recognized the need for education in Cambodia.

Shortly after adopting Eric, Grossman and her husband sponsored the Grady Grossman School in the village of Chrauk Tiek in the Kampong Speu province near the Cardamom Mountains.

It started with 50 kids studying on a dirt floor under a dilapidated thatched roof. The school now serves 10 times the number of students and includes a teacher’s residence so educators can afford to instruct the kids.

With government salaries hovering around $25 a month, many instructors have traditionally made teaching a second priority to other odd jobs that paid the bills.
“In many new buildings, there’s no education going on because the teachers don’t make enough money to live so they don’t show up to work,” Grossman said.

Supporting teachers with a food stipend and residence enabled more teachers to educate full-time and therefore more kids to attend school.

Grossman, who visits Cambodia every year, is now aiming to develop a lifeskills training center at the school to equip students with crafts that can provide a means of income.

For instance, teaching students how to grow agriculture or developing cooking fuels alternatives to wood to help curb illegal logging in the forest — a huge problem near Chrauk Tiek.

Eventually she hopes the life skills model can spread to other schools in Cambodia.
“What I envision is not building more schools. It’s making the schools already built function independent of the government and self-sustaining,” Grossman said.

A quarter of all the profits from “Bones that Float” go to the Friends of the Grady Grossman School. For more information, visit www.gradygrossmanschool.org.

Nicole Formosa can be reached at (970) 668-4629, or at nformosa@summitdaily.com.

Event and book signing
Kari Grady Grossman will have a booth on Breckenridge Main Street during the Mountain 2 Mountain Race for the Mountains on June 24, 2007. Also on June 24, she will sign copies of the book at Weber’s Books in Breckenridge from 4-6 p.m
She’ll be back at Hamlet’s Book Shoppe for a book signing at the end of August.

On Fathers Day June 17, 2007, the Casper Star Tribune published, in the Range section, three articles about Kari, her family and the Grady Grossman School. The wonderful articles focus on how we are empowering Cambodia’s oppressed through education and how sales of Kari’s book, Bones That Float is supporting our school.

Click here to read the articles.

A personal journey to the heart of Cambodia

By Richard Irwin, Special to the Press-Telegram

Article Launched: 04/15/2007 12:00:00 AM PDT

HOW MANY authors would turn down an advance from a major publishing house so they could publish their own work?

Author Kari Grady Grossman did just that for purely altruistic reasons. Through Wild Heaven Press - part of Wild Heaven Productions, a documentary company that she and her husband George founded - a quarter of her new book’s profits are donated to Friends of the Grady Grossman School, a nonprofit group that supports a Cambodian school that the couple founded in their son’s honor in 2001.

In “Bones That Float: A Story of Adopting Cambodia,” the Wyoming-based journalist tells the story of how the adoption of her Cambodian son led her to investigate the tragic takeover by the Khmer Rouge and the lasting effects it had on this small Asian country.

Tuesday marks the 32nd anniversary of the takeover. Grady Grossman’s book covers the three decades that have passed since the genocide.

Cambodians celebrate their New Year in April, and this year could be a year of justice if the United Nations follows through on its plans to prosecute Khmer Rouge war criminals.

Grady Grossman entered a crowded orphanage in Phnom Penh on March 24, 2001. That’s where she met her 8-month-old son and began a personal quest to uncover her son’s past.

The journey took her through Cambodia’s gruesome history of genocide and war. In her book, the Wyoming writer tells the stories of two Cambodians, one who managed to escape the Khmer Rouge’s purge and one who didn’t.

Grady Grossman,a 1990 graduate of Syracuse University, has spent the last 20 years traveling around the world to write and produce documentaries.

Her work has appeared on Discovery Channel Online, ranging from covering the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Alaska to an expedition on Mount Everest.

In “Bones That Float,” she takes readers on the back of a moto-taxi along the smoggy streets of Phnom Penh as she delves into her son’s past.

“Bones That Float” refers to a Cambodian phrase for the sacred that rises from suffering.

In her book, Grady Grossman takes us into the jungle with the Khmer Rouge, where boy soldiers force starving families to work all day at gunpoint. Later it jumps to modern-day Cambodia, where innocent preteen girls are bought by foreign pedophiles.

The book inspired the Grady Grossmans to create a school in a remote village in Cambodia, which now educates 500 children every year.

The Cambodian students were recently featured on the Voice of America for a letter-writing campaign to stop the deforestation of their country. The students are demanding an end to corruption in their community.

The publication date was moved forward to April because the author sees an urgent need for the international community to help save the forests in Cambodia, as well as the livelihoods supported by it.

In the end, the author reminds us that we’re all “one big family,” and we shouldn’t turn our backs on people suffering in other lands. Especially, Grady Grossman notes, when our country’s foreign policy has contributed to some of this suffering.

Proceeds from her new book will help fund Grady Grossman’s school. While “Bones That Float” will be available at major bookstores and online booksellers, more money per book will be donated if readers buy it directly from www.BonesThatFloat.com or by mail order to Wild Heaven Press, P.O. Box 65, Lander, WY 82520. The cost is $24.95, plus a $5 shipping fee.

Last year, the Grady Grossmans traveled to India, where they adopted their second child. She is now working on a book about that country.

Grady Grossman will man a booth at the Cambodian New Year Celebration on Saturday in Area 3 of El Dorado Regional Park, 7551 E. Spring St., Long Beach. She will discuss and sign “Bones That Float.”

