Visit to Koh Ker school

This report is for everyone to enjoy; this is what I wrote to the people who made this act of loving kindness possible:

I wanted to give you the premier of my trip report to the school where we used your generous donations to provide a nourishing, tasty hot lunch to 200 wonderful, beautiful and needy kids at the primary school in Koh Ker village.

A bit of background. I used the money to help a small, independent and fantastic charity I have known here since 2007 called the Ponheary Ly Foundation. For some more info about them you can check out the bit I wrote last year when visiting: "Education is the Sweetest Revenge." They pretty much run the school we went to in a remote village called Koh Ker. It is the site of one of the ancient cities of the old Angkor empire but due to its 100 km distance from Siem Reap, the tourist town serving the main temples of Angkor Wat, it gets almost no tourists and enjoys no development.

Koh Ker was established in 1979 in the region of one of the Khmer Rouge's last holdouts in Cambodia. It was populated with refugees who had fled to the northern border with Thailand to escape the terrors of the Khmer Rouge regime, who had survived wandering in the jungles for several years or who were lucky enough to outlive their torturous Khmer Rouge servitude. And even up to the mid to late 90's, these people continued to suffer while war waged between the post-Khmer Rouge Cambodian government and the Vietnamese army who had 'liberated' Cambodia from the the Khmer Rouge and the last remnants of civil war between Cambodia and the dying Khmer Rouge movement. And once in a while until not so long ago, people would sometimes still appear from the jungles asking if the wars were over.

It is a village of people who are all deeply suffering from post traumatic stress syndrome following 3 decades of three brutal wars and of course the only case in modern history of wide-spread auto-genocide. The net effect of all this on Cambodia and so many villages like Koh Ker, was the total destruction of the nation's social fabric and economic infrastructure and the elimination of the administrative, cultured and educated classes along with the essential social and governmental institutions that such people run in any country.

The Foundation began supporting this school in 2006. When they began there were 40 or 50 students, out of a possible 200, on a good day. Most parents could not afford the $40 - $50 a year to buy 2 uniforms (blue shorts or trousers and white shirt are mandatory), pencils & notebooks and pay the occasional 'tip' most teachers demand given their poverty wages of $50 a month. And even if money were not the problem, most parents could not figure out any reason why their kids should even go to school, certainly not beyond the 3rd grade which didn't even exist back then at the school. And even if that were not a problem, the kids were desperately needed as working family members - in the rice fields, foraging for fire wood or edibles in the forests or watching after the babies. The Foundation found that 65% of the kids in the village were seriously ill with all kinds of terrible and often life-threatening conditions mostly due to malnutrition, filthy contaminated water, neglect and abuse.

Today, barely four years later, the school has 200 students in grades 1- 6; the first graduates - nine girls - have moved on to what they call secondary school (grades 7 - 9); the kids are voracious and eager learners; they finally have the most incredible smiles; they get clean water, breakfast in the morning, there is a doctor on staff to provide the medical care possible within the limits of budget and accessibility to equipment and medicines; sometimes dangerously ill children even now get life-saving care in district or regional hospitals; there are now dedicated and caring teachers. All this thanks to the inspired, tireless and dedicated work of the Ponheary Ly Foundation, it's staff and supporters and of course the best efforts of the kids themselves in living conditions that for us can only be literally described as unimaginable.

And sometimes, someone or some group of people, people just like yourselves, make it possible for the kids to get an extra meal - a hot, nourishing, tasty and abundant meal - that is consumed with the eagerness and joy as if it was the elixer of life itself. Which it basically is. On behalf of all the people at the Foundation but mostly on behalf of 200 of the most beautiful, wonderful and deserving kids you can imagine, thank you so much. And thank you for making it possible for me to be your emissary on this mission of service, to be your eyes and hears and to be your helping hands.

I have put together a 7 minute video of the trip up to the school. That's part 1, along with this letter, of the report. In a few days I will finish with some more stories, pictures and videos of how the rest of the day went.

Category:

Travel & Events

Tags:

• Koh Ker
• Ponheary Ly
• Cambodia
• Siem Reap