The English Language School
Roteang's young people recognize that learning English will help them move from their parents' lives of subsistence farming and fishing to jobs in business, tourism, education, and so on.
The Foundation sponsors 19 daily English classes, attended voluntarily by about 450 children after regular Khmer school hours, five days a week, year-round. We are able to use village school classrooms for this program in exchange for doing all the public school maintainance, including yearly painting of the school, putting in electrity, establishing and maintaining the school library, and regularly replacing white boards.
Classes are taught by carefully selected bilingual Cambodians, for whom we also provide ongoing English language instruction at the Australia Center for Education in Phnom Penh, as well as regular teacher training. Our village students are so eager to learn English that many have formed study groups that meet early on weekend mornings.
Roteang Village School
The Sharing Foundation provides general support for more than 700 children who attend the Roteang village public school by donating supplies and uniforms for needy students. Even the six dollar cost of two uniforms a year can prevent a child from attending school. The Foundation also built a new playground, as well as new classrooms and a library in 2004. The library, with over 400 colorful books, is among the first in Cambodia’s public schools.
The Sewing School
A four-month course, enrolling two new female students every two months, teaches young women a skill that enables them to support their families substantially better than they can by farming. The selected students are paid from their first day in sewing school.
They start by making white school uniform shirts, which with blue pants or skirts, are put together in school uniform packets and delivered to poor schools that need them, or to SCAD (Street Children's Assistance and Development), which works to get street children into school.
The Sewing School is a win/win program, as the students learn a trade that can get them a well-paying supervisory job in the garment industry, and TSF can donate 1,400+ uniforms yearly to kids who might otherwise not be able to go to school. Sewing students, as they develop more skills, make the tote bags, back packs, and purses which are brought to the USA and sold by volunteers at church fairs and the like, thus making the sewing school self-sustaining. A few graduates choose to stay on in the sewing school shop, earning substantial money by piecework. Even with the economic downturn in Cambodia, as American companies buy fewer Cambodian–made garments, our trained graduates have no problem getting jobs in the garment industry
The Computer School
Opened in 2006, the computer school offers computer classes five days a week utilizing ten donated laptops and a few older desk tops. Students are picked by lottery and attend daily for six weeks to learn word processing and spreadsheets, and see a bit of the internet on our one slow connection. After all the lottery groups go through, the group rotation starts again.
After the graduation of our first college students in August 2009, we hired Kuch Seiha, our I.T. graduate, to start another class, doubling the size of our computer school. Seiha has also started a class with a group of young village children using donated computers from the "one laptop per child" program.
Beng Krom School
In 2004 TSF adopted the Beng Krom School on the far side of the Mekong River when we learned they had extremely high arsenic levels in the wells the government had installed to provide drinking water at this very poor school. With a generous donation from Long Island chapters of the American Association of University Women, we built a huge rainwater collection system using rain collected off the school roof, funneled into a giant tank, and then pumped (using a stair-stepper mechanism) into filtered vats with spigots.
We also provided 250 school uniforms that year, and have now done this every year since, twice a year, plus all the school copybooks, pens and pencils for this school of 750 children. In 2008, we built new latrines for Beng Krom, a 3-unit system, updating their very primitive outhouses.
The Farm Project
The poorest families of Roteang Village are served by the Farm Project. The Foundation leases about 5 acres, and provides seed, tools, irrigation equipment and a very competent Farm Manager for indigent farmers to grow their own vegetables. Surplus is sold in Phnom Penh, providing farm families with credits exchangeable for such things as roofs, latrines, and water collection systems.
The only requirement from them is that they must send their children to school—a requirement that was met with much resistance by the totally illiterate farmers in the beginning, but now is embraced as the children can read and do simple arithmetic for their families.
TSF built a two-room thatched private school at the edge of the fields in 2002, and hired two excellent Khmer teachers. Today 138 children go to this school, in three shifts, daily. Many of the children have now been able to advance to the regular village school (whose principal keeps asking to send to us his slow children), and one girl has finished high school now, and hopes to be sponsored for University in the near future.
