A chance to make a difference overseas

By Victoria Cheng
Globe Correspondent

May 11, 2008

Four letters may not be a lot, but it's enough to underpin a $20,000 fund-raising effort to build a school in rural Cambodia. Calling itself the Cambridge School for Cambodia (and Camb-Camb for short), the campaign brings together students, businesses, and several groups across the city, some with deep ties to Cambodia and some who have always called Cambridge home.
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Rachael Harkavy, a fifth-grade student at the King Open School, started learning about Cambodia in January when she and her peers in the school's fifth through eighth grades joined the effort by hosting weekly penny drives. She reels off statistics about the country. "It's about the size of Oklahoma and has the population of Pennsylvania," she began.
Camb-Camb is raising money to send to American Assistance for Cambodia, a nonprofit organization run by former Newsweek journalist Bernie Krisher, that has built more than 400 schools across the country.
"We'll be the 405th school, but it's not enough," Harkavy added. "Massachusetts is about half the size of Cambodia and has about 1,000 schools, so that just brings into perspective how many schools Cambodia needs."
The planned Camb-Camb school will be 40 miles north of Phnom Penh and accommodate between 200 and 400 students. Krisher started the initiative in 1993 and negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the World Bank that called for it to match whatever money he raised. The cost of a school, Krisher said, "is actually about $30,000, and the donor only pays about $13,000." By contributing an extra $7,000, the Cambridge School for Cambodia will be able to equip its school with an English teacher, solar panels for a computer, and Internet access.
Longteine de Monteiro owns the Elephant Walk restaurants, which feature French and Cambodian cuisine at locations in Cambridge, Boston, and Waltham. The Cambodian native explained that outside assistance is sorely needed in the country, which was devastated first by the spillover effects of the Vietnam War and then by genocide during the brutal rule of the communist Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.
"The government now doesn't really do much to help education," she said, "so all the foundations from outside of the country who go there and build whatever the country needs, especially schools and hospitals, are very important."
When Camb-Camb contacted de Monteiro, she agreed to host a benefit dinner at her North Cambridge restaurant early last month.
"We served chicken curry, Salade Cambodgienne, and beef short ribs with green coconut juice," said Monteiro. The event bumped Camb-Camb's funds to the $13,300 mark.
The event also gave de Monteiro an opportunity to showcase a prominent part of Cambodian culture - its cuisine - and the desire to teach Cantabrigians about this small country perched on the southeastern peninsula of Asia.
At the King Open School, Rachael and fellow fifth-grader Eliza Klein have made it their goal to involve younger students.
Before classes one day earlier this month, the girls helped set up an origami table at the school entrance, along with an empty water jug inviting donations of spare change. Sixth-grader Brianna Lavelle patiently guided the younger students through the steps of folding a colorful square of paper into the shape of a crane.
"What is this for?" asked 6-year-old Bianca Byfield, as she handed over her crane to be placed on a large branch of a tree that will eventually hold 400.
"Every crane represents one child who will go to school in Cambodia," said Lavelle's mother, Risa. "And all of Cambridge is helping raise money."