Be the Change Network

I have 9 beautiful faces leaning over my shoulder as I write this.   The girl to my right is named Srey Mom.  She is 13 years old and only in the third grade, having studied here for three years.  She started school when she was 10 and old enough to walk the 2 kilometers to this school.   She likes to study computer and English.  Judging by how close the girls are leaning in behind me, I’m guessing that class time behind the computer is quite limited.   At least the new super-capacity batteries I bought last year allow the solar panels on the roof to keep the two computers powered for 6 hours per day. Out of more than 400 students, only 40 are chosen for computer studies; you have to be the top of the class to get behind the keyboard.   We are bulging at the seams here, truly in need of another school building, or at least a library and extracurricular training facility.   The music class keeps their instruments piled in the library room and practices in the afternoon under the shade of the tree.  I love to sit with them and listen.   The music class is just as popular as the computer class.  They practice every day, even on Sunday.   I am contemplating buying the school director’s old house, dismantling it and resembling it on the land behind the school that I bought last year.   It could serve as a temporary home for the music class and library, until we can raise more money for another school building.
 
Before we jump that far ahead, however, we have to stay focused on the task at hand:  pulling together a briquette workshop, so that kids stop skipping school to chop down trees.    When you are working in a community with zero organizational skills, just making the necessary preparations for the workshop feels like it may do us in.
 
Sanu has had us working hard for 3 days to prepare for a community demonstration.  We’ve built a small shelter for our Briquette Workshop Training Facility.  The students have collected piles of dry bamboo leaves, rice husk, rice straw, scrap paper and cardboard.   Sanu 2 has been very busy welding the frames for the briquette presses, as Sanu 1 says that welded metal parts will compress better and last longer.   But we’ve impressed both our Nepalese experts with the strength, weight and cheap price of the local hardwood available and will create one briquette press with it.  That way our participants will know how to manufacture the necessary equipment completely out of locally available materials. We found a standing dead tree in the school yard to use - now if we could just find a working chainsaw.  You’d think those would be plentiful around here.  Every single day and night caravans of oxcarts travel the road with freshly sawn tree trunks – a completely illegal activity that is done with impunity right out in the open.    
 
We have a small but passionately committed group of local community members who showed up this morning to learn more about the curious little briquettes.  One man actually showed up two days early and has been volunteering his time to help us prepare the hardware; he has HIV and no job, supporting his family with 30 kilograms of rice donated by the Lutheran World Foundation every month.  Two monks from the forest pagoda came to see us and have committed to bring 4 members of their community to participate.   I was most pleased to see Tau Soka and her 6 month old baby in the group.  She is a twenty-year-old woman with four children who wrote the first letter last year when I asked the community to express themselves concerning their forest destruction problems.  Her brave letter ignited a campaign that sent 170 letters from this community to Voice of America, human rights groups and other media outlets. I learned later that her husband had quit his job as a policeman because together they had decided that they didn’t want to be involved in taking bribes.  Now she calls me “bong srey� for older sister.   A small amount of law enforcement resulted from our letter-writing campaign.  At least now there is some press living in the area.  The reporter from the local Mohoran newspaper spent time with us, going directly to the wood cutters in the forest to invite them to our training.   One wood cutter said he would come, but I didn’t see his face today.   
 
Sanu demonstrated how the piles of raw materials can be transformed into the briquettes which he burned in both the traditional claypot cooker and in the smaller tin stove we brought, specifically designed for the most efficient burn of briquettes.    It is definitely the people who are concerned about the forest who have shown interest in the briquette, but even they are skeptical about this curious new product.  Honestly, they just want a job.  Whoever participates in the workshop is guaranteed the job, either full day production with a salary or a half day with commission for selling briquettes in the afternoon.  But the business model is the least of our worries right now.   Getting the community mobilized, organized and committed to what we are doing is a constantly-evolving process.  Building the equipment, translating the manual and collecting and processing the raw materials will consume the rest of our week, and we have a bigger challenge on the horizon – getting the community to care about creating their own future.  This is a society too used to donor hand-outs.
 
It is easy to gather waste materials for free now, especially sawdust from the many lumber operations, but once local people see us create something of value from it they will want to charge. I am trying to convince Bun Vanna, our briquette workshop manager, to tell people we are performing a service collecting their waste materials to support their school.  The community contributes their waste, we turn it into a marketable product and use the profit to support teachers and strengthen the education opportunities for their children.  Bun Vanna and our school director understand the logic but are skeptical that the community will rally.   Frankly, so am I.  But step-by-step we must try to convince them that recycling their waste to support their school locally will offer a better future to all.   I have no idea if this will work. 
 
