09.15.09
Posted in Current Events, Spero Cras at 3:54 pm by Kaihaku
Twice a year I have to write… Well, in the past I’ve had to write reports on the Global Family School for its supporters to read. These are not the technical reports that I write quarterly but rather more informal letters catching them up on progress at the school and letting them know what’s happening. I thought I would share this, my last one!
A Hard Year for Poor Farmers
The rains came early this year bringing cool relief from the dusty hot season but putting the efforts of enterprising farmers who had planted rice along the Sap River’s edge at risk of ruin. Families of farmers worked desperately to harvest their rice before the rising waters swallowed it. Despite their effort much of the grain that was gathered in time was premature or could not be dried out before mildew set in.
Then, in the heart of the rainy season, the daily deluges that farmers rely on to irrigate their crop abruptly stopped for two weeks. This short drought ruined over 25,000 acres of rice across Prey Veng province. Around Angkearhdei Village thick paddies of once lush rice drooped and wilted beneath the hot sun. Much of the rice that was lost only needed a few more days of water to finish maturing. Most of the families who live in Angkearhdei depend on their rice crop not only to support them financially but also to serve as the stable of their diet. Even in good years families are stretched trying to keep food on the table, in bad years families can be forced to take desperate measures to fight off starvation. Many go deep into debt that they can never hope to repay as rice farmers. Then they travel to Thailand to work illegally or send older teenagers to work at construction sites or garment factories in the Capitol.
Breakfast Program
Living from meal to meal for many months of the year families often see sending a child to school as a luxury that deprives the family of work. Even young children are often sent into the fields to gather fruit, herbs, fish, and other foodstuffs. While small this contribution to the family’s diet is seen as a valuable one. Good nutrition has proven value in child growth and education but in Angkearhdei by providing breakfast to students Global Family lessens the burden of struggling families by one meal a day. For some families that one meal makes the difference between sending children out to scrounge for food or sending them to study at school; for others it makes the heavy load of a poor rice farmer that much lighter. For the students it guarantees that they will never have to sit through school lessons hungry and ensures that at least once a day they can eat their fill.
Since Angkearhdei School began providing rice porridge for breakfast Teachers report that attendance is up fifteen percent, tardiness has dropped to almost nil, and that children are much more attentive in class. The parents of Angkearhdei don’t want their children to grow up uneducated but they want them to have something to eat more. Global Family is helping the parents of the young students of Angkearhdei not to have to make the difficult choice between the two.
Bathrooms
In 2003, construction workers took advantage of a government contract to add extra sand to the concrete mix for bathrooms of the Angkearhdei School so they could sell the concrete saved for personal profit. The result was that five years later the bathrooms were crumbling buildings with gaping holes in the floor left locked for fear of the children hurting themselves.
Basic sanitation is uncommon in Cambodia, according to the World bank only four out of twenty-five Cambodians have access to toilets. There are over 200 families living in Angkearhdei but there is only one bathroom other than those at the school.
Thanks to Global Family’s help the school’s bathrooms have been made safe again and two new bathrooms have been built that will last for many years. Teachers report that children no longer do their business in the schoolyard or along the side of the road, now they use the school toilets. Sot Mern had this to say the bathroom renovation and construction, “This has made the school a cleaner healthier environment. We can teach about good hygiene with confidence again, before we felt that it was frustrating to teach about it when the students couldn’t practice it. There is another benefit, the recess period is a much more peaceful now, it’s cut down on a lot of teasing.”
New Teacher Scholarship
Phon Ravy will be the first Angkearhdei Villager to graduate from High School since the Sot Mern, the School Director, became the village’s first High School graduate in 1993. For years the Phon family, poor rice farmers, have worked hard to ensure that their son gets a good education so he can have a better life.
Now Global Family is supporting with a scholarship to help Phon Ravy finish studying at a distant High School and then at the Provincial Primary Teacher Training Center. When he finishes the young man will return to Angkearhdei Village as the first of a new generation of teachers and hopes to inspire more students to continue school beyond Primary School.
