Daniela Papi's Blog

Living in a place like Phnom Penh, it is sometimes hard to focus on where the biggest "needs" are, as you see them all around you. You pick an area you work on, like our school with PEPY, and then you try to identify the most responsible way to address the issues. But.... then you walk down the street, see children crying, see the burning dump covered with children working all day in the sun with no access to water, and you get confused. How can you help, who, and what?

Sometimes it is as simple as connecting two needs. Sometimes there are people who have a surplus of something and are looking to get rid of it and those who need it. Such is the case of mislabled food and food banks or used cooking oil and bio-diesel cars. In this case, it is a young man whose dream is to be a doctor, and some successful doctors in New York and Canada looking to make a difference.

Chamroeun is sometimes our translator. He is a bright young guy who was in my friend's free English classes a few years back and then became her Khmer teacher. Chamroeun taught me Khmer when I first arrived here as well, and he has a way about him of just grasping at knowledge and using everything he learns right away, like new words and phrases.

His family survives on duck farming. They sell the eggs for a few cents each, and his whole family with 5 children must be supported on a meager monthly income. Chamroeun's parents recognized his intelligence at a young age and worked hard to send him, and only him, to school. Every family member, aunts, cousins, EVERYONE took out loans this year to send Chamroeun to his first year of medical school. The weight of the world rests on his shoulders as his whole family is waiting for him to become a doctor and pay back their investments in him. He has to get the highest grades to compete for the limited scholarships available.

Through a friend, I was able to tell Ed & Jean-Luc about Chamroeun, and being doctors themselves, they could relate to his endless studying and the pressures of school. They were moved by his story and have now decided to pay his $1000 per year school fees to help him get through school and continue to serve his country.

Thanks to Ed and Jean-Luc for making a huge difference in so many lives by supporting this bright young man. Happy 2007!

The best part of this week at the school was going into the villages and speaking to the parents about the Bike-to-School Program (BTSP), interviewing parents and grandparents about their views on education, and asking all of the towns people to come to the education event on the 10th.

Some of the houses would make anyone feel so sad.... small SMALL wooden platforms, covered with a thatched roof - where 7 kids live, with no parents, as their parents are over the boarder in Thailand working. Or, a man who had broken his arm with a bamboo "cast" wrapping who says he thinks his arm will heal in 6+ months and in the meantime he sits, waiting for the day he can work again and support his family.

Daniela K, our PEPY videographer, is in from London. It is SO nice to see her again, and to speak with someone who lives and breaths PEPY every day as much as I do. She is making a full length documentary (look out for it next year) which will feature PEPY and other voluntour operators.

Daniela K. had fallen in love with a group of girls who are now in 6th grade at the PEPY school. When she arrived at the school she found three of the foursome, but was told that the final friend, Vith, was not coming to school anymore as her parents needed her to work. We made a point of visiting the parents of all the girls. On the final day before the performance, we went to visit Vith.

News that we were coming to see her had already reached her village and her mother kept her home from the fields that day to meet the foreigners who were coming to see her. Her home is in a SMALL small village, about 10km from the school which you approach on tiny dirt roads. It is a good 45 minute bike ride from school as the roads are so bumpy and windy.

Vith was waiting and so happy to see us. She impressed us and her whole village with her English when she greeted us and asked us how we were. Her mother, so young and beautiful herself, invited us into her home. Her mother spoke about how Vith's bike was broken and that was the reason she was not able to attend school anymore. She said how she wanted a better life for Vith and how she wanted her to go to school. When her mother finally stopped speaking, Vith looked at us and burst into tears, as did I.

I worried later that she was sad, that yes, of course she did want to go to school as was so evident by looking at her, but maybe she felt such a strong need to be at home and working. Daniela K disagreed, and as usual, I now agree with her. She says Vith cried because someone cared, because we had gone out of our way to find her, to ask her mother to send her back to school, because she had been a hero in her village for the first time - the girl who the "barangs" came to see, because she knew how much we cared about her.

