| One of the lessons that every NGO working in Cambodia learns early on is that transportation has to be factored into every plan to help people here. Maryknoll set up a teaching hospital to train eye surgeons who would work in clinics in the rural provinces around the country. Once the first doctors and nurses were trained, it quickly became apparent that they were going to have little to do because people beyond walking distance in the rural areas could not afford transportation to the new clinics. In our own Deaf Development Program, we have found that many of our students initially registered for our literacy and sign language classes have dropped out because their poor families couldn't afford the ten or twenty cents it would cost to send them to school every day. |
The DDP teachers in four provinces gave us the names of the students who needed bicycles and we purchased an initial twenty of them in Phnom Penh to be taken back to the provinces by their teachers when they finished a training session in the capital. Chan Virak is the team leader of the six teaching teams and organized the purchase of the bicycles shown here in the hall of the DDP office in Phnom Penh.