COURTESY PHOTO
Students at the Lincoln-Sudbury Memorial School in Cambodia unload bags of rice, purchased with $3,000 donated by students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, to distribute to needy families impacted by the mid-October floods.
Posted Mar 01, 2012
See more photos at Wicked Local.
Posted Mar 01, 2012
See more photos at Wicked Local.
Read :Sudbury contingent celebrates opening of Lincoln- Sudbury Memorial School in Cambodia
Read: School in Cambodia memorializes L-S students who died too soon
Read more: Sudbury contingent celebrates opening of Lincoln- Sudbury Memorial School in Cambodia
SUDBURY —Two years ago the students, alumni, and staff of Lincoln-Sudbury raised money to build a sister school in Cambodia to memorialize students and young alumni who LS had “lost too soon” and to help give hope to the students of a poor country decimated by genocide.
A year later, with the help of students at the Haynes School, a second solar-powered computer was purchased for the Lincoln-Sudbury Memorial School in Cambodia. The two computers, it was hoped, would not only help the students there learn English, become computer literate, and dream of a life beyond the rice fields, but would also enable a cultural exchange between these two schools on opposite ends of the earth. Today, a dozen L-S students are, or will soon become, “pen pals” with their Cambodian counterparts.
Still, no one ever guessed that this new computer link would make possible the Internet equivalent of a 911 call from Cambodia. But when that call came, L-S students were listening.
In mid-October, a teacher and several pen pals at the Memorial School alerted students at L-S that a natural catastrophe was taking place in Thailand and the Battambang region of Cambodia. This disaster had not yet made most American newspapers. Flooding of historic proportions was destroying the rice fields that Cambodians depended on for work and food. Some people had been killed, and many others had lost their supplies of rice.
Realizing that hungry students cannot learn, the Memorial School group at L-S immediately put aside its usual educational priorities, and began raising money for an emergency rice distribution at the school. Within three weeks, the group had raised $3000, and the money was sent to Cambodia.
Frustrating logistical problems and the need to carefully investigate which students most needed the rice delayed the shipment for months. The 100 poorest students at this school of 400 were finally identified and the rice was trucked up from Phnom Penh two weeks ago, on Jan. 30. The rice arrived later than the L-S group had hoped, but in another sense it arrived right on time, just as families were exhausting their emergency food reserves.
Attached to the email confirming the arrival of the rice came five photographs. They showed grateful students who would now eat because their pen pals and the L-S community cared.
What began with cold checks and soulless computers has developed into a real human connection between young people in two countries a half-a-world apart. The term “sister school” has taken on a new meaning in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and Thmar Kaul, Cambodia.
For more information about the L-S Memorial School, see: www.lincolnsudburymemorialschool.org/
The members of the L-S Memorial School group responsible for the success of the emergency rice drive were: Molly Bloomenthal, Alex Braverman, Mira Dayal, Maia Dinsmore, Callie Flanagan, Sophia Goswami, Ronan Hunt, Kellie Heye, Becca Kupperstein, Ashley Miller, Grace Tam, Sarah Thompson, and Emma Yeager.
Read: School in Cambodia memorializes L-S students who died too soon
Read more: Sudbury contingent celebrates opening of Lincoln- Sudbury Memorial School in Cambodia
SUDBURY —Two years ago the students, alumni, and staff of Lincoln-Sudbury raised money to build a sister school in Cambodia to memorialize students and young alumni who LS had “lost too soon” and to help give hope to the students of a poor country decimated by genocide.
A year later, with the help of students at the Haynes School, a second solar-powered computer was purchased for the Lincoln-Sudbury Memorial School in Cambodia. The two computers, it was hoped, would not only help the students there learn English, become computer literate, and dream of a life beyond the rice fields, but would also enable a cultural exchange between these two schools on opposite ends of the earth. Today, a dozen L-S students are, or will soon become, “pen pals” with their Cambodian counterparts.
Still, no one ever guessed that this new computer link would make possible the Internet equivalent of a 911 call from Cambodia. But when that call came, L-S students were listening.
In mid-October, a teacher and several pen pals at the Memorial School alerted students at L-S that a natural catastrophe was taking place in Thailand and the Battambang region of Cambodia. This disaster had not yet made most American newspapers. Flooding of historic proportions was destroying the rice fields that Cambodians depended on for work and food. Some people had been killed, and many others had lost their supplies of rice.
Realizing that hungry students cannot learn, the Memorial School group at L-S immediately put aside its usual educational priorities, and began raising money for an emergency rice distribution at the school. Within three weeks, the group had raised $3000, and the money was sent to Cambodia.
Frustrating logistical problems and the need to carefully investigate which students most needed the rice delayed the shipment for months. The 100 poorest students at this school of 400 were finally identified and the rice was trucked up from Phnom Penh two weeks ago, on Jan. 30. The rice arrived later than the L-S group had hoped, but in another sense it arrived right on time, just as families were exhausting their emergency food reserves.
Attached to the email confirming the arrival of the rice came five photographs. They showed grateful students who would now eat because their pen pals and the L-S community cared.
What began with cold checks and soulless computers has developed into a real human connection between young people in two countries a half-a-world apart. The term “sister school” has taken on a new meaning in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and Thmar Kaul, Cambodia.
For more information about the L-S Memorial School, see: www.lincolnsudburymemorialschool.org/
The members of the L-S Memorial School group responsible for the success of the emergency rice drive were: Molly Bloomenthal, Alex Braverman, Mira Dayal, Maia Dinsmore, Callie Flanagan, Sophia Goswami, Ronan Hunt, Kellie Heye, Becca Kupperstein, Ashley Miller, Grace Tam, Sarah Thompson, and Emma Yeager.
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