VSO is moving offices to smaller quarters. The old house will probably be torn down to make room for some high-rise. This is an unfortunate trend in Phnom Penh now. Lots of building going on. What was a very cozy and charming city is turning into a high-rise hodge-podge of modern buildings that block the breeze and sun.
The new office will be much smaller, so VSO sold some equipment it no longer needed. I was able to use donations to buy 14 bicycles to start a “Bike Club” at the Provincial Teacher Training College. I also got some furniture for the resource room.
Before buying the bikes, I had a conversation with the Deputy Director, where I introduced the idea of “Student Life” and how it would be good to have some fun things for students to do. She was excited about the bikes because they could go to practice teaching easier. This is also an issue, and it is true that bikes will make this all much easier, but getting them to see the quality of life issue will be more difficult!
I have wanted to get bikes for students for 4 years, because I see that students are basically stuck on campus, many with no transportation. A lot of students are poor from rural areas, who receive $2 from the government as a stipend each month, and families send them rice to keep them going. It would be a great improvement if they had some mobility and could enjoy the town a bit more. But bikes cost normally $45 and buying 2 bikes for 200 people didn’t seem so helpful. But 12 bikes for 200 people seems more reasonable. Each bike cost $10-12, and $5 each for transport to Kampot, and on average about a $5 repair. So for $20-22 we get a new bike.
I included 2 bikes to give to trainers who are helping fix the bikes and who help around the school a lot. One trainer actually lives in the student dorms and has no bike himself. I realize that helping students (the littlest people on the hierarchy) requires that you help some people above them too, otherwise you get no support. The whole system is broken (trainers get $70 a month and that is not enough to live on), so at every level, there is some sort of bribe or support demanded. They have a legitimate point, but that just makes it more expensive to help the people you want to target in the first place.
The bike club will fix the bikes, paint them crazy colors and number them. Hopefully, we will be able to have students responsible for the borrowing of the bikes as well. We will have a fund that each student contributes $0.10 to each month to repair the bikes.
I am hoping also to work on community building activities next year so that students have a better experience at the college. There is still a lot of stealing and non-supportive behavior that goes on and changing that will take time.
This photo is of the bikes in the resource room waiting for repairs. I was heartened that the bike repair guy in town could fix two in a day, so after we discuss how we will do this, it should go quickly!
The first year students study until August, so I hope to have an experimental bike club for the next 2 months and then make improvements based on that experience for the start of school in October.
