Group Works to Improve Literacy

Students' activities were happy with reading and playing puzzle in new library opened by Young Generation for Development

By Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
14 November 2007
Please click here to listen Nuch Sarita reports in Khmer

A new group has started up a rural literacy program it hopes will help alleviate poverty in Cambodia.

The group, Young Generation for Development, has 16 members and will undertake a three-month project in Kampong Cham province, funded by the US Embassy in Phnom Penh and the International Republican Institute.

Director Hing Soksan said in an interview with VOA Khmer that the reading would help children improve critical thinking, cleverness, broad knowledge and dignity.

The children will be role models for their community and Cambodian society, Hing Soksan said.

"The Young Generation for Development wishes all students' parents or guardians to be a part of the students' learning, so that they can encourage their children to like and love reading and learn to avoid illiteracy," Hing Soksan said.

The group's project coordinator Heng Socheata called on all parents to send their children to school.

"We want to promote the awareness of the importance of reading among children and their parents and to make children's parents aware of their role in pushing their children to read as much as possible," she said.

Student Democracy Advocate Visits US

Mr. Hing Soksan was interviewed in VOA studio during the trip to USA

Nuch Sarita, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
27 September 2007
Please click here to listen Nuch Sarita reports in Khmer

Hing Soksan, an officer of the Students' Movement for Democracy, began a two-week visit to Washington last week, where he met US government leaders and attended leadership development training.

Hing Soksan was sponsored on his trip by the International Republican Institute, a US-based group that promotes democracy abroad.

He met with Anthony O'Donnell, a Maryland state legislator, as well as members of pro-democracy groups and State Department officials.

American youths are strong and independent and willing to take the government and their president to task, Hing Soksan said. This is different from the youth in Cambodia, who depend on the government, he said.

"Young adults in the US like to develop their independence, confidence and responsibilities," he said. "They have the courage to speak out on their views and directly identify problems. Young American adults especially have creative ideas where they continue to improve and refine on them. They make themselves valuable."

US youths are more able to attract political attention on issues, he said, whereas Cambodians seek out politicians for favors.

The Khmer Rouge tribunal was necessary in Cambodia, he said, where the youth remain under-educated over the regime and its policies.

TWO WEEKS TRIP TO USA

The YLC Champion’s reward is two weeks trip to USA. After gaining YLC Winner Agreement and Invitation Letter and on behalf of the YLC winner, Mr. Soksan Hing participated in the Leadership Development Training and Short Internship from Sep 16-30, 2007 conducted by IRI in Washington D.C where he saw some people who are the representatives from both governmental and civil society unit. Please click here to listen to VOA interview.

The objective of the training includes: learning how international non-government organizations and non-profit organizations work, understanding the American political process, how national and state level legislation is created and observing free and independent press covering of political events and other benefits and stipend.

After coming back to Cambodia, Mr. Soksan was invited to US embassy to present his activities in the USA. Here are narrative report and power point presentation.

Actually, the occasion was precious one because the program allowed Mr. Soksan to cultivate his leadership skills and gained experience in areas that were specifically catered to his particular professional and educational interests especially he met and conferred with U.S professional counterparts and visited some significant organizations. View my thank you letter.

Young Generation For Development "YGD"

Mr. Soksan HING spoke to students and their parents

Young Generation for Development (YGD) is a newly-established group whose members were former contestants of the reality show, Youth Leadership Challenge, co-organized by Youth Council of Cambodia (YCC) and TV5. Read and Listen VOA interview by Mr. Soksan HING and Ms. Socheata HENG.

YGD was created on May 16, 2007 and there are 16 members. With an intent to help improve the Cambodian society and to work with young people to drive them to actively participate in social activities as well as to avoid using drugs, to study hard, to be best youth and to enjoy life with safety and healthiness, especially we would like to make the children liking and loving the reading and learning to avoid illiteracy. Please view the YGD's in Brief--Khmer and English.

Therefore, we have decided to work cooperatively together in order to achieve our group’s goal. One of the Cambodia Millenium Development Goals (CMDGs) is to ensure all chidren complete primary schooling by 2010 and nine-year basic schooling by 2015. Although the country has made progress in increasing access to basic education in recent years, there is a long way to go to reach the targets set under the CMDGs.

In order to ensure the increase in admission rate and decrease in the drop out of school, a number of factors need to be considered such as free admission, motivation for teachers to teach and sufficient facilities/equipment. Although the free admission has been practiced, there is still a lack of motivation for teachers due to low salary.

Moreover, with limited facilities, especially for students, there is still difficulty for them to study. With the intention of training children to like reading and to get access to studying materials, our team has decided to launch a project of bringing books for libraries of some schools in various provinces along with half-day forums to broadcast the bad impact of illiteracy.

