Visit to Tchey school

Good schools are good schools all around the world.

This week I visited Tchey school with Lori, the president of PLF and she explained why Tchey is a model school for the foundation. The Principal had fled the country and escaped the genocide of Pol
Pot as a young man, in a refugee camp in Thailand. When some peace was restored to Cambodia, he walked all the way home to his village Tchey, where he built a straw hut school, this has now evolved into one of the finest primary schools in Siem Reap. this man has the personal capacity to not only relate to, motivate and lead the people of the village, but also to organise and administer a wide range of interventions by NGOs and charities to benefit his students.

The school is well organised, clean and again, the children undertake a lot of responsibility, here
are two boys watering the plants in the school yard during break and another, ringing the school 'bell', the metal ring inside a car wheel, highly effective!

At 11 o'clock, the morning children streamed out of school, all rushing to be first when I saw these 

boys collecting what looked like a large banner, I followed them out the school gate to the extremely busy road where all the children who needed to cross the road had stopped. The next thing, at some 

signal I missed, the banner boys streamed across the road, held up the speeding traffic and in thirty seconds all the children had crossed - check out this new version of a Lollipop Lady!     

When PLF first supported Tchey  school, breakfasts were provided for all students, but things have moved on here and now food  is only needed for some of the families who receive weekly food parcels. The parents are very involved in the school and very keen on the students' progress, some of the mothers provide a  small canteen for breaks with lots of fresh fruit, but also some naughty goodies! They pay a small rent to the school and earn a little much appreciated cash for their families

On the recommendation of the Principal, an elderly man from the village was engaged for a tiny monthly stipend of $40, to teach the children organic farming, these are the school's rice paddies, dried up now in the hot season, and the seedling beds prepared for sowing the new crops. Unlike the other schools where all the garden produce is consumed by the students, this rice is a valuable cash crop which provides additional funding for the school's activities. Training in organic farming is critical for Cambodia where toxic pesticides are used everywhere

The PLF contributes to the school in many other ways, English classes are provided for all children for the  last four years of primary school and throughout the holidays. A media room has been set up and power provided to the otherwise electricity free school. The students engage in web research projects and in a science exchange with a school in the U.S., they also design and make their own videos which are displayed in a hotel in Siem Reap at a students' festival. To achieve this they undertake the research in English drawing heavily from Google translate! The school reports that the children's scores shoot up as not only have they developed IT skills and better English, but also key learning skills and critical thinking which are impacting on other subjects such as Maths and Science.

The school is also very committed to sports and has very successful volleyball and football teams for girls and boys and competes favourably with more advantaged and private schools in Siem Reap.  In fact it is becoming a local 'magnet' school attracting able and wealthy children as well as meeting the needs of the local villagers.

Breakfast in Knar School

Claudia and I left the guesthouse at 5 am in the tuktuk and drove through the darkness , into the forest for an hour. We arrived at the ghostly and apparently deserted school just as the sun was rising.

Claudia is a Swiss girl who visited Cambodia first in 2007 where she saw such heart rending sights of poverty and hunger that she set up her own charity in Switzerland called 'Eyes Open - help for the people in Cambodia'. Claudia wished to visit the school to observe and photograph the breakfast provision and record what was happening on her website: www.open-eyes.org (you will see there a wonderful video of Claudia's project with an English VoiceOver)

In the far corner of the school yard we could discern a flame and moved towards the kitchen area, an open air concrete stad with two huge fire holes for the enormous pots of rice and curry being prepared - all I could marvel at was what had been accomplished in positively medieval conditions while Claudia was delighted with the progress she saw, the concrete base was new and a huge improvement on the earth floor which used to be churned up into mud in the rainy season.

As light grew, children appeared from every corner, a few through the school gates and many more from the fields surrounding the school. They set to work immediately, quietly and purposefully, sweeping the classrooms and the schoolyard, clearing it of all the leaves in preparation for school assembly at 6.30 where, as you can see, they all lined up in class rows, one boy raised the flag and they sang the National Anthem before being addressed by the Principal (somethings never change, no matter where you are!)

Then the children moved, smallest first , cheerfully and quite orderly, over to the kitchen. Each carried a bowl and a spoon and each received a ladleful of rice and a deliciously scented curry
of fish and vegetables, they sat at tables dotted around the yard and ate happily with their friend - a truly lovely sight!


Claudia explained to me that the World Food Programme provides rice for the children for ten months of the year and her charity is now in a position to guarantee the annual funding of $20,000 to
the PLF (Ponheary Ly Foundation, for which I am working here). This money is now providing the important protein supplements of fish, meat and eggs and essential vegetables. School attendance has improved dramatically and also the alertness and concentration of the students. Many of the families also send in their toddlers for breakfast, all who appear are fed without question.

