Be the Change Network

Kampong Speu: Our van is packed with books, maps, games, and a new computer as we travel westward through the outskirts of Phnom Penh, past rows of garment factories and onward toward Kampong Speu. The air is hot and choked with the dust of a thousand motos and the traffic of overloaded trucks carrying goods from the province to market in the city.

Our research in the city has gone exceedingly well. We’ve met with the education project officer at American Assistance for Cambodia (AAFC) to buy a new computer for our students, a musician to discuss arts classes, and biomass and renewable energy experts exploring simple technologies appropriate for Cambodia. Everyone we have met with believes our idea shows promise. Our vision to use school level education to engage children in solving local economic and environmental problems with hands-on learning is utterly revolutionary.

There-in lies the difference in the fundamental reality of an educated person. I can come from half the world away, negotiate a foreign city, be resourceful, ask questions, network connections to expertise, and gather the resources from many levels to advance a vision of sustainability. These are simple skills that our teachers and village community lack and I hope our project will teach. Now we face the challenge of connecting our vision to the reality of Cambodian village life.

The Abundant Forest project is taking shape around the idea of charcoal briquettes, though they are not really charcoal at all. They are partially decomposed and pressed biomass, made from material collected from the forest floor. With the briquettes as the basis of an inquiry based science class, we hope to create problem-solving leadership in our students. For the first time we will connect what the students are learning with the world they live in. Students can collect raw material from home, bring it to the school, and spend time working the decomposition and production of briquettes.

Our new friends at GERES, Mao Rotha Cambodian project director and Aurelien Herail, a French doctoral student, offered excellent input to assist the first stages of our project, the lessons of quality control they’ve learned from their attempts to introduce improved charcoal and cooking stoves to reduce raw wood consumption. With the vision in mind to one day sell our briquettes as a sustainable, income-generating product for our school, they can test the products at home with their parents, take notes to gain valuable feedback for improvements, and then consider marketability of their product. The secondary effect is that we get the parents to try something new without having to buy something, and begin their conversion to sustainable use. The students take their feedback data and create materials to educate people about the use of their product.

Connecting classroom lessons of experimentation to an important issue in the students daily lives is a revolutionary style of learning for rural Cambodians.

In the next dispatch, read about our visit with Arn Chorn-Pond, a child of the Khmer Rouge who survived to tell his story through music. His Cambodian Living Arts program is saving Cambodian classical music from extinction. I’m talking to him about using music to communicate our message of forest conservation to the children. We are both excited to lend our support to each other. I am especially honored, as Arn is a personal hero. His life story is detailed in the PBS documentary The Flute Player. What an intensely passionate and warm hearted person!

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