Be the Change Network

February, 7th 2009 - Phnom Penh, Cambodia

The last time I saw Sokea, he was sitting in the outside his parents cottage with his head down and a foot kicking the dirt, wishing he could continue to go to school. He couldn’t look me in the eye. When I told him we had a boarding house in Phnom Penh who would take him if he wanted to attend high school in the big city, he practically cried. When I met him at high school today he was bright eyed and smiling, looked me directly in the eye and spoke in English, “Hello, how are you Madame?” He is happy and proud to be the first in his village to go to high school. He is also a dedicated student our boarding house partner, Sam Sunduoen, tells me.

Sunduoen runs an amazing operation with 45 students from the rural provinces living with him to attend High School and University. Each student must work one hour per day to care for the many gardens and animals that sustain the dormitory, one of the chores is making briquettes! Sunduoen runs a tight ship. The students rise at 5 am to meet and organize the chores, each day a different student is the team leader. They eat promptly at 6 am, 11:30 am and 6 pm, attending school the hours in between. Work is typically done after lunch before returning to school for the afternoon classes. Everyone is required to drink 3 bottles of water per day and to listen to Radio Free Asia during the dinner hour. After dark they gather for evening tutoring sessions given by the best students in English, Math and Computer. The one house computer is old and slow, I want to contribute a new one. Sokea tells me he loves Math. Sunduoen says he is so happy that our partnership helps him to find the very bright but poor rural students. He is especially interested to help girls and minorities, and we are all annoyed that Kim Sarim, our second high school scholarship student from the Souy hilltribe minority, has not started school yet because we are still waiting for the provincial education department to issue his secondary school certificate - it’s been 9 months already! Obviously, I am going to have to get this done myself.

We met Sunduoen because he was interested in our briquettes to use at his 100% sustainable boarding house. His staff and students are using briquettes exclusively to cook, and each student dedicates 1 hour per week to making them. He says if he could figure out the secret to make them not cause smoke, he would be a millionaire. I was pleased to learn that the principal at the new high school where we will be enrolling the students next year is also interested to have his students learn the briquette technique. Sunduoen and Nao Ridthy, the principal at the Samdech Hun Sen High School in Phnom Penh Thmey are the kind of people we want to work with, men with a social conscience. The principle and I had a long talk about the disadvantaged students from the countryside and how to make sure that they are not forced to pay the teacher the customary bribes. His school even gives coupons for complimentary bicycle parking to the most poor students. We are all aware of how bad and corrupt the education system is, but I am pleased to see he has a pile of letters from other NGO’s who have enrolled students with him because of his honest treatment of the poor. I look forward to Sokea and Kim Sarim enrolling at his school.

I visited Sokea at his present high school earlier in the day. It was a crazy busy place with more than 4,000 students in 6 cement block 3 story buildings. His class had 66 students squished onto 6 rows of desks. They were studying geography, so I told the class I’d give a dollar to anyone who could show me where Colorado is located. It may have been easier if they had either a map or a globe or at least a book, none of which were present. The system works something like this, all the information is stored in the teachers head, and if you don’t pay the teacher, he or she doesn’t give it to you. I met with the principal who pretty much confirmed the system but told me if we supply the names of the kids we support he would be sure they were exempt from the practice. Pathetic. I did not like this principal and I am glad Sundoeun will be moving the students to Samdech Hun Sen High School soon.

In the absence of a map, I posed an easier question to the geography class, “Who is the president of the United States?” Gasps and smiles and lots of hands raised. I picked a girl who perfectly and proudly pronounced Barack Obama. I asked, “What’s special about Barack Obama?” “He has black skin,” she answered without skipping a beat. When I gave her the dollar, she asked me to sign it. All the students love Barack Obama, not for what he says but for what he symbolizes, black skin in this country is considered ugly and low class. To have the leader of the free world with dark skin seems to level the playing field for everyone. Now, if we could just get a globe into the geography classroom.

I wish that building a proper education system in Cambodia was as simple as outfitting proper school supplies. Not so, as my meeting at the Kampong Speu Provincial Education Department reveals. The first item of business is Kim Sarims secondary school certificate which miraculously appears before the end of the meeting. I had to come from halfway around the world to secure that. Then Yoen and I and the Provincial Deputy Chief of Education and 6 members of his staff discuss the situation in Aural, the region where the Grady Grossman School is located.

The group of education officials agreed that the schools in Aural District are difficult to operate because of the remote locations and marginalized populations; they basically haven’t got a clue what to do about it. Needless to say, asking the local populace for their input is not on the radar. Aural District has almost 10,000 students served by 25 primary schools, 3 secondary schools and 1 poorly funded high school. Our school at Chrauk Tiek is the only one with ongoing donor support and thus, better attendance records. The Aural District chief tells me that 80% of the schools have student retention problems. The drop out rate is 12% per year, which if you do the math works out to 20% complete primary, 10% secondary, and less than 5% high school. I told them our objective is to strengthen rural community support of their schools to increase student retention.

We agreed to regular communication mechanisms between SSI and the Education Department, and we will have letters of support for funding applications and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. I said we’d like to expand the program to 2 schools in Aural District next year, and 2 more schools in the following year. They suggested the schools also built by foreign donors who “walked away,” two of them were built by the same organization that built the Grady Grossman School with our donation, and most of the others were donated by foreign NGOs or governments. The Deputy Chief asked me how many schools I intend to build. “None,” I told him, “we build the inside of the school, not the outside.”

I am worried about getting the funding in place to meet expected timetables. You simply can’t talk to people about doing something and then not do it for a year or 2…they just don’t get the time is takes to research, plan, apply, and receive funding to begin. Time is of the essence if we are to solidify their support. To many NGOs have promised things and left because of “no fund”. Hence the reason we are focusing our programs around long term sustainability. The current situation perpetuates powerlessness.

I’ll be meeting with our school supporting committee over the next 3 days to discuss their Vision for the future, but first I need to see the District Chief about getting a secondary school teacher fired….he’s been harassing our female teachers. We need to send a loud and clear message that this will not be tolerated.