Update from Dad in Cambodia

Here’s an update from my Dad (John Mann) on the work he’s doing for Beaudesert Rotary building schools in the village of Chuor Ph’av, Cambodia (and now, it seems, Koh te Cho).

This post is my editing together of five emails – so, sorry Dad if I’ve mixed it up (here’s an earlier update).

Dear friends and family,

Its several months since I gave a good update on life in Cambodia. A lot has been happening.  I’ll send you five emails and hopefully 23 photos. I’ll start with the personal stuff and then in email two I’ll tell you about an incredible discovery and what will become an equally incredible project.  In subsequent emails there will be photos and news of the two schools in our village and some magical photos of school equipment….mmm how, you may ask can school equipment be magical?

Do you remember an early photo of a little girl sitting on a cow. Chanthai has been attending our first school for the morning session – 7am to 12.30 six days a week and every afternoon till nightfall she looks after her cow. Chanthai has no immediate family and owns nothing except this cow. She survives by rearing the calves and selling them.. She is 10 years old now.

I’ve added a photo of foundation work to this email. You may recall that a teacher/volunteer house is going in to the right of the two schools.  It will have solar power.  Our very first volunteer teacher arrives in January.  A young Australian woman who will teach English.  We have money to finish the house but I am still looking for money to equip the house - bedding, furniture, pots pans plates cups etc etc.   If you can help with money please contact me (the house is for Cambodian teachers too if they need it).

We have almost completed the second of the two schools in our villages in Prey Veng province and the school house will be complete by early January.
The next five photos are about a project that I feel very excited about and I think you will be too in around about three minutes from now.

The mighty Mekong River starts in Tibet then journeys through China and Laos before heading due south right through the middle of Cambodia. At Phnom Penh the river bends to the south east and at the border with Vietnam it divides into the ‘Nine Dragon’ delta.

Half an hour south east of Phnom Penh the river is very wide and there’s an island – Koh te Cho – in the middle. Think about “the smell of napalm in the morning” in ‘Apocolypse Now’ and the bombing of Neuk Leung in ‘The killing fields’ … That’s our island… and I mean our island in the same way that our villages on Prey Veng have certainly become our villages. Koh te Cho has 1000 school age children. There’s an old tumble down school house trying to teach 400 children in two shifts but 600 children can’t go to school at all. 20 years ago the villagers tried to raise money for some classrooms by making and selling noodles but gave up. They got as far as the concrete pillars which are now sadly decayed.

We will build them a school on that precise site.  The site that they wanted. Same as our second school it will have books computers solar power and we’ll help pay for the teachers. The Cambodian government will pay each of three teachers $1 a day and we will match it.

One photo shows me and the village leaders in the ferry that goes to the island. We see tiny fishing houses as we approach the coast.

There’s a huge reception for us at the dock and then lots of children come with mums and dads to the village square to discuss and plan and prepare. The photo with the old concrete stumps is the exact site.

When this school is complete, hopefully in a year from now it will be a VERY SPECIAL PLACE. An island in the middle of one of the worlds most iconic and tragic rivers with our school children at long last getting a chance in life.

This is the magic that will be our third school – KOH TE CHO – the island. Building will commence early in the New Year.

Every year in early November it’s the national water festival and around 900 boats with up to 70 oarsmen in each boat compete in a three day race on the Mekong in Phnom Penh. Our island Koh te Cho entered a boat with 70 oarsmen. There’s a photo of me with the island chief in front of the boat and another photo of me presenting the local equivalent of Red Bull for the team.

The next set of five photos is surely a lesson on how the world should value education.  I think they are nothing short of amazing to a western eye.

Over the past two months we have been gradually buying all the equipment needed for the second school – our senior school. I stay in the house behind the truck in one of the photos. It’s the largest house for miles and it’s where I stored everything prior to taking them the one kilometre to the school. As you can see there’s books – over 1000 text books, teachers books, 1200 excercise books, four new computers, lots of sport equipment, art equipment and musical instruments. There’s 300 full uniforms including flip flops, (or thongs or jandals depending on where you come from). (solar installation will happen the day the building is completely finished.)

In the west we would simply expect that these things would somehow materialize and there would definitely be little or no fanfare. In these photos and in photos in next email you can see first the piling of everything in a truck and then the ceremonial  procession past everyones house, there’s me and Chanthou our translator who is dressed in all her finery and great clowns and figures of huge cultural significance accompanying with drums and a lot of noise.

This next set has 5 more photos following directly from the procession of equipment to the school.   You can see all the children lined up and clapping us into the grounds.   In the  last set email you’ll see all the elders and government dignitaries lined up on the school verandah.  Here you can see the villagers have displayed everything for all to see and celebrate.   The children are under cover of a marquee.

Here’s the 300 uniforms on the table.

