Be the Change Network

Chrauk Tiek Primary School, Cambodia.   Today is a national holiday, Chey Chom Nas Prom Bei Makara, Victory Day (when the Vietnamese Army freed Cambodia from the grip of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979).  There is no school.  The rice harvest is not yet finished and many families sleep in the rice fields to protect their crops from thieves.  The students spent the holiday working; I spent the day cleaning the library.  

We have a 5-classroom building for 6 grade levels teaching more than 400 students, but one room is divided in half by library shelves for multi-use: half computer-and English-class and half library/store room/music room/principle’s office.  We have serious space problem.  I dream of building another 5 room cement structure for additional classrooms but the immediate needs require a solution - if even a temporary one.   

How are the students supposed to enjoy reading time in the library if they can’t find the books?   They are stacked in cramped piles on rattan shelves and covered in dust because the director wants them to remain flat.  You have to step over musical instruments to get to them.  School and art supplies are in a locked cabinet and the pieces to puzzles and learning games in complete disarray.  It took two days to organize. While I was working, two boys played legos with my son Grady, a group of girls worked puzzles, and a girl named Neat read books quietly to herself.  This is how it should be: time and space to read.   To encourage them, we need to dedicate a building and a librarian.

School director Ngim So Bun and his family live in a shack on the school premises now, and as luck would have it, he is willing to sell us his former home for $2,000.   We went to look at it in the poor Souy village called Ca Peou.   It is made of sturdy hardwood beams and planks with a good tin roof, big enough for two classrooms to house the library/reading room and the musical class.  The price includes the carpentry work to disassemble and move it to the school grounds where it will be reassembled on our private property behind the school building.  The school director and school-supporting committee will donate the cement foundation.  We need a donor. If anyone would like to donate the library building we’d be happy to put your name on it.   Please contact us by email, or click the Network For Good button to make a contribution by credit card.

When we do finally build another cement building, we should convert the wooden building into a medical clinic.  Since my arrival, people have been coming to me daily with every medical condition under the sun.  I’ve been administering care as best I can with no medical background and a very limited supply of over the counter medications.  I don’t even know what to do with the few donated prescription medications I have.   There seems to be a chronic case of fevers among the population, heart disease, arthritis, asthma, gastro-intestinal disease, and toothaches - just to name a few of the things I have treated.    Sanu told me about several international organizations that donate prescription medications and birth control for free; we just need a nurse to diagnose and dispense.  A doctor visit is a long, bumpy, expensive bus ride away, so people just use natural home remedies and put up with conditions most of us would consider unthinkable.  Getting a doctor or nurse to work here is nearly impossible because of the living conditions and the limited supply of professionals in the entire country.   They simply don’t want to work in the rural area.   The best solution would be to educate one of the local girls to be a nurse because she is obligated to live here and care for her parents.  If anyone would like to donate a scholarship to educate one girl to nursing school, please email us or click on the Network For Good button.  This is a critical need in this community as medical care is completely non-existent.  I administered to a 14-year-old student this morning who has had high fevers for 6 days; I’m not sure if it is Malaria, Dengue, or something bacterial. She may die for lack of medicine.   We also have one blind student who is 12 years old, and one 9-year-old who limps for lack of a kneecap.  We are discussing what can me done to help them.

If you cannot help, but you know some one who can, please send them our contact information.   

The briquette making facility and preparations continue, I will write more about it tomorrow.

Donations to our sustainability challenge come pouring in from the most touching places !
From Walter in Massachusetts:

Over 60 years ago, the Nazi’s made financial ruin of Walter’s Jewish family. Today’s German government decided to make financial restitution for Nazi crimes and when Walter recieved his check he knew just what he wanted to do with it, donate it to Cambodia. “There is no restitution in Cambodia” Walter said. As the proud grandfather of two children who were adopted from Cambodia, Walter has sponsored 30 students at the Grady Grossman School this year.

From Cambodian Heritage Camp:

Last July, twenty Middle School and High School students held a class called “More Than Me” to discuss ways they could give back to Cambodia, the country where most of them were born and left through adoption into American families. It was my great honor to discuss the Grady Grossman School with them. They showed deep concern for the plight of education and the environment in Cambodia, and held a fund raiser that very evening. These teenage adoptees learned a traditional Cambodian collection dance, alongside the Chhyam Drum Team from Long Beach California, and collected over $1,100 dollars. With this donation, 10 students will be sponsored toward sustainability at the Grady Grossman School. Thank you Cambodian Heritage Camp teenagers!!

From Jim and Jill in Wyoming:

A year ago, Jim and Jill were looking for something “off the beaten path” on their Southeast Asia vacation. When Jill asked me for tips, I hooked them up with lodging and transportation to the Grady Grossman School. They endured 6 hours on a Godforsaken road and a meal of snails and unidentified meat to experience life at the Grady Grossman School, but in the end told me “that was the most moving experience of our lives.” They’ve donated the salary for three years so village leader Bun Vanna can manage our alternative cooking fuel program, effectively sponsoring 10 students toward sustainability.

From Rick and Susie in Colorado:

Longtime supporters of the Grady Grossman School, Rick and Susie Grossman, grandparents of Grady and Shanti Grossman, have pledged to support 50 students in our sustainability program this year! This will not only pay for the English teacher salary but also for the creation of a demonstration show with our music class to promote biomass charcoal briquettes in the market!

