Be the Change Network

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”.