Press
Making an impact: Cambridge residents and students
help build school in Cambodia
Spare Change News
January 17, 2011
By Robert Sondak
A group of Cambridge public school students, teachers, parents, businesses and residents raised $24,000 between October 2007 and June 2008 to build a school in rural Cambodia.
The February 2010 dedication of the Cambridge Schools in Cambodia Project School in rural Kauk Rovieng marked the end of three years of fundraising and planning. The school was built, complete with two computers and three solar panels for energy.
According to the Cambridge Schools in Cambodia Project website, children worked diligently to raise the funds from after-school jobs and clothing and community sales. These funds were allocated towards construction of the five-room school, which was built in cooperation with American Assistance for Cambodia, an Asian non-profit organization. This is the 405th school constructed by American Assistance for Cambodia’s Rural Schools Project.
Currently, the school is run by the Cambodian Ministry of Education.
After the construction was complete, eight Cambridge students were invited to do a service learning project by organizing a field trip over February vacation week to attend the school’s 2010 dedication. These students were led by six people from Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School, along with two middle-school students. These students worked together with a group of thirty Cambridge businesses to raise the additional $18,000 dollars for the one- week trip.
According to their Web site, the Cambridge Schools in Cambodia Project began in 2007 at the Haggerty School, a public school in West Cambridge, as part of the Global Awareness Peace Project. This peace project was organized by the Arts Council and parents Heather Faris and Erika Wentworth. This project spread to other public and private schools and local universities including Harvard, MIT and Tufts.
The CSCP partnered with American Assistance for Cambodia to help spearhead education growth and increase the literacy rate for people over age 15, and also to deter human trafficking. The United States and Cambodia have had a long history dating back to the Vietnam War, during which the country of Cambodia was socially and economically devastated.
Heather Faris, co-founder of the project, elaborated about their goals. “This project emphasized how children in other parts of the world live,” said Faris. “This experience provides our students with a better understanding of other cultures.”Faris pointed out that the Cambridge students played a major role even from the beginning.
“A lot of Cambridge children contributed money,” said Faris. “They contributed hundreds of nickels, dimes and quarters, money from allowances, and contributed funds from after school jobs.”
The Cambridge Schools in Cambodia Project website highlighted the fact that private school students from the Shady Hill and Buckingham and Brown & Nichols schools also supported the project.
“We received donations from public and private school students statewide,”said Faris. “These young people were very interested in our work.”
According to Faris, the dedication of students helped to build partnerships. Businesses such as the Elephant Walk restaurant featured three fundraising dinners for the Cambridge Schools in Cambodia Project from 2008 through 2010. These dinners were sponsored for the initial school construction as well as the field trip.
“The Elephant Walk was very supportive of the project,” said Faris.
Faris described how local businesses helped contribute to the project. “We had an online auction in which businesses donated either products or services for individuals to bid on. Corporation participation included computer services, sporting goods and food.
“We were able to raise $5,000 from our on-line auction,” said Faris.
Faris mentioned that fundraising is ongoing to pay annual Internet fees and to pay the salary of an English-speaking high-tech teacher. Additionally, American Assistance for Cambodia is working with CSCP to pay Cambodian families to send young girls to the school. These girls would not otherwise have the opportunity to attend school because they are working full time to provide income for their families.
“Future goals are to continue to raise funds to pay for the special teacher,”said Faris, who also talked about another student trip to visit the school in Cambodia. “We would like for our high school students to make a second trip.”
Faris also highlighted the computers the project was able to purchase for the Cambodian students.
“We have purchased two additional computers,” said Faris. “They have just been delivered.”
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Hands-on Help for Cambodia: School Project offers
Education in Caring, Sharing
Boston Globe
May 11, 2008
By Victoria Cheng
Four letters may not be a lot, but it’s enough to underpin a $20,000 fund-raising effort to build a school in rural Cambodia. Calling itself the Cambridge School for Cambodia (and Camb-Camb for short), the campaign brings together students, businesses, and several groups across the city, some with deep ties to Cambodia and some who have always called Cambridge home.
Rachael Harkavy, a fifth-grade student at the King Open School, started learning about Cambodia in January when she and her peers in the school’s fifth through eighth grades joined the effort by hosting weekly penny drives. She reels off statistics about the country that highlight how Cambodia compares with the United States. “It’s about the size of Oklahoma and has the population of Pennsylvania,” she began.
Camb-Camb is raising money to send to American Assistance for Cambodia, a nonprofit organization run by former Newsweek journalist Bernie Krisher, that has built more than 400 schools across the country.
“We’ll be the 405th school, but it’s not enough,” Harkavy added. “Massachusetts is about half the size of Cambodia and has about 1,000 schools, so that just brings into perspective how many schools Cambodia needs.”
The planned Camb-Camb school will be 40 miles north of Phnom Penh and accommodate between 200 and 400 students. Krisher started the initiative in 1993 and negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the World Bank that called for it to match whatever money he raised for the project. The cost of a school, Krisher said, “is actually about $30,000, and the donor only pays about $13,000.” By contributing an extra $7,000, the Cambridge School for Cambodia will be able to equip its school with an English teacher, solar panels for a computer, and Internet access, he said.
Longteine de Monteiro owns the Elephant Walk restaurants, which feature French and Cambodian cuisine at locations in Cambridge, Boston, and Waltham. The Cambodian native explained that outside assistance is sorely needed in the country, which was devastated first by the spillover effects of the Vietnam War and then by genocide during the brutal rule of the communist Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.
“The government now doesn’t really do much to help education,” she said, “so all the foundations from outside of the country who go there and build whatever the country needs, especially schools and hospitals, are very important.”
When Camb-Camb contacted de Monteiro to explore opportunities for collaboration, she agreed to host a benefit dinner at her North Cambridge restaurant early last month.
“We served the meal that we usually serve on New Year’s Day in Cambodia,” which is April 15, de Monteiro said. “We did chicken curry, Salade Cambodgienne, and beef short ribs with green coconut juice.”
The event raised enough money to bump Camb-Camb’s funds to the $13,300 mark and also gave attendees like East Boston resident Selena Sang, whose family is Cambodian, a chance to revive memories of childhood traditions.
“My parents live in California,” she said, adding that she had not eaten a traditional Cambodian New Year meal since moving here. The event also gave de Monteiro an opportunity to showcase a prominent part of Cambodian culture – its cuisine – and the desire to teach Cantabrigians about this small country perched on the southeastern peninsula of Asia.
At the King Open School, Rachael and fellow fifth-grader Eliza Klein have made it their goal to involve younger students in the project. “In the library we have a display with recipes and books and how to make origami elephants,” Klein explained. “We don’t want to be collecting money from people and having them say, `Oh, we’re sending it across the world to do blah blah blah.’ We want them to really understand it, so that then they’ll feel closer.”
Before classes one day earlier this month, the girls helped set up an origami table at the school entrance, along with an empty water jug inviting donations of spare change. Sixth-grader Brianna Lavelle patiently guided the younger students through the steps of folding a colorful square of paper into the shape of a crane.
“See all these points here?” she said, indicating the triangular sections where the corners met. “Point it down and fold it like this,” she instructed, pressing the edge of a flap against the table.
Eventually, the students managed to fold their pieces of paper into diamond-shaped creations that they then bent to create long necks and pointed tails.
“What is this for?” asked 6-year-old Bianca Byfield, as she handed over her crane to be placed on a large branch of a tree that will eventually hold 400.
“Every crane represents one child who will go to school in Cambodia,” said Lavelle’s mother, Risa. “And all of Cambridge is helping raise money.”