From Girl Scouts in Wyoming:

Troop #138 of Jackson, Wyoming donated their cookie sale money to the Grady Grossman School last spring. It bought instruments for our music class. Now, they are collecting shoes for Christmas. Kids at the Grady Grossman School play soccer in bare feet, with the addition of tennis shoes we give them a better chance to win and feel pride for their school. I’ve asked the girl scouts to create a scrap book of life in America, because the kids in Cambodia only see the image of America in one thing: the power of the dollar bill. I will ask our Cambodian students to make a scrap book of life in Cambodia for the girl scouts. As I’ve said so many times on speaking tours all across America, “the relationship matters as much as the money.”

THANK YOU ALL!!

Would you like to take the Sustainability Challenge? Sponsor a student toward sustainability for $100/year with a recurring donation for 3 years. Sponsor as many students as you want!

We are pleased to announce that the Friends of the Grady Grossman School has received a $7,000 grant from the PRBB foundation for our alternative cooking fuel training. The price of LP gas is skyrocketing in Phnom Penh and putting even more pressure on our students to drop out of school to chop down trees and sell cooking fuel to the city. What a mess. But we hope to turn the tide with the production of biomass briquettes. It’s like putting a finger to the damn but we’ve got to start somewhere.

Our old village leader, Bun Vanna, who was ousted by corrupt officials a year ago because he was too adamant about protecting the forest, has agreed to manage the cooking fuel production, stage one of The Abundant Forest Life Skills Training Center. We are excited to have Bun Vanna on board, a man with no teeth but more integrity than anyone I’ve ever met in Cambodia. We hope that this new skill will not only help economically empower the community to support education in their village, but also strengthen the leadership role Bun Vanna already holds, despite the efforts of corrupt officials to silence him.

The training will be conducted by one Sanu Kaji from the Foundation for Sustainable Technologies in Katmandu, Nepal. There are only 3 people in the fuel briquette network that I’ve found in Asia, one is a Burmese refuggee stuck in a camp in Thailand, and the other an expensive academic group from Indonesia. Sanu is our only option, and he is taking time out of his busy schedule to help us.

The Foundation for Sustainable Technologies is a finalist in the World Challenge 2007, a prize sponsored by BBC, Newsweek and Shell Corp for innovative solutions to tough development challenges. You can see his work here. Please watch the program and cast your vote for “Cooking Without Gas” to help Sanu’s organization win the prize and gain the publicity to help Nepal convert to using sustainable resources for cooking. There are 9 days left to vote. The prize is announced December 10, then we will know for sure when Sanu can join us in Cambodia.

We will be the first to introduce this low cost, innovative solution to Cambodia. Our villagers are very excited about the market potential of biomass briquettes.

Kari will be reporting the progress of the training on this blog in January. Stay tuned.

Woud you like to support the children of Chrauk Tiek in their desire to create sustainable future?

Girl Scout Troop #138 of Jackson, Wyoming donated $300 to the Grady Grossman School which will go a long way toward supporting the students and the teachers. We thank you.

5,4,3,2,1….Launch!

Wild Heaven Press proudly announces the launch of Bones That Float, A Story of Adopting Cambodia by Kari Grady Grossman.

Read inside the dust jacket:

On March 24, 2001, American writer Kari Grady Grossman walked into a crowded orphanage outside Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and met her eight-month-old son. One of the first questions Kari asked was, “How did he get here?� The complex and, at times, heartwrenching answer is told in this magnificent book that encompasses Kari’s personal journey to adoption, Cambodia’s gruesome history of war and genocide, and the stories of two Cambodians—one who escaped the Khmer Rouge’s bloody reign and one who did not.
The interweaving stories grab your heartstrings and never let go. From the moment Kari realizes that she will never be an “earth momma� practicing prenatal yoga to years later, as Kari wends her way on the back of a moto-taxi through Phnom Penh’s smog-choked streets trying to make a difference in her son’s birth nation, you can’t read impassively. Bones That Float takes you into the Khmer Rouge jungle where boy soldiers force starving families to labor all day at gunpoint, and it brings you to modern-day Phnom Penh streets where foreign pedophiles purchase the innocence of preteen Cambodian girls.

But ultimately Bones That Float—a Cambodian phrase for the sacred that rises above the suffering—is a tale of hope. Kari reminds us that our world is “one big family� and that we cannot—or dare not—turn our backs on people who suffer, in part because of our own country’s foreign policy missteps. To read Bones That Float is to open your heart to caring.

Go to www.BonesThatFloat.com to order pre-publication hardcover copies at a discount price of $20 (+tax & shipping). 25% of the proceeds benefit the
Friends of the Grady Grossman School, Cambodia.

A link to an eBook is available with each order.
Autographed hardcover copies will be sent in March. Regular price is $24.95 (+tax & shipping).

Follow Kari’s trip to Cambodia Jan. 23-Feb.4th right here to meet the students and teachers the book is benefiting;meet the monks praying for the Cardamom Mountain forest;meet the community leaders trying to stop the forest destruction, and help us figure out how to empower local families of the impoverished Souy hill tribe so the kids can stay in school.

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