Ten people showed up to volunteer this morning, their labor committed in lieu of payment for the workshop.  It’s a start.  We need the local people to feel ownership of the project if it is going to subsist on its own.
Thankfully, we have the beautiful tunes from the music class that seem to quell my fears of the many obstacles we have to overcome.

Our sustainability plans for the Grady Grossman School are quite coincidentally at the cutting edge of international development. Sanu Kaji Shresthra, our alternative cooking fuel expert, has just won the runner up prize in World Challenge 2007, sponsored by BBC World, Newsweek and the Shell Corporation for his work introducing biomass briquettes and solar cookers to urban and rural poor in Nepal.

According to Sandra Wijnvelt, who collected the award for Sanu in The Hague, because of the media coverage, Sanu is now getting requests from all over the world to share his expertise. As luck would have it, we’ve been working with Sanu for months, and the Grady Grossman School is the first place outside Nepal he will bring his expertise. Together, we are the first to introduce this low cost, appropriate technology to Cambodia. Makes me feel like we are on the right track.

“Thanks to the exposure in Newsweek and on BBC World Sanu has already received more than a dozen request from countries in Africa, Asia, South America and even in the Pacific of people and organizations who now want to replicate FoST’s technologies, projects and ideas! This month Sanu Kaji Shrestha is invited to Cambodia to teach his skills and share is knowledge with a school. And this is only the beginning…

For us this is a dream come true, because now Sanu can help the Nepalese rural and urban poor, while protecting the environment, but he can share his work with the rest of the world who are facing the same daily struggles and hardships in life. FoST’s solutions to these global problems are so simple and cheap, but highly effective. This small Nepalese organization is becoming an example to many countries in the world.

- Sandra Wijnveldt, GORP Productions”

To see Sandra’s video of Sanu’s work in Nepal Click here.

To read the article about the 3 World Challenge finalists, find a copy of the Dec. 17th issue of Newsweek. (Unfortunately, the article is not posted on their website - argh!)

To see how we apply this technology in Cambodia. Stay tuned to this blog!

We now have 150 students sponsored for 3 years in our sustainability challenge. Keep the donations coming!

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?

Last year, the Grady Grossman School had 92 kids in first grade, yet only 16 graduated from sixth. Fifty percent student drop-out begins in third grade because at 8 or 9 years old, children are needed to work. In the commune of Trapeang Chhor, where the Grady Grossman School is located, that means chopping down trees. 1.5 million people in the capital city of Phnom Penh cook with wood sticks. Currently, Trapeang Chhor is the largest source of these cooking sticks. Hardwood trees chopped up for cooking fuel is annihilating the forest, funding a culture of corruption, depleting the water source of the entire country, and keeping children out of school. In Trapeang Chhor, cooking fuel has everything to do with education.

Our goal is for every child to complete a primary education through 6th grade.Rather than build a secondary school which few could afford to attend, we’ve decided to make primary school attendance more economically feasible with a vocational training center where sustainable, income-generating skills are learned. Since students only attend school half the day, we intend to utilize the other half of the day to teach valuable life skills. The first project of The Abundant Forest Life Skills Training Center will address cooking fuel.

Cambodia needs an alternative. Who better than the children of Trapeang Chhor commune (aka Timber Town) to lead the way!

The Legacy Foundation, an Oregon based engineering development organization, has devised an ingenious solution to the cooking fuel problem in many poor regions of the world where natural resource depletion is taking it’s toll. Biomass briquettes are created from dead material collected from the ground: dead leaves, rice husks, saw dust, and even waste paper can become the raw material for a highly efficient and low cost cooking fuel.

Click here to watch a short video of the process.

Through the worldwide network of fuel briquette-rs we found Sanu Kaji, the Nepalese director of Foundation for Sustainable Technologies. Sanu brought briquette technology to Katmandu during a cooking fuel shortage and is now having success converting poor villages to sustainability. He is a finalist on World Challenge 2007, a worldwide competition that rewards people who “truly make a difference through enterprise and innovation at a grass roots level.” We’re excited to welcome Sanu Kaji to the Grady Grossman School. In December, we will begin the briquette training under Sanu’s guidance.Our next challenge will be to get people to buy our briquettes in the marketplace rather than wood sticks.

Stay tuned to this blog to find out how we intend to do that!

Do you have ideas or input that may help us achieve our goal?

September 13th, 2007 | by Angel Limb of WCVE Public Radio, Richmond, VA.

Cambodia’s long history of war and genocide has left thousands of orphans with little chance of a better life. WCVE Public Radio’s Angel Limb spoke with author Kari Grady Grossman at a Richmond homeschooling event about her efforts to improve the lives of Cambodia’s children.

Listen to the interview: