Tag Archives: Cambodia

Editor’s note: On Digital Learning Day, we feature a story about the promise that technology in learning presents to a population that hungers for the knowledge that, literally, will feed them and their families as they look from a troubled past to a hopeful future.
 

Modern day political boundaries of Cambodia

I recently returned from northwestern Cambodia where I helped to deliver ten refurbished computers donated by CompassLearning to the new J.P. Skola Technical School. The technical school is being built by the Cambodian School Project, a small American non-profit, started by bi-national Sarith Ou. Since 2004 the project has built and administers four rural elementary schools, taken on the running of a fifth elementary school, and now, with the offer of funding from a group in the Czech Republic, is completing the technical school and fulfilling Sarith’s dream of providing education that will ensure that poor rural children acquire the skills to get jobs that will help to support themselves and their families.

A trip of this kind inevitably becomes more than one journey. It is a geographic journey literally half-way around the world, but in coming face-to-face with the effects of poverty and of a war that ended decades ago, and in seeing the kindness and generosity of people in responding to these effects, you end up journeying inside yourself.  You pose new questions and you don’t necessarily answer them. This journey cannot help but begin with Cambodian history.