Phon Kea, his father, feels strongly about the value of the education he himself never had and the future it will give his family, “We worked hard so that our son could get an education. It was difficult to send him to study rather than help us but I thought we are still young and strong. But when we are old how can he care for us if he is a rice farmer? He would be caught up in trying to care for his own family. He would be struggling from meal to meal like we do. But if he has an education he will be able to care for his parents in their old age.” Phon Kea is also supporting his younger sons through school.
Library
While the Angkearhdei School Staff work hard to instill a love of learning in their students there is not much in the rural farming village to engage them. To broaden and deepen their education Global Family is helping to establish a library for the School. So far the library includes picture books, storybooks, historical biographies, dictionaries, and simple farming books. Angkearhdei Students can now often been seen sitting out recess to read a book or borrowing books to read at home.
Thank you!
Many Angkearhdei children stop studying even before completing Primary School. Their families believe that the work they can do is more valuable than the lessons they can learn in school. Sot Mern, the School Director, has been trying to change that attitude for years and with your help through Global Family he’s coming closer.
You can find more information on the program at the Global Family website. Oh, the little boy on the page is a student at Angkearhdei. That’s exciting – this is the first I noticed.
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08.31.09
Posted in Current Events at 3:49 pm by Kaihaku
Reading Rainbow is finished. The will is there, the need is there, but the money is not. It’s easy to blame the department of education for being too one dimensional but in a world where corporate executives spend millions of dollars detailing their homes the fact that no one is willing to pick up the bill of several hundred thousand dollars. That’s a huge bill for most of us but for a small percentage of the population that’s pocket change. It’s doubtful that they watch Reading Rainbow anyway, I suppose. It’s a low budget high value show. I don’t understand why it needs to pay to renew broadcasting rights if its a non-profit. Then, there are a lot of things I don’t understand.
Even if you can’t remember a specific Reading Rainbow episode, chances are, the theme song is still lodged somewhere in your head:
Butterfly in the sky, I can go twice as high,
Take a look, it’s in a book — Reading Rainbow …
Remember now?
Reading Rainbow comes to the end of its 26-year run on Friday; it has won more than two-dozen Emmys, and is the third longest-running children’s show in PBS history — outlasted only by Sesame Street and Mister Rogers.
The show, which started in 1983, was hosted by actor LeVar Burton. (If you don’t know Burton from Reading Rainbow, he’s also famous for his role as Kunta Kinte in Roots, or as the chrome-visored Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation.)
Each episode of Reading Rainbow had the same basic elements: There was a featured children’s book that inspired an adventure with Burton. Then, at the end of every show, kids gave their own book reviews, always prefaced by Burton’s trademark line: “But you don’t have to take my word for it …”
“The series resonates with so many people,” says John Grant, who is in charge of content at WNED Buffalo, Reading Rainbow’s home station.
“I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being,” Burton said in a 2003 interview. “It’s just such an integral part of the human experience — that connection with the written word.”
“I think reading is part of the birthright of the human being,” Burton said in a 2003 interview. “It’s just such an integral part of the human experience — that connection with the written word.”
The show’s run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the Corporation for Public Broadcasting — will put up the several hundred thousand dollars needed to renew the show’s broadcast rights.
Grant says the funding crunch is partially to blame, but the decision to end Reading Rainbow can also be traced to a shift in the philosophy of educational television programming. The change started with the Department of Education under the Bush administration, he explains, which wanted to see a much heavier focus on the basic tools of reading — like phonics and spelling.
Grant says that PBS, CPB and the Department of Education put significant funding toward programming that would teach kids how to read — but that’s not what Reading Rainbow was trying to do.
“Reading Rainbow taught kids why to read,” Grant says. “You know, the love of reading — [the show] encouraged kids to pick up a book and to read.”
Linda Simensky, vice president for children’s programming at PBS, says that when Reading Rainbow was developed in the early 1980s, it was an era when the question was: “How do we get kids to read books?”