In the occasion of bringing books to open the libraries at some primary schools, YGD will conduct the half-day forum. We will invite students’ parents to participate in, so that they can become the part of students’ learning, i.e. to know the benefits of reading and to push their children to read books more often either at home or at school especially, to make the students liking and loving the reading and learning to avoid illiteracy.

In the meantime, the YGD members conducted a role-play (short drama) about the advantages of reading because the reading would help children to improve their critical thinking, cleverness, broad knowledge and dignity especially they will be regarded as role-modal children in their community as well as society. After finishing the role-play we also called on all parents or guardians of students to send their children to school as a phrase said that “sending children to school means saving property for children.

YGD Source of Fund: After establishing the working group (YGD) already on June 2007, we primarily started our project by raising fund and asking books and other materials and stationeries from NGOs, bookshops, businesspeople, seller, elder students and other charitable people. Recently we just get fund from International Republican Institute in Cambodia and other charitable people especially from Mr. Gregory F. Lawless, first secretary of U.S embassy to Cambodia. View YGD's project proposal.

Until now we conducted ten forums and opened nine libraries at various rural-primary-schools in the following provinces:

1. 5 libraries for Kompong Cham province
2. 2 libraries for Pursat province
3. 2 libraries for Prey Veng province
4. 1 library for Takeo province

Please view the minutes to learn more YGD activities: Khmer [1] [2] [3] [4] [5], English and click here to see pictures.

The Apprentice Goes to Civics Class

Judges and contestants gather in the boardroom to decide who will be"going home" at the end of each episode of Youth Leadership Challenge. More picture slideshow...

A reality TV show brings U.S.-style democracy to Cambodia.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007
By Suzy Khimm
The Slate Magazine

PHNOM PENH, Cambodia—With her button-down blouse, plastic-frame glasses, and impeccable résumé—youth delegate to the United Nations, research assistant on rural economic development—Heng Socheata seems like an unlikely maverick.

"I didn't tell my friends to watch the show," the 21-year-old accounting student said. "If I won, it'd be OK. But if I failed, it'd be kind of embarrassing."

Socheata is among the young stars of a new reality TV show that quietly subverted the political orthodoxy of Cambodia's heavily censored broadcast networks—seven public and private stations all under the thumb of the ruling party. Part Apprentice spinoff and part civics class, the Youth Leadership Challenge replaces Donald Trump's aspiring moguls with 16 citizen-heroes who race around the capital collecting signatures for a neighborhood clean-up petition, producing a social-advocacy video, and soliciting donations for an orphanage.

In the show's inaugural season, which concluded last week, contestants were quick to adopt the true spirit of the genre: Reduced to tears one moment, they gave on-air confessionals the next. There have, for sure, been a few cross-cultural adjustments. Trump's trademark "You're fired!" was deemed too harsh for the Cambodians, two of whom were instead told to "Go home" each week. The prize for the last do-gooder standing was a trip to America, still the promised land for Cambodia's young and ambitious.

The program was the brainchild of the International Republican Institute, a USAID-funded and U.S. Republican Party-linked group that collaborated with the Youth Council of Cambodia to produce the show. IRI, along with its sister organization, the National Democratic Institute, was founded during the Reagan administration to aid U.S. efforts to promote—in some critics' parlance, "export"—democracy abroad, with offices now in Iraq, Haiti, and more than 40 other geo-strategic hot spots. Both groups still recall the spirit of the Cold War years, focusing on political-party development, civic mobilization, and election monitoring to promote "the nuts and bolts of democracy," according to Jerome Cheung, NDI's resident country director in Cambodia.

Of course, that the United States once bombed Cambodia in the name of such ideals isn't lost on this new wave of political missionaries. But Cambodia, unlike Vietnam, was forced to recover from Year Zero and the mass murder of nearly 2 million citizens. By 1992, when the U.N. occupation began, many Cambodians were ready to let in the phalanx of Western donors and aid groups at its door and begin the country's fitful transition to democracy.

Under the guise of its competitive theatrics, the Youth Leadership Challenge makes an indirect but unmistakable challenge to a government that continues to censor broadcasts of unfavorable news items, miniskirted entertainers, and portions of congressional hearings that seem threatening to the ruling party. In one high-profile crackdown, the IRI-backed Cambodian Center for Human Rights hosted a public forum that led to the arrest of CCHR director Kem Sokha and four colleagues on charges of defaming Prime Minister Hun Sen in late 2005, provoking an international outcry.

Barely a year later, the Youth Leadership Challenge featured a free-flowing debate about the national law prohibiting adultery, a bill mandating military conscription, and sex education in public schools. Between the frenzied yelps of the timekeeper, the contestants expounded, rebutted, and, occasionally, grabbed the microphone away from one another. "I don't know how we're supposed to argue against what we believe in," Socheata admitted in a fit of offstage nerves, moments before making the case for why women shouldn't be allowed to hold high political office.

