Sarah's Cambodia Blog

By Sarah Knight

Well yesterday, we hired a fantastic new manager to monitor and report to myself and the team on the two projects we run while I’m in Australia. His name is Pilot and he is highly qualified for the role but most importantly the children love him, and he loves his new job! I was so pleased to meet with him today and discover he had made an agenda listing all the ways he can help us improve!

This morning we went to visit two of our high-school scholarship students Yan and Channa. We decided to send them to an after school class to improve their English. In Cambodia only Khmer is taught in schools and yet English is a requirement to attend Universities in Cambodia. Of course this prevents many school graduates from entering tertiary education and ensures they will only be able to work in low income jobs. We are so excited to be ahead of the game and hopefully provide these five children with university scholarships in the future! Pilot is already proving himself invaluable helping to construct profiles of all the children so that we can monitor their school progress and home life. He will visit all our scholarship students weekly and make sure they are healthy, happy and succeeding in their academic lives.

This afternoon we will visit our university scholarship students and provide them with iPhones kindly donated by our awesome Australian supporters! These will be used to communicate with us in Australia, over skype and email, to practice their english with us! Currently, we have four girls attending university as a result of money raised in Australia so a big thank you to everyone that has donated money! These girls will be the first from their province in Takeo to attend university! It is a huge achievement and we're so incredibly proud of them!