Teaching the future

Aspen educators making a difference in Cambodia

February 4, 2007
By John Colson
The Aspen Times (Colorado, USA)

A retired Aspen school teacher had a dream