Since then, she explains, research has shown that teaching the mechanics of reading should be the network’s priority.
“We’ve been able to identify the earliest steps that we need to take,” Simensky says. “Now we know what we need to do first. Even just from five years ago, I think we all know so much more about how to use television to teach.”
Research has directed programming toward phonics and reading fundamentals as the front line of the literacy fight. Reading Rainbow occupied a more luxurious space — the show operated on the assumption that kids already had basic reading skills and instead focused on fostering a love of books.
Simensky calls Reading Rainbow’s 26-year run miraculous — and says that its end is bittersweet.
Reading Rainbow’s impending absence leaves many open questions about today’s literacy challenges, and what television’s role should be in addressing them.
“But” — as Burton would have told his young readers — “you don’t have to take my word for it.”
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06.15.09
Posted in Current Events at 7:41 pm by Kaihaku
We are the generations unto whom the collective knowledge of the ages has been given freely and we are those who, with the wealth of human understanding at our fingertips, have spurned it for the frivolous.
Despite access to the greatest storehold of human knowledge in history, many don’t know where they are in the world, many can’t even identify where their hearts are in their own bodies, and many know more of fiction than of global reality.
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05.24.09
Posted in Current Events, Rants at 12:18 am by Kaihaku
Last Thursday, the President gave a speech on national security which held beneath a thick layer of beautiful rhetoric the inclination to implement at least one disturbing new policy. Well, perhaps new is not quite appropriate, rather he outlined his intention to make a certain policy of the last Administration legal. He, of course, took pains to separate himself from that Administration and emphasized that this policy would be absolutely guarded against abuse. Absolutely.
The policy is ‘indefinite preventive detention,’ which is the imprisonment of individuals solely on the suspicion that they will become a threat. It is illegal under the Sixth Amendment which states that ‘In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial‘ and ‘be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation‘. If the possibility of becoming a threat is a crime then each and everyone of us is a criminal. Since it is not a crime then each and everyone of us who is not a criminal otherwise is not a criminal, that includes those deemed potential terrorists by the government.
The “War of Terror” is not a War. Terrorism is not a political force, nation state, or ideology; it is a particular form of violence. It is comparable to declaring War on marital abuse or rape. A friend of mine once said that, “All men are potential rapists.” While that is a true statement of good cautionary value, it is ultimately of no legal value. The potential threat of an individual committing a crime is not a crime. Then some claim that these individuals should be considered Prisoners of War allowing them to be legally held until the ‘War’ is ended. Aside from the fact that this is not a ‘War’, Terrorists should not fall under Prisoner of War status because 1. It is generally impossible to separate a combatant from a non-combatant in this ‘War’ and 2. Even if this is a ‘War’ on Al Qaeda rather than Terrorism it is a war that has no foreseeable end. The United States should not confront Terrorism as if it were going to war, Terrorism should be considered a criminal activity. Terrorists should be punished to the fullest extent of the law but they should not be subjected to special treatment beyond the law.
For well over half a century the ‘Free World’ has sharply criticized dictatorships for exercising this kind of power. There is only token difference between holding ‘Enemies of the State’ indefinitely without specific charge and holding ‘Threats to the State’ indefinitely without specific charge. This is exactly the situation in dictatorships around the world, due process is necessary to preserve all other rights. All other freedoms are ultimately invalidated if the government can freely incarcerate individuals who have committed no crimes. Such a power is by its nature arbitrary. No amount of guarantees or safeguards can negate that this compromises a, perhaps even then, core tenant of the Constitution. Transparent rule of law is not optional in a democratic state, it is essential.
“I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.”
–Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269.
Perhaps this administration will be so upright as to not abuse a law of this sort but I am positive that it will be abused eventually. This would set a dangerous precedent, one that future administrations and certain other nations will surely make use of to justify their abuse of power. It will be difficult to critique a dictatorship for holding journalists (even of other nationalities) as enemies of the state without trial, specific charge, or time limit when the United States is doing the same.
