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On Sunday, Musica Felice will have a charity concert at the Sofitel Hotel in Phnom Penh to benefit the Deaf Development Programme. Our deaf students will have a walk-on role at the end and today our teachers handed out T-shirts they will wear. Our special thanks to Ms. Miwako Fujiwara, the organizer of Musica Felice, who also provided the shirts!
Does the description under this photo raise any questions for you about the inefficiency, silliness, can we say incompetence, of the bureaucracy in Cambodia?
Education is Cambodia in normal times is generally uneven and inadequate, and Covid made the situation worse. The schools were closed a year and a half and an attempt at online learning was not effective. A good number of students don’t have electricity much less a computer or smartphone or wi-fi connection.
The current school year began late, in January, 2023, and it was anticipated that the new year would start in January, 2024. Schools were preparing for that schedule. Suddenly the government announces this school year will end three weeks into November and the new school year starts December 1st.
This throws the planning of NGOs and groups supporting education really out of whack. Maryknoll has a month-long program to help older students catch up and adjust to the curriculum after missing so much school but now that has to be dropped. The kids suffer….
When I first came to Phnom Penh, one of the institutions of the capital city was Sambo the elephant who spent the day at Wat Phnom giving rides for tourists. That was his life until he was retired in 2014 to an elephant refuge in the mountains where he spent the last nine years of his life in peace until he died this past week.
Today we had the quarterly meeting of the Catholic Alliance for Charity and Development, the organization of the Cambodian Catholic Church’s social service agencies.