The event, featuring traditional food, activities and entertainment, will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is $20 per car in advance or $30 on the day of the event. For information, call (562) 607-9261 or see www.cam-cc.org.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Regional author returns from Cambodia with cause

(Courtesy Grady Grossman School) Kari Grady Grossman talks to villagers in Cambodia. The author is currently visiting Fort Collins to promote support for the country devastated by war and genocide.

Saturday, April 7, 2007
By JP EICHMILLER
JPEichmiller@coloradoan.com
The Coloradoan (Ft. Collins, Colorado, USA)

Kari Grady Grossman traveled to Cambodia in 2001 with the intention of finding a child to adopt.

She came back to the U.S. with a 9-month-old son and a newfound mission to educate and better the lives of the children she could not take with her.

Since that life-altering journey, the author and documentary filmmaker from Lander, Wyo., has built and sustained a Cambodian elementary school and written a book about the experience. Grossman’s hope is that one-quarter of the proceeds from her soon-to-be-released chronology “Bones That Float, A Story of Adopting Cambodia” will help the fledgling school not only survive, but prosper.

Grady has been touring the Front Range for most of the past week to promote her book, scheduled to be released April 17, marking the 32-year anniversary of the bloody Khmer Rouge takeover of Cambodia. On Thursday and Friday, Grady spent time visiting two of the ninth-grade honors English classes at Lincoln Junior High School in Fort Collins.

“When we (she and her husband) went over there in March of 2001 to adopt our son, the experience really grabbed our hearts and we got involved with the education process over there,” Grossman said. “We raised $15,000, which was matched by the World Bank. A school was then built in honor of our son.”

Since the Grady Grossman School was first opened in 2001, enrollment has grown from 50 students to 485 students and eight teachers. The school has been such a success that the next step will be adding another building to the campus to be able to meet the demands of prospective students.

“Our goals now are to raise $10,000 to build a new computer lab and to stop the dropout rate of 50 percent by the third grade,” she said.

Grossman said many of the students who leave the school are forced to because of their family’s need for income. As proof of the difficulty of student retention, she pointed out the school’s disproportionate enrollment, where 92 children are enrolled as first graders, but just 16 as sixth-graders.

Grady’s purpose in speaking with the students in Colleen Conrad’s English classes was to educate and get them involved in a “sister school” program with students half a world away.

Conrad said Grady’s cause fits in nicely with the attitude of service-based learning she believes is embedded in the attitudes of Lincoln students.

“My kids love to do service; it is part of our culture,” Conrad said. “It empowers the students to see what they can do.”

Conrad said, during the last four years, her students have raised more than $42,000 to aid in removing land mines from Cambodia as part of the United Nations’ “Adopt a Minefield” campaign - more than any school in the world, she claims.

When she heard about Grossman’s experiences, she said it seemed like a perfect continuation of a charity her students had already adopted.

It is now Grossman and Conrad’s hope that next year’s Lincoln students will buy into the “sister school” program by becoming online English tutors for Cambodian students. The details haven’t been figured out, but Grossman believes the first step is to gain the interest of students.

“Once we have the internet connection, we can have a sister school to teach English communication,” Grossman said. “Right now, only 40 of 485 students are enrolled in English skills classes. In Cambodia, English skills open employment opportunities.”

For additional information: www.gradygrossmanschool.org

Author shares harrowing experiences

by Sarah Milke, The Rocky Mountain Collegian, Colorado State University

Issue date: 4/6/07

Inspiration to help comes from many different places and for documentary producer Kari Grady Grossman the inspiration came from a child.

After Grossman and her husband George adopted a baby from Cambodia six years
ago they were exposed to the terrible conditions the country has been facing since the Vietnam War, the couple did an incredible amount of research on what they could do to help.

Grossman, who is also a writer and photographer, spoke in the CSU bookstore Thursday evening to promote her soon to be released book, “Bones that Float.” The book focuses on efforts to improve a crippled Cambodian village. “We were inspired to give back and help the country out of a very difficult situation,” Grossman said.

The couple discovered that schools had been destroyed and numerous teachers had been murdered by the Khmer Rouge Regime, which rose out of the conflicts from the war. After seeing the destruction, the couple decided to build a school to be shared by five villages in the Cardamom Mountains could require up to $15,700.

The Grossmans teamed up with the American Assistance for Cambodia, a non-profit organization, and were able to raise the money by selling pictures over the internet. They donated the money in the name of their newly adopted son.
“We figured we would donate the money and get on with our lives,” she said.
What they didn’t know was that the people of the village needed more than just a school; they also needed help with the education process. After the war, more than 70 percent of the country remained illiterate and 50 percent of kids don’t make it past a third grade education.

Because the teachers make less than $20 a month, they couldn’t afford to come back and forth to the school. The Grossmans’ new task was to raise money for supplies and housing for the teachers, along with a monthly food stipend.
Some of the things they donated were play dough, art supplies and puzzles.
“It gives the children an opportunity to think,” said Grossman.

Grossman, who in the past was an online writer for the Discovery Channel and a graduate of Syracuse University, currently resides in Lander, Wyoming with her family.

The book’s main release date is set for April 17, which marks the 32nd anniversary of the invasion of Cambodia. Grossman wrote the book initially to promote awareness of the current conditions but also as another way of raising money. “Bones that Float” is available at the CSU bookstore for $24.95 and 25 percent of the proceeds go to future projects not yet scheduled in Cambodia.