Thankfully, there are a wealth of protests against on this speech available online, so at least I don’t feel alone in being alarmed at this. Low Points in American history compares this to the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 and the Japanese internment of the 1940s. Glenn Greenwald has two lengthy posts on the subject, Obama’s civil liberties speech and Facts and myths about Obama’s preventive detention proposal. Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post details Problems With Preventive Detention.
If this is the course that our government is destined to head in then it’s my opinion that the terrorists have won. This is certainly a slippery slope and if someone as supposedly progressive as President Obama continues on it then I’m filled with a cynical skepticism on the future of our democracy.
Please, send letters to your representives and even the President himself letting them how deeply you disaprove of this fundamental violation of everything the Consitution stands for.
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04.25.09
Posted in Current Events, Media at 5:16 pm by Kaihaku
Jackie Chan has lost some of my respect due to his recent comments. It is a major disappointment that Jackie is quoted as saying “I’m not sure if it’s good to have freedom or not. I’m gradually beginning to feel that we Chinese need to be controlled.” It ruins his legacy and casts a shadow over his entire career.
Unlike others, I am willing to believe that his comments were taken “out of context” and that they were directed at the entertainment industry, not society in general. However, I don’t believe that putting them in context makes a significant difference. “Out of context” his comments support totalitarianism, “in context” they are against free speech and basically mean the same thing.
I never imagined that Jackie Chan would sell out, I thought he was one of the few stars who could handle success. I still admire him as a skilled individual but I’m afraid that I’ve lost a hero. Shame on Jackie.
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03.29.09
Posted in Current Events, Life and the happenings there of at 3:34 pm by Kaihaku
For most of my time in Prey Veng the sight of pumps and cranes loading barges with sand near Neak Leung has been a common one. Dredging the bottom of the Mekong for sand is a profitable business with the rapid construction the region is undergoing and land reclamation projects such as those in Singapore. Last year, sand dredging near Phnom Penh caused the riverbank to collapse claiming over a hundred homes. Following that event, the government began regulating sand dredging and apparently at least some government officials are taking the risk it presents seriously. The sand dredging operations near Neak Leung have picked up considerably over the last few months. Where once there were two or three barges now there are up to a dozen. Last weekend’s Cambodian Daily, which unfortunately lacks an online edition of note, had an article revealing that the company leading this operation has received five orders from the Ministry of Water Resources to stop sand dredging in that area. Certain government officials are, rightly, concerned that continued dredging there will cause the riverbank to collapse claiming homes and damaging national road 11. National road 11 is, incidentally, the primary road to Prey Veng town and runs along the river near the heavily dredged area. Each of these orders have been ignored by the Phal Sareth Import Export Tourism Company which, not surprisingly, is owned by a high-ranking RCAF general and a member of the Prime Minister’s elite “bodyguard unit”. The official spokesman for the company has said that the company will not cease sand dredging until it receives the order to stop dredging directly, which I suspect is a way of saying that they won’t stop until someone in the military rather than the civil government tells them to.
Global Witness’ last report, though more than a bit inflammatory, contains some information on sand dredging. The Phnom Penh Post has an article on a speech the Prime Minister gave warning villagers of further riverbank collapse this wet season. While it is kind to give villagers advance warning this time, it would be kinder to regulate the businesses so that their activities don’t come at the cost of the broader public’s well-being. But then that’s a lesson we still haven’t seemed to learn back home either.
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03.05.09
Posted in Current Events at 12:52 am by Kaihaku
KARAOKE GIRL, DRIVER ATTACKED WITH ACID
A karaoke girl and a moto taxi driver were severely wounded on Monday in an acid attack on Street 376 in Boeung Keng Kang 3 commune, Chamkarmon district, Phnom Penh. Police identified the victims as Ith Muy Neng, 20, an employee of Zoom Karaoke, and the taxi driver Uon Chanreoun, 44, both residents of BKK3. Police arrested Vichet Chaly, on suspicion of involvement in the attack. The arrested suspect was severely beaten by local residents.