Here’s a photo of Chanthou paying money to one of the teachers.  Every six months we pay each teacher the $180 supplement. I like to place the actual money in real dollars into their hands. There are many many cases of money ending up in wrong places in Cambodia. I am very very strict and photograph as many transactions and purchases as I can.

There’s  also a photo of the two schools side by side. Foudations for the school house are in to the right of the buildings. There will also be water tanks for rain collection as well as a second toilet block.

A photo of happy looking adults next to school equipment includes the state (provincial) Premier next to me and a whole array of leaders elders and teachers. Two of the most significant people for me are the older man leaning forward and the younger man behind the computers who is looking away – these are Warn and his father and they are our main builders. They are good men.

We gave out uniforms and there’s a beautiful photo of four children the next morning about to set off for school at 6.30am. Beautiful for several reasons – these are very same cildren you’ve been looking at for the past two years and look at them today. I didn’t comb their hair. Just look at the pride! One girl found a watch and a bangle. I cried when I saw these children. It was a good moment.

And a personal story:

I receive a great many enquiries about Nang.

There are 2 photos of Nang - one in a yellow dress and one in purple (I bought the dresses for her).  A quick recap is that 3 years ago I was told there’s a ‘crazy’ girl to avoid in the village who doesn’t wash or care for herself.  I saw it was epilepsy and I made an instant decision to take her to Phnom Penh for a CAT scan and work out a medicine regime.  She had no father.  I bought her clothes and taught her to care for herself.   I look after Nang’s epilepsy and on January 7 this year I gave her away at her wedding. Her husband is an almost subsistance rice farmer but he is kind to Nang.

She had one miscarriage in March and a very small baby is now due on December 2.  I am worried.  There is virtually no medical care and I control her medicine by phoning a doctor who has never seen her and I buy her tablets from a market stall.  The baby will need vitamin k as soon as she is born (I took her to phnom penh for an ultra sound and that’s where she will have the very underweight baby.) …I’ll tell you what happens.

PS. If you are a praying sort of person, please pray for Nang…otherwise…fingers crossed.

 

Congratulations everyone involved in the Sustainable Habitat Challenge

I had the honour of being the warm-up act at the Sustainable Habitat Challenge Awards dinner on Friday (see ODT list of winners).    It was a fantastic night, and not just because of the wine, music and train ride.

The projects described were fabulous.    Although I appreciated the “alternative” buildings, the ones I enjoyed the most were more ordinary – the ones that engaged large teams in building more sustainable houses.  These houses might not be revolutionary, but are a big step in the right direction, and I’m sure we’ll see these students going out into the workforce knowing that better building is achievable.  Next year, let’s make sure that this is the baseline for all the buildings built by carpentry students nationwide (hopefully alongside another “sustainable” house to continue to push the envelope).

I enjoyed the student engagement beyond the building disciplines.  I especially liked the interaction between the landscape architecture students and the design students that resulted in the cheeky Manu Pango Peg (after the landscape folks insisted on not having a washing-line).

I enjoyed the stories of wider student and community engagement – the judges telling stories of wading through hordes of people from the wider community come to see and learn from the houses.

I was impressed that the wider professions got involved.  The Housewise challenge led by Housing NZ was extremely worthwhile, and I hope this small team gets noticed within their corporate body.  This team now has a more important challenge:  1 house retrofitted, 69,000 to go (and then get these noticed as a beacon for the other 1.7 million).   Similarly, I enjoyed talking with the Director of Engineering from IPENZ Charles Willmot about the direction they are taking.

But what impressed me most of all, was that for the first time ever, I was able to have more than half the room still standing at the end of my series of questions.    More than half the room agreed with this statement (and many of the others were excused as not being directly involved in teaching).

9. I am currently integrating Education for Sustainability into my teaching.

This fact alone makes me very proud to have been associated with Shac from the beginning.    It makes me very proud that Otago Polytechnic led this amazing initiative.   Well done Tim,  D’Arcy and Nic – you’ve done good.  Very good.    Shac shows again the huge impact of the handprint of education in preparing sustainable practitioners, and of Otago Polytechnic’s leadership role in this.   Let’s hope we can do it again.

 

Two speakers from Shac Symposium

I’m at the Shac Symposium today.   This is the final act of the Sustainable Habitat Challenge (for this round at least).    Nine teams from around the country have developed housing that is “simple, affordable, efficient, adaptable and desirable.  Sustainable, in a word”.

Early in the development of Shac I went to the Solar Decathlon and we learnt a lot from that trip, especially about the engagement of students, and about importance of communication.   Shac, though,  is quite a different beast.  While the Decathlon houses could be described as Formula 1,  the houses we have are real.   Two of the speakers reinforced this difference for me last night.

Susan Krumdieck presented sustainability on a survival spectrum:  Safety/Security/Sustainability.     She talked about the need for adaptability, the most important of these being of changing what we think and expect.