According to local media trainer Moeun Chhean Nariddh, the program's unscripted antics have helped usher in "one of the most serious and political programs in Cambodia. … All networks are either censored or self-censored, as everything is controlled by or affiliated with the ruling party."

Local observers are still wondering how the kids have gotten away with it. For years, IRI had been commonly perceived as supporting the opposition Sam Rainsy Party—an allegation bolstered in 1997 when an IRI staffer was wounded in a grenade attack on an opposition rally he was attending, as well as by Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell's long-standing calls for "regime change" in Cambodia. (Cynthia Bunton, IRI's Asia director, maintains that the organization has always been nonpartisan.)

Over the years, however, the ruling Cambodian People's Party has only continued to consolidate power, bolstered by Hun Sen's strong-arm tactics and an expanding grass-roots base. Many believe the SRP has lost its critical bark since its eponymous leader's return from self-imposed exile in France last year. The CPP accepted IRI's offer of political training for the first time in its history last fall, and IRI has been able to explore alternative means of cultivating a more open society in Cambodia.

"You have a hole in the boat, and water is coming through that hole," explained Thun Saray, director of Adhoc, a leading rights organization. "You have to plug the hole without making the boat turn over."

Certainly, the reality show's contestants hardly come off as radicals; they're the good kids, overachievers chosen from nearly 200 candidates. But the program has capitalized on their youth and ambition by leaning on another infamous U.S. export: American cultural mystique.

In a country where 70 percent of the population is under 30, Cambodians have an overwhelmingly positive opinion of the United States, as IRI's own 2004 poll confirmed. Bunton emphasized that the show's organizers "tried to tweak [the program] to be relevant to Cambodians." But the competition's big prize is hardly an afterthought. "That's why everyone wanted to be on the show—to go to the U.S.," said contestant Sorn Sarath, 24, who had already posted a photo of the U.S. ambassador on the wall of his volunteer-staffed NGO, the Student Movement for Democracy. The first Youth Leadership Challenge winner, Hing Soksan, 26, is another SMD staffer who introduced himself in an interview as an orphan and a future NGO officer. Unable to find a suitable job in Cambodia, Soksan hopes to use his trip to the United States "to learn from American leaders … and make Cambodia have more freedom than it has now."

At the same time, the contestants are hardly guileless consumers of everything Amerik. For them, the show's most outrageous task wasn't canvassing pool halls or handing out condoms on Valentine's Day, it was being criticized on camera. In a culture where "losing face" remains cause for shame, the judges dissected the contestants' leadership flaws—then had them turn on one another.

"In Cambodian culture, we don't say these things directly. We have to save face," said Socheata. "I've learned how to go after people directly. You have to be very good at seeing the weak points of other people, and you have to go back after them."

For one of the judges, that unrestrained public criticism lies at the heart of the show's edifying mission. "It's part of American culture—the competition of ideas," said Theary Seng, the Cambodian-American director of the Center for Social Development. "In a market economy, everything goes through a refining process, and the best idea or product will surface."

Trump couldn't have said it better himself.

THE ROAD GO TOWARD FUTURE

After becoming the champion of the Youth Leadership Challenge (YLC), Soksan HING was invited by TV5 to be a guest speaker in a new program, Road Go Toward Future, produced to interview some people who succeeded what she or he has done in their daily lives.

Soksan was asked many questions related to personal life since he was a child till becoming first place winner of the YLC. "I'm orphan, my father died in 1982 and mother died in 2000", Soksan said. "I always fight and struggle with all challenges in order to make my life even meaningful, especially to finish my study."

"It's incredible that I could be the Champion because the Show was a new one and very challengs with high capable contestants. Especially, the only one candidate who would be selected to be champion to visit the USA in order to participate in the Leadership Development Training", Soksan said. Please click the below clips:

CHAMPION OF YOUTH LEADERSHIP CHALLENGE

Youth Leadership Challenge (YLC) was an educational program to promote leadership among young people, and the TV show was produced to encourage youth audience to become more responsible, act responsibly, generate initiatives, and involve in and improve their community service through working with local authority. More detail please read in Khmer and English [1] [2] [3].

YLC was co-organized by Youth Council of Cambodia and TV5 and supported fund by United States Agency for International Development via International Republican Institute. On March 03, 2007 was the date of episode of YLC competition, HING Soksan was only one candidate who won the prize at the end of the YLC and was interviewed by local and international medias, one of them The Slate, famous magazine of USA, published as well. The prize for YLC champion (first-place winner) was an oversea study visit for two weeks to the United States in order to get leadership development training and short internship.