Red Ants
Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
I got served Red Ants today. Fried. Funky. They’re supposed to taste sour and good, my colleague Paul Chuk assured me. I might have tried a taste, but the large ones with the wings and white egg sacks freaked me out. When a fried ant accidentally attached itself to my rice and sour fish, I couldn’t help but squeal. Kind of cartoonish, I know. My passion for Cambodia has led me on many adventures, but I draw the line at eating insects. This is a part of Cambodian I will never be.
The fried ants are a symbolic reminder of the cultural gap we need to bridge, as I spent the day with Paul, Yoen and Sam Sundoen trying to figure out how we will implement our vision for Sustainable Schools International. Our vision is pretty straight forward really—help the village support and sustain a strong primary school so that all the children will achieve a primary education and more can access secondary, high school and University through our scholarship program. It’s a partnership. We get stumped on things like “how to change the school director’s behavior to be more honest and transparent”, “how to make the teachers care about teaching”, “how to get the parents to participate and send kids to school”, how to raise termites, to feed chickens, to feed children, to feed teachers.
How on earth will we find the funding to make our education model truly reliable and sustainable and expandable to other villages? We go on the hunt for money. First stop is USAID, housed in the US Embassy. We enter through a fortress of security to go see about a grant. The irony is not lost on me. When I think of the exceptionally poor and powerless people we advocate the money for, how on earth could they ever access these vaulted resources? It’s intimidating for me, an educated American. The conversation goes well. Our approach is very much in line with the strategic education objectives of USAID and their program partners, who with tremendously more resources have come to the same solutions we have. But guess what. We’re in the wrong province. Their “target area” is not our region. You have got to be kidding me. We are working with the most marginalized people in the country. We are working in a community-driven, holistic and sustainable way. We are already accomplishing many of their objectives and solving some problems they haven’t solved yet, and their funding is geographically unavailable???? Surely, we can get around this? Nope. Red Ants.
I have one of those throw my hands in the air moments, wondering I why don’t just go home. Sokea, our first high school scholarship student, enters the room. He speaks to me in English as best he can. He wants to study English so he can go back to the village and be a teacher. We all smile. We will soldier on.
