Be the Change Network

Chrauk Tiek, Cambodia.

We’re calling it School Fuel. A small donut of compressed sawdust and scrap paper pulp that we hope will turn the tide of forest destruction toward an activity that supports schools. It’s a micro-business with big dreams. Our 3 day workshop concluded with certificates awarded to 41 community members who completed the training to transform waste materials into cooking fuel. We’re heading back to Phnom Penh with more than 500 kilograms of briquettes to take to the next step - finding the market.

The process of pulping scrap paper, mixing it with a raw material and putting it through the press is not difficult, but it is a little messy; yet the participants seemed to be having a good time. Sanu offered expert instruction and encouragement. Certainly, it is easier than traveling to the forest to cut down trees, and more convenient work than forcing children to skip school to help cut down trees.

I was most proud of the 9 women who joined the training; several showing up with babies on their backs. Three women traveled all the way from a Tropaing Ongrong, a village 7 kilometers to the east. They had heard through the grapevine about our training and decided to come, and as Chou Leng said to me, “the trees will all be gone soon, so I need to know how to do this.” She has experienced this problem firsthand when her former village in the Takeo province ran out of trees and she had to start cooking with cow dung. All our trainees are now also certified to become trainers, and we plan to export our skill to other villages where people want to learn the process and support their school. Workshops can be conducted at our facility or we can set up new ones. We will charge for this service, so we have another income generation stream for our school.

I was reminded again yesterday why income-generating activities are so important to the sustainability of our school. I spent the day in a long meeting with teachers, the principle, and the school-supporting committee, trying to settle a long-standing dispute over a substitute teacher who was not paid for her time. The principle apparently had kept her salary for operating expenses and to pay bribes to higher-up officials to keep the regular teachers from getting fired. One teacher had skipped two months to elope with her boyfriend, and another skipped 5 months to get training with a Korean company he hopes to join. All the squabbling has undermined the solidarity of the teaching staff that is critical to the functioning of the school, and a possible explanation for the decrease in student attendance this year. It’s also the reason the library had been closed for 5 months. All of this unrest over 50 dollars. When I asked each teacher to pitch in $7 to pay the substitute and settle the matter, not one of them had even $2. They are paid only $30 per month. Raising the teachers pay in a sustainable way is one of our highest priorities. You simply cannot run a school without good teachers.

Solidarity is a problem in Cambodia on many levels, and the lack of it threatens our ambitions. It is very difficult to get people to work together for the common good when all anyone cares about is putting money in their pockets. Long term vision is non-existent. Still reeling from traumatic memories of the Khmer Rouge regime and its extreme form of forced cooperatives, the society as a whole is distrustful of giving anything to one another.

“Cambodian always look down on Cambodian,” Madame Ouk Savborey said when she interviewed our team for Radio Free Asia. She was so interested in our briquette project that she drove the 5 hours of bumpy road to interview our participants directly. While researching her story she stopped in Kantout (a village 20 kilometers to the west) to compare the regular charcoal-making process with our briquette process. It takes 40 kilos of wood to produce 10 kilo of charcoal, and only scrap sawdust (or other materials) to make compact briquettes.

After the interview Madame Savborey, 52, recalled how as a 16-year-old girl the Khmer Rouge had held her in a prison camp in nearby Kantout. She was lined up at a mass grave for execution, and when the man in front of her failed to die after being struck with a hoe, she passed out. She awoke in the morning in a pile of dead bodies and someone rescued her. With memories like that, no wonder building solidarity is so difficult. Sadly, it is a common story.

During the workshop one monk looked into the classroom where we were serving lunch to the group and commented, “this how we eat during Pol Pot time.” He didn’t join us. Not far from here, about 5 kilometers upstream is beautiful lake Peam Levia at the base of Aural mountain. The dike is 5 kilometers long and it was dug entirely by hand for a failed Khmer Rouge hydroelectric project where 10,000 people labored and thousands died. The two men who recounted the scene, Sok Sarith and Bun Vanna, had witnessed it as boys; they are now the principle managers of our briquette program. There is only one way they can succeed in building community support around it, by selling lots of briquettes. If there is money to be made, people will change - but that remains to be seen.

Madame Savborey seemed a little baffled as to why a family of Americans are here, offering our support to this school in a remote village, far from the tourist centers. I explained that we have many new school buildings provided by donors in this region, but ours is the only one that continues to receive donor support. As a result, ours is the only school in the region with a computer and English class. Another school in the area has a solar panel that hasn’t been used for 2 years, since the power storage unit was burned out by vandals. Those teachers live in the pagoda because their salary is too low to survive independently. The school down the road has a failed garden project, and our sister school at the Pos Meas village has high teacher absenteeism. If we did not continue to support our school, the same things would happen here. We’ve taken our first small step toward sustainability through life skills training. If it is to progress, we must help the few members of the community who believe in our vision to build support - no matter how frustrating it may be.

When I start to feel like giving up, I go visit a classroom. I shout out the Khmer letters with 60 first graders. I teach the second graders how to use Play Dough, Legos and K’nex. I help the 6th graders sound out words in English books and teach them to sing “If You’re Happy and You Know it Clap Your Hands.” I give the blind boy private music lessons. I add a Saturday English for the secondary students who don’t have access to computers and language lessons. I show everyone how to do yoga and jumping jacks. I listen to them sing. I see their smiles. And I pray for the support we need to keep it going.

The children are magical; they deserve better.