The Cambodia Daily had a more detailed article, though it left out the fact that Vichet Chaly had been beaten, but it is not available online.
Vichet Sothea, twenty-one years old, lived with Ith Muy Neng, twenty years old, for two years but after an argument they separated and she began working at a Karaoke club. She was riding home from that job when her former boyfriend decided to take what a police officer called, “revenge against her beauty.” He threw acid at her and her mototaxi driver, injuring both of them. Her driver, 44 year old Uon Chameorun, sustain serious burns to his back. Ith Muy Neng was able to shield her face from the attack with a purse but sustained burns to her chest, stomach, and thighs. Vichet Sothea then fled the scene with his sixteen year old brother, Vichet Chaly, but another nearby mototaxi driver chased after him and managed to capture Chaly. Chaly is now being held by the police on charges of assisting with the attack while his older brother, Sothea, remains in hiding. Uon Chameorun, the injured mototaxi driver, is asking for public support for the medical bills he is accruing that he cannot afford to pay.
This is a common occurence here in Cambodia and throughout many parts of Asia. While the victims are usually women, men are sometimes targetted and bystanders are injured in almost every attack.
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02.25.09
Posted in Current Events, Rants at 1:48 am by Kaihaku
In the face of the economic downturn, Microsoft has launched a new ‘Elevate America‘ program with the goal of providing individuals with the technology skills they need to succeed in today’s economy. This comes following a series of layoffs at Microsoft.
Before anyone gets too excited at this great act of generosity on the part of Microsoft, let’s stop for a moment to review the context.
- Windows Vista is a terrible product, so now Microsoft is releasing Windows 7 which should have been a service pack for Vista not a ‘new’ operating system.
- For the average user in today’s business world, Windows XP is sufficient.
- Microsoft is facing competition in the form of Linux (operating systems), Google (server-based applications), and the Open Source movement in general.
- The economy is in a serious downturn and purchasing new copies of Windows isn’t a priority for most people.
So, Microsoft, out of the goodness of its “heart”, is giving two million Americans free training in their newest software?
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02.11.09
Posted in Current Events at 4:45 pm by Kaihaku
Even here in Cambodia I’ve been hearing the question raised, “What if Michael Phelps were Black?” The general conclusion seems to be that he would be in a worse situation than he is now. I’m not so convinced. In fact, I wonder if the opposite is true?
If Phelps had darker skin would this be a controversy? Would anyone be outraged at how he failed to be a “good role model”? Or would they shrug their shoulders and answer “That’s just they are.” There would have been public condemnation but without the tone of surprise or betrayal. He probably would have be arrested and released by now without his image being “tarnished. My take is that, in this case, racism put higher standards on the guy with lighter skin, he was suppose to be a model citizen. Wouldn’t it be nice if those standards were applied to all athletes?
A better question would be “What if Michael Phelps were a woman?”
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01.08.09
Posted in Current Events at 2:23 am by Kaihaku
5:00 PM Monday Afternoon, the Phnom Penh municipal court ruled that the fifty-year lease on the Hotel Renakse given to the husband of Kem Chantha was null and void due to “neglect” of the historical French Colonial buildings that make up the hotel. Early the next morning, fifty police appeared at the hotel and evicted the manager, staff, ten guests, and the staff of a UN Development Project Office located in the hotel. On Wednesday, the Police began stripping the Hotel of it’s fixtures. “Justice” is rarely so swift in Cambodia. The hotel was sold, prior to the court order, to Alexon Inc by the ruling CPP for the sum of 3.9 million dollars. The nephew of the presiding Judge who ruled on the case Monday is married to the owner of Alexon. Yes, I think it is an extremely appropriate commemoration of thirty years of CPP rule.
I do not feel much sympathy, I’m afraid, for the manager Kem Chantha whose husband had close ties to Chea Sim. The now discarded fifty-year lease and the wealth of the family all came from CPP ties that have since withered. I do, however, feel for Cambodia.
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