David Trubridge presented an interesting talk on design as a cultural experience.   He is critical of swapism – swapping one technology for another without addressing the underlying issue, and of eco-design (despite being a practitioner in this area).   He treads a line between design as fashion flimsy and design as an expression of the connections between people and their environment.   He promotes the importance of craftsmanship.

He repeated Susan’s message of “enough”.  The problem is not one of supply to meet demand,  it is, he says, a problem of how to make the demand meet the supply.    This is where I think the Shac approach differs from the Decathlon.  The tasks in the Decathlon are about maxising energy production so that the teams can achieve tasks such as  tumble drying towels.  The Shac houses are more about making sustainability a natural part of everyday life.

I struggled with David example of housing – where  sustainability features such as energy render the house a square box – “the worst kind of machine for living”.  He contrasts these to things of beauty (eg Torajan houses),  of craftsmanship valuing the connection between the environment and people.    I don’t see the difference.  Sure, the houses look different, but they are still an expression of values.   I’ll try and with him about this today.

 

 

 

Software Engineering class explores our handprint

Our software engineering students have proven again that computing can make a bigger contribution than energy in the data centre.    We’ve been working with the Dunedin 350 campaign.     All semester, groups have been working with their client – Ella Lawton – to develop systems to raise awareness and engage people in climate change.     Although the big release day was the Spring Food Festival (see Flickr set), we’ve just had the final presentations where the students reflected on the process.     There is some really really nice work (see below).

Engaging students in a sustainability project has met all our goals -  they’ve learnt software engineering through engaging in a real project-  a project that takes the impact of computing beyond its own footprint, to exploring our potential handprint.

As part of the 350.org movement, our main mission is to raise the awareness of the 350 campaign and its purpose of ensuring the safe upper limit of CO2 in our atmosphere is lowered to 350 parts per million.

At 350 Live, it is our primary objective to design an interactive application that will be released to the public of Dunedin free of charge to promote education about 350, and bring to attention the significance of the important date of October 24, 2009, the International Day of Climate Change.

Here’s some screen captures from the projects:

 

Sustainability Pictures X

Ten more for the  collection.     Breaking my rule of stand-alone images but these seemed quite evocative, even if they do take some explanation.

See also these variations on earlier approaches: Venn diagrams coming together and showing changing dominance of sectors in a static animation, and a nice systems loop.

 

179. Brown’s 15 elements of Ecovillage living

180. The Barometer of Sustainability (ICUN)

The Barometer of Sustainability is the only performance scale that measures human and ecosystem wellbeing together without submerging one in the other.  The Barometer’s key features are:
• Two axes, one for human wellbeing, the other for ecosystem wellbeing. This enables each set of indicators to be combined independently, keeping them separate to allow analysis of people-ecosystem interactions.
• The axis with the lower score overrides the other axis in the analysis. This prevents a high score for human wellbeing from offsetting a low score for ecosystem wellbeing, or vice versa. This approach reflects the view that people and the ecosystem are equally important and that sustainable development must improve and maintain the wellbeing of both.

181. ‘The Egg of Sustainability’ (Robert Prescott-Allen, in IUCN, 1995)

182. Red triangle/Green Circle (from SustainAbility Gearing Up).

These high friction worlds are represented by the red triangle: low levels of trust increase friction in the system, with different sectors fighting (or ‘scapegoating’) each other.

183.  Mapping environmental problems by management and revsersibility (UNEP Geo4)

184.  Global environmental outlook framework (UNEP Geo4)

Net gains in human well-being facilitated by the social and economic sectors have, however, been at the cost of growing environmental changes, and the  exacerbation of poverty for some groups of people

185. Shrinking Earth (UNEP Geo4)

186.  Sustainability Asymptogram (Onwueme and Borsari – Proquest link)

100 percent sustainability is a perfect state that is practically unattainable by anybody or any system.  No matter how good a person or system is, there is always a sustainability deficit that cannot be overcome, as entropy affects living systems and their physical habitats without exceptions.  This means that there is always room for improvement.  Different persons or systems are located at different levels on the curve, with larger or smaller sustainability deficits, but with deficits all the same.

187.  Meadows’ framework (after Daly). (Balaton Group)

I see the triangle as saying there’s no way human ends can be realized without healthy, functioning natural and economic systems

188.  Ecosphere as a mail sorter (Collins)

Imagine all of Earth’s chemistry as a mail sorter’s wall of letter slots in a post office, with the network of compartments extending toward infinity (see the bottom figure, next page). Each compartment represents a separate chemistry so that, for example, thousands of compartments are associated with stratospheric chemistry or with a human cell. An environmentally mobile persistent pollutant can move from compartment to compartment, sampling a large number and finding those compartments that it can perturb. Many perturbations may be inconsequential, but others can cause unforeseen catastrophes, such as the ozone hole or some of the manifestations of endocrine disruption. Most compartments remain unidentified and even for known compartments, the interactions of the pollutant with the compartment’s contents can usually not be foreseen, giving ample reason for scientific humility when considering the safety of persistent mobile compounds.