Other PLF initiatives operating here are the provision of school uniforms, a library and a dental health programme. As you can see from the photo, the toothbrushes must be kept in school to ensure the children have access to clean water, their brushes and mugs are kept on a special shelf in each classroom

Eco project in Koh Ker Village

Two hours north of Siem reap, off the beaten path, in the ancient temple complex of Koh Ker, forest temple treks are led by locals Dieb and Ty who have grown up in Koh Ker during times of violence and civil unrest. They have recently Grade 9, the highest level of schooling available to them. there is no high school in the village so they and other young students from Koh Ker live in a dorm, about thirty minutes away. This dorm is supported by the foundation where all their living costs and food are provided throughout the year. Dieb and Ty, although now high school graduates, continue to live in the dorm while they pursue their training as guides and build up the business - the brochure states: 'Working in partnership with the Ponheary Ly Foundation, they lead treks to places that others don't know about. You will go deep into the forest to discover hidden, ancient Angkor temples and to the villages where the guides grew up with no school and living only off the forest - your participation in their business will be helping the guides launch their business, improve their English and crate a brighter future for themselves and their families and their community' - you can see more about these treks on Trip Advisor.

Koh Ker is a very remote village where rice farming and tending the temple grounds are the main occupations. It was one of the last places in Cambodia from where Khmer Rouge bandits continued to operate. Dieb told us that one hour after he was born, his mother heard gunfire and fled with her baby from the village - it took them seven years to get back to the village to rejoin his father and older brother. One of Ty's sisters was killed by a landmine and all over we saw signs declaring that the land had been cleared and made safe..

We walked at first through the dried up paddy fiedls and found it so hard to imagine the floods that come each year to turn this desert into a green and fertile plain. As we moved on through the forest our lovely guides  told us about the plants and trees and their culinary and medical uses. I was delighted to see the ferns - a great reminder of home! We also saw Mahogony trees and you can see their seed pods and seeds in one of the pictures.

Gradually as we moved on we could see shapes through the trees - these are the three temples in the forest, built in 921 A.D., incredible constructions of tiny brick made by the workers of local clay and then faced by sandstone drawn, probably by elephants from about 20km away. Dieb pointed out the bullet holes in the walls and explained that many battles and skirmishes had taken place here - a landmine had also been thrown into on of the temples.

Returning to the village, Dieb and Ty told us that they had both started school under some trees in the middle of the village, 'this one was grade one and that grade two'. Now there is a modern primary school, no electricity of course and great poverty persists. Each week the staff of the PLF foundation travel up to Koh Ker to make lunch for all the students and staff and pretty much anyone in the village who shows up. I am planning to go with them to help next week so will report!

We then moved on to visit one of the most dramatic temples in this area - the pyramid temple. We walked a series of tumbledown temples and then beheld this miracle of preservation - or amazing construction:

The views from the top were quite spectacular over the whole forest and country side - very barren and dry just now but transformed, as our guides told us to a lush green everywhere when it rains.

The Floating Village of Kompong Phhlup

Kompong Phhlup is' an incredible village of bamboo skyscrapers that rise from the lakeshore like a set from   the film 'Waterworld' as my guidebook says.We thought we had seen examples of the Cambodian people's courage, creativity and resourcefulness in the face of extreme challenges and deprivation until, Daniela, a fellow traveller from Germany, who is very interested in the work of the foundation, and I travelled to the village and were stunned by what we saw.

We travelled 40km by tuktuk and arrived at the boat community village and landing stop, the boats can only be owned and driven by members of the community, this is another project for empowering local people. Our boat was driven by Lai whose father owned the boat and we were her first passengers ever. On one side of the river, as you can see the houses are built on soaring bamboo stilts some 6 or 7 metres high - in the rainy season,(June to September),he water laps the top floor of these 'skyscrapers'.

You can also see the life on the river, the floating shop and school and clinic, and even the 'school bus' delivering the children home after classes. People were fishing everywhere or beating the fish out of nets with what looked like badminton racquets. The lake Tonle Sap, is fed by the Mekong river which floods it in the rainy season and brings valuable nutrients and migrating fishstock. Around October the level of the river begins to fall and the lake becomes one of the world's richest sources of freshwater fish. There are howver threats to the supply of fish through environmental challenges, the construction of dams upriver and some overfishing.

I also inserted some photos of the fish being gutted and dried in preparation for smoking as I know at least one reader who would be interested in this process!

You can judge for yourself about the harshness of this life and you can see the quality of the houses but everywhere the people waved and called out to us while they got on with their work.

On the other side of the river, which is inaccessible by road, the houses were just barely lifted off the ground, and Esa, our driver, explained that these house were built at the end of each rainy season, crops were planted, beet and water vegetables, when the floods  come, the houses are rolled up and taken away in boats back to the village which is higher than the river until the cycle starts all over again. Below is an example of their ingenious irrigation machine which they would pull from field to field

School photos attached here, second attempt!

