News

Sitting in the home-based classroom under her traditional stilt home, Mrs. Vet Savin, a community preschool teacher becomes melancholic while describing her previous life and poor background.

Ms. Laiki smiles at us when we met her in the narrow library of Kompong Khneas Primary School, a floating school on the vast, freshwater Tonle Sap Lake, located around 45 kilometers from the provincial capital of Pursat town. She playfully tells us this is the first time she has smiled since becoming a preschool teacher six months ago.

Ms. Ngek Youm, 59, rides her motorbike about twelve kilometers from her home to the village, first crossing the river and then riding through rice fields before finally reaching the villager’s houses. Her destination is Boeng Khek Village in Peam Mean Chey Commune in Prey Veng Province – located in the southeast of Cambodia near the border with Vietnam. Ms. Youm would always get dirty while riding along the muddy road during the raining season, or become covered in dust during the hot dry season. However, Ms. Youm was not too concerned about the dirt.

Sorn Panha Reach is a six-year-old boy studying in first grade at Kokor primary school. He and his family live in Chamkar Samsib Village close to the Mekong River in eastern Cambodia. Enthusiastically, little Panha told us that he enjoys reading picture books.

Loeur Saveth is not the typical second grade student at her primary school in Kampong Chhnang Province, Cambodia. That is because Saveth is a 22-year-old woman. Saveth, the youngest of nine siblings, was born deaf and does not speak. Growing up, she never attended school because there were neither specialized schools nor teachers who knew how to support students with hearing loss in or around her community.