A road too long to education

In the last few days of our journey, we rode to the south of Cambodia to visit these other orphanage and village school projects coordinated by Thy and other local volunteers. As part-time university students and full time teachers at local schools, these young volunteers in their mid-20s had manage to find 1 hour teaching in the villages every day to help their less fortunate country people…

One of the most astonishing stories we came across in the beautiful town of Sihanoukville, where the busy port and tourist beaches were located, was the story of our very own friend, Thy. Growing up in a single-parented rural family, this young man who is 25 now had one of the toughest childhood. Yet, he knew the importance of education since young, and for many years he rode the bike for one hour every day just to go to another village to attend English classes. As a boy growing up in the fields, he had worked very hard, until one day he came first in the whole province in the public examination, and until he speaks English so well he is now a university student of English Literature and the head of an English centre in Sihanoukville. Walking around Sihanoukville with Thy, we realized that this humble man had so many friends and students throughout the town, yet when asked to visit his home there, he couldn’t offer us anything. In the past 5 years, Thy has been sleeping on a hammock or a mat on the floor of his English centre. He told us he prefers living a simple life when there are so many people suffering in his country…

15-minutes motorbike ride away from the lovely beaches where tourists enjoy a massage by the locals or occasionally a joint of marijuana, there laid many villages of landless peasants and part-time construction workers. Living under the fear that their homes and lands will be taken back by the landlords at any time, these villagers often have nothing much to work on besides taking care of the buffalos for their landlords and waiting for part-time construction projects in town. In the surrounding 5 kilometers of the village where we visited, all lands belonged to the few rich landlords, thus the nearest public school needed to be built several km away in a remote monastery. Children need to walk one and a half hour, sometimes up to two hours to school everyday, making education extremely unaffordable for many of the kids who need to help on the fields or take care of siblings at home.

Thy, who usually avoids talking about “corruption”---the topic feared by most Cambodians since talking about it may lead to imprisonment or death, could not hold back his resentment any longer that day on the bumpy motorbike ride to the public school. He sighed, “You see, there is no hope, when all that the rich and investors think about is ‘money’ and nothing goes to the hand of the general people…”

Riding back to the villages, we visited the informal school built by Thy and the village kids. With a US$200 cost collected from donors and their own income, the school was merely an open hut made of straw and wood built together by the bare hands of the volunteers and children. Yet, there the children finally had a place to learn everyday without needing to walk 4 hours to the public school….They learnt English and Khmer from the volunteer teachers…they learn so well and fast that for some of them, there’s a hope that they will be able to catch up with higher grades in one year’s time and they can save a few years of school.

After a fun day teaching the kids at the hut the “heads and shoulders” song as well as giving out some stationary, we realized in the evening that there is another neighboring village that is even more remote from the roads and is also in need of an informal school…By that time, we have already gathered enough stories in our heart it was difficult to sit back and pretend that it was all a dream…We promised that we could help build the other school and provide training to some new teachers. At that moment, we had no idea of what to do or how to do it, but Thy’s example told us that we are capable. Compared to the long road these children are walking every day to education, our road to help does not seem that long…