Two classes now completed, the experience has been quite extraordinary and quite wonderful so far. Each day at 4 pm, I am driven in one of the guesthouse tuktuks by one of the team of drivers employed here, they act as minder, guide, interpreter and friend to the volunteers and are all so courteous and pleasant and very patient with us. They are called the friends of the foundation and have all been supported and trained through the foundation. Each of them has their own pretty tough life story about growing up in poverty and struggling to be educated. What seems worth more than anything here is the ability to speak English well which they do. However they often like to join the    classes and can be a great help when explanations and crazy miming (on my part) have failed.

We travel out of the city of Siem Reap and into the country near the temples complex, through the loveliest countryside and very good paved roads mostly, it's about 20kms away and takes 45 minutes.  The students range between 18 and 28 years of age, some are still in school, two are teachers and one  boy works as a hotel porter from 4am to 2pm, everything starts early in Cambodia to avoid the heat,  but this is still a very gruelling schedule.

They all live in the villages within the temples complex where their traditional work as farmers has been banned as Angkor has been designated a Unesco World Heritage Site, unless they can learn to  speak  English well they will either become one of the horde of trinket sellers or have to leave a place their family has known for hundreds of years. I have been told that they have a fund of knowledge  and inherited folk history beyond what the archaeologists and historians have been able to surmise. They know about the ecology and uses of all the herbs and vegetation growing there, it would be a tragedy  now to lose all the richness.

We finally turn off the road and down a narrow rutted track between fields and there ahead is the classroom - a little  wooden building with straw walls, as you can see in the photo, it's a pre- school    classroom with tiny furniture apart from the teacher's chair and table, they have to share the tables as there aren't enough to go around but everyone has a chair.
My first students arrive by bicycle, four beautiful smiling girls who shyly say hello and then gesture to me to step outside as they start to sweep the floor and put out the furniture, this it appears is a daily  ritual. Little by little another four students arrive, three boys and one girl, they are extremely pleasant and lively and made up of the same mixture of personalities and abilities as you will find in classrooms all over the world.

Apart from struggling to get to know them, to connect with their prior learning, to assess the level at which to pitch the class, all goes well, they are really proud to be studying English and truly    appreciate having a teacher.

My biggest challenge hits at about six fifteen ( I work from 5 to 7 pm) when night falls suddenly, there is no electricity but I have been supplied with a range of battery powered lanterns and inflatable  solar lights, it is really difficult for us all, the students seem as if they would stay on forever no matter what but I call it a day (or a night!) at 6.45. I will request more lanterns for tomorrow.

I hope you like the photos which I am now
going to attempt to attach.

Landed and settling in

After a long and varied trip via London and overnight in Kuala Lumpur, I arrived at Siem Reap airport on Saturday morning. I was so over-prepared for the trip, weighing luggage, sorting docs etc. that I made a very basic error!

As advised by numerous friends, thank you, I had planned to bring several copies of my ticket and passport, stowed in separate pieces of luggage but was not happy with clarity of passport copy so took it out of my travel wallet to scan again and print, and so completed my copies and put them in  the luggage as planned.
Maeve and Brian drove me to the airport at 6 am and we said our goodbyes, I proceeded blithely to the check-in desk, took out my ticket and, yes, you guessed it, no passport, panic stricken, I hauled myself and all my heavy bags to the nearest taxi and we sped back home, found the passport and  returned in a highly stressed state just in time. Am I really fit to travel so far for so long? My children  certainly 'hae their doots!'

However, I did manage to negotiate all other obstacles successfully and am installed in the foundation's guesthouse - a beautifully restored Khmer house, destroyed in the war and re-built by the Ly family, their story is remarkable, you can read a summary on www.theplf.org . Their entire work is dedicated to improving the lot of disadvantaged families and children in Cambodia.

Siem Reap, in the short time I have been here, seems to be an extraordinary amalgam of old and new and very obviously rich and poor. The airport, which is new, is designed like a pagoda and is certainly the most beautiful and calm airport I was ever in, surrounded by a beautiful garden of exotic palms,  ferns and buddist statues.
I was collected by a lovely young man called Esa in his tuktuk and we drove through the most hair-raising traffic of every sort, no wonder visitors are not allowed to drive here. I have already shelved my plans to borrow one of the bicycles which are at the guests' disposal. Luxury hotels lined the road alongside street food stalls and little hucksters shops, people everywhere talking,  laughing, calling out and  smiling. The Cambodian people I have met so far are universally pleasant and courteous and hepful and you feel very welcome here.

I am meeting my students for our first class this evening, am looking forward to it but also quite anxious, after all these years it's like starting all over again. I promise that my next post will include some pictures to liven up the narrative but that's another bit of IT I have yet to conquer !