Greetings from Cambodia

Greetings from Siem Reap, Cambodia.

PEPY  Empowering Youth

Sous s’dey, everyone.  I have just spent the past two weeks here in Siem Reap working with our partner organisation, PEPY Empowering Youth.  As always it has been an incredibly uplifting and positive experience.   I had the good fortune of working everyday with 32 scholarship students alongside their English teacher, Soury.  I find it difficult to describe the PEPY students without going over the top, but their enthusiasm and commitment to hard work is exceptional.  They arrive to class early and fully organised.  They are attentive and participate fully in the lessons. Homework is meticulously completed and at the end of the class students often complain that the class is over as they are so eager to learn more. It is such a pleasure and a privilege to teach them.

This year’s group are particularly strong at communicating through English. Soury is a very talented teacher and not a word of Khmer is spoken during English Class. She has a gorgeous rapport with the students and they have lots of fun learning with her.  The first week we principally worked on Drama.  We worked on voice, gesture and facial expression and had lots of fun acting out the story of ‘Reaksa and the Beanstalk’!  In the second week we worked on personality traits and expanding the students’ vocabulary. We worked on interview skills and we learnt all about Malala Yousafzai, whose inspirational story resonated with the students.  They all have personal experiences to share about the challenges facing young Cambodians in accessing quality education.  This is something we take so much for granted in a developed country like Ireland.   Malala’s quotation ‘One child, one teacher, one pen and one book can change the world’ is one we all agree with and is what this partnership is all about. All of you who contribute to the Scholarship Sponsorship Programme through monthly donations, or who support other Cambodia/Ireland fundraising events, are quite literally changing lives.  Supporting a PEPY student is literally transforming their lives and supporting them to lift themselves and their families out of poverty.

SeeBeyondBorders

I return to Ireland more convinced than ever of the importance of Development Education and of our commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals. The standard of education in Cambodia is very poor. Class sizes are huge, there are often over 50 students in a class, many schools lack basic facilities such as electricity or running water, and teaching resources are scarce. The education system in Cambodia is still struggling to recover from the devastating effects of the Khmer Rouge regime.  Many teachers are unqualified and are not sufficiently skilled to teach their students.   This is why the work that the NGO SeeBeyondBorders does is so important.  Colm Byrne (former teacher from DPETNS) is now working with SeeBeyondBorders. Colm is Director of Development with this organisation.  My daughter Dee is spending a year working and living in Siem Reap. She is working as a Communications Officer with SeeBeyondBorders – she is enjoying the work and especially enjoys working with her 4^th class teacher, Colm! Phearith who visited us last April is also working with SeeBeyondBorders.

Their work is based around upskilling teachers through teacher workshops and training peer mentors to continuously support teachers as they apply what they have learned to their day-to-day teaching. Research is showing that this model is impacting extremely positively on the teachers’ skill levels and confidence, and furthermore, significantly impacts the children’s learning outcomes.  Something that sets SeeBeyondBorders apart from many other NGOs is that they are striving to bring about systemic change by working in the public school system.  They have a mountain to climb and we hope that our Cambodia/Ireland partnership can help them with this enormous but extremely worthwhile task.

During our stay in Siem Reap I attended a couple of workshops with PEPY and SeeBeyondBorders, and taught some English classes with the staff there. My other half, Liam, kept himself busy by painting a few rooms for them and cleaning up the garden area.  He reckons he lost a stone in weight as physical work in this climate is tough!