Thu, Nov 23, 2017 page4

• FEATURE: Advocate wants to break Cambodia’s poverty cycle

  CHANGING LIVES: Yang Wei-lin has been helping poor children receive an education for more than 20 years in a bid to prevent them being exploited as child workers

  • By Liu Li-jen and Sherry Hsiao / Staff Reporter, with Staff Writer
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  Nearly all of the graduates from a Cambodian junior-high school established last year by a Taiwanese advocate have passed high-school entrance exams held by the Cambodian government.

  Of the 15 graduates from the first class of the Field Relief Agency’s (FRA) school in Poipet, 13 passed the exam, setting a record for the region.

  The agency was established by Taiwanese advocate Yang Wei-lin (楊薇齡), who said that the students were moved to tears when they saw the results, because only a year earlier, going to high school was an unattainable dream for them.

  

  Graduates of Field Relief Agency Secondary and Vocational School are pictured in an undated photograph in Poipet, Cambodia.

  Photo courtesy of Field Relief Agency Secondary and Vocational School

  Yang said she was a volunteer for humanitarian aid in Indochina and witnessed the Khmer Rouge’s rule over Cambodia in the 1970s, when the nation experienced civil war and extreme poverty.

  She founded the agency in 1996, and chose to stay in an area of Cambodia where villages were still contaminated by landmines and living conditions were harsh, Yang said.

  Yang said she sparked the hopes of local residents by collecting donations and resources from Taiwan and sending them to Cambodia.

  The landmine areas were battlegrounds during Cambodia’s civil war. After the war, hundreds of thousands of landmines were left buried. The Cambodian government later opened the areas for use by poor people, but in the process of rebuilding the areas, many people accidentally stepped on landmines and lost limbs, while many children became victims of child labor.

  More than 40 percent of Cambodians are illiterate, and elementary and junior-high schools in the landmine areas are in poor condition.

  Yang said she deeply believes that education changes lives.

  If children receive a proper education and develop skills, not only can they earn money to support their family, but they can also end the vicious cycle of poverty, she said.

  The agency has helped tens of thousands of people through more than 20 years of paying for the education of poor children, helping rural villages renovate classrooms, gathering secondhand stationery items from Taiwan, and establishing a vocational training center to cultivate skills, she said.

  Yang said she applied to Cambodian authorities to establish a school and rebuilt the agency’s Poipet service building into a school.

  After discussions with the head of the Poipet City Department of Education, the FRA Secondary and Vocational High School was established in November last year, accepting 212 students, she said.

  Children of poor families are exempted from paying tuition, helping many children receive an education who might have otherwise entered the labor market as child workers.

  “The village where the [school] is located is home to more than 2,000 people and more than 1,000 elementary-school students. Including about 1,500 elementary-school students from neighboring villages, without a junior-high or high school, these children would have to walk 5km to 10km to go to a high school,” Yang said.

  Seventeen-year-old Ry Theary said that she “kept worrying that I would not pass [the exam] and would be unable to attend high school. After seeing my name on the list, [I was] really happy.”

  “Thank you, Taiwanese donors, for building a school so that we can have the opportunity to receive an education,” 16-year-old Soeun Seanghai said.

  “If we did not provide an opportunity for these children to receive an education, they might have been working at part-time jobs or begging on the streets. What the FRA does is small, but for the people living in poverty-stricken areas, it is something big,” Yang said.
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