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Rather than continue to build new schools, we have decided to stay with the schools we have. We will continue to support our thousand students and our graduates to encourage continuing their educations. We will do this in consultation with parents and in the eyes of the whole village as we always have. We will continue teaching English and hope to add computer keyboarding classes. We will keep improving schools and grounds. We are in it for the long haul, supporting our students from 1st grade through high school.

This a picture is from our first year at Poum Steung, while we were getting organized and long before we had much in the way of school supplies. I noticed this artist, sitting by herself in the shade of one of the few trees, drawing an intricate pattern in the dirt with a rock – her version of this stylized image in Khmer decoration. Her unfolding talents transcended her poverty and lack of schooling. She was living evidence that these children would most certainly grow and thrive in an encouraging school. Given what she was doing with almost nothing, it was encouraging to realize that we did not have to have a perfect school with the perfect curriculum to help these children. Surely we could support a school good enough for her to learn. If the children from Poum Steung would attend our school, they would learn.

As we worked with the parents and village, we could see how collective a culture these villages had. People knew each others’ business to an astonishing degree (my mother would have been horrified). This lack of privacy was also a source of strength. Everyone knew who was going to school and who wasn’t (and why). If the village culture embraced the school, there would be enormous social pressure to attend. I began to better understand some of Sarith’s strategies. When we hired the sewing girls, his shrewd choices did not go unnoticed in the village. That the poorest girls, without parents, were trained and employed by the American donors raised their status. In helping the poorest families, we were raising everybody’s boat. The village got behind us - we really were trying to help people, not just the rich people either. The village did embrace our school, the children did attend and they did learn.

Recently, we graduated our first class at Poum Steung. The graduates were literate, but clearly these 6th graders were not ready to earn a living. It is a large sacrifice to send children off to school instead using their labor in the rice field. We realized that unless we continued our support, we would simply put off the age of dropping out. This was one reason for our decision to stay involved rather than expand and move on.

Another reason was that we are getting to know the children themselves, and feeling some of the villages’ solidarity and loyalty toward our students. These children were complicated individuals with complicated inner lives, just like any child. Here is a Poum Steung girl who sang a song for us on our visit in 2006. It proved to be a poor choice for her, a love song with lyrics that began to embarass her as they became more and more romantic. She soldiered on, falteringly, but when it got to the kissing part she became completely undone. Giggled helplessly, she ran from her stage to the back of the crowd, all the children and us laughing along with her. She soon regained her composure. Here she is with Thai, Sarith’s nephew and the principal, both laughing at the predicament she got herself into.

So, for the immediate future, we have decided to continue supporting the schools and students we have now. We will keep improving the ones we have, and expanding them where needed. We will keep making and giving away school uniforms, improve our organic gardens at the schools, add bathrooms, fences, trees, landscaping and provide or improve clean water supplies and storage where needed . We will keep improving our schools and supporting the thousand students in our schools and our graduates as they go on to high school. We have also begun to add to our curriculum, particularly to the skills training that will help employment. We are now teaching English in three schools, and this is going so well that we are hoping in the future to be able to teach them computer keyboarding skills.

Our shift from building to sustaining and improving lets the village see we are in it for the long haul and builds community support for good attendance and graduation. We know that future employment depends on the world economy as well as the skills one has learned. From this perspective of continued support, if there are no jobs, we will have to think about what we can do to create jobs. Our plans for the future are to keep providing support until we get these kids working and bringing resources back to their families and villages. We, the families and the students thank you for helping us do this.