We asked Vith's mother to come to school the next day.

When I got up to speak yesterday, I noticed that there was Vith's mom, front and center. She was beaming up at me and me at her. The mothers of Vith, Sam, and Channda, who all live in rural villages, had all come, despite having told us it would be almost impossible for them to leave their homes. We sent a car to pick them up, and amazing PEPY volunteer Audrey was somehow able to convince them, by sitting around and waiting for a LONG time, to come to the show.

At the end of the night, when I brought all three mothers to the pick up truck which would take them back to their village, they all smiled and said thank you over and over. They had "never seen such a beautiful show." They "would send their girls to school through 6th grade and then on to secondary school to learn more." They "were so happy they came." I was so happy they came too and I hope with all my might that the girls are indeed allowed to continue to study.

Yesterday was the official opening of PEPY's Bike-to-School Program. It was a night which had been planned for quite some time. The main point was to bring the parents and students together, announce our Bike-to-School Program, talk to the parents about the value of education, and get more students to enroll and stay through graduation in Chanleas Dai..... I hope it works. I have a feeling it will :-)

First were the speakers, the principal, me, speakers talking about the role education played in their lives (Sopat from Chanleas Dai, Tolors our English Teacher, Kulikar my friend who runs Hanuman Tourism) and then Phany, our super translator who introduced the BTSP. In between, the children did dances, sang songs, and performed games which they had learned in school. I think it may have been the first "school recital" type thing they had ever done. As I watched, I remember the countless school performances I had had, and I felt as my mother must have so many times..... proud. Proud that these children were up on "stage", or the steps of their new school building, singing off-key, but smiling, enjoying, and proud of themselves for being able to preform for their parents.

Two of our students spoke as well after the teachers were all introduced. Chun Ly, grade 5, might be the world's smartest kid. Really, he can't get enough of learning. He is so intelligent, so driven, so intrigued by learning. He got so nervous when he stepped up to the microphone, I was devastated and thought we had made a big mistake by asking him to speak.... but then he caught his nerve, and read from his notes (just being able to read impressed the parents so much), and he beamed the proudest smile when he was done. It was one of the best nights I'll ever have.

We were able to borrow a projector, as we are still looking to get one donated, and played a streaming movie of pictures, and the PEPY video by Daniela K., on the wall of the school. The parents were in awe - seeing photos of their children perhaps for the first time.

And the main part of the night was the shadow puppet show by Cambodia's Living Arts. They set up a HUGE screen and a fire behind it. The performers dance in front of the screen, or between the screen and the fire, with huge cut out shadow puppets. It's a traditional Cambodian art, but no students, and most parents, had never seen it.

The road our school is on is right on the main road up to the rural boarder with Thailand (where many can sneak across the boarder to work as illegal day laborers). The small engine powered vehicles (which look like lawnmowers with a cart attached) FULL of people go up the road all night to cross the boarder in the dark. At one point there were 10 of these trucks pulled over to the side of the road. People had come to the school selling food and snacks. We estimate that there were over 1000 people there.... it was nuts. But awesome..... really really awesome.

I spent most of this week in Switzerland. I was invited to speak at a UNEP conference on sports and the environment. I found it ironic that I had flow half way around the world to talk about CO2 emissions... such is the nature of such conferences I guess.

Anyway, when writing what I was going to present I realized that ALL of PEPY's tours need to be zero-impact. If we are going to teach and talk environment, we can't be handing out empty textbooks from which to learn. We must set the example. So, from now on, all PEPY's tours will be zero impact. You can of course off-set your carbon emissions on sites like www.carbonfund.org (check out the Pearl Jam website for others as Pearl Jam offsets all the emissions from their tours), but with PEPY we will do replanting here in Cambodia and fund replanting projects to off-set the carbon emissions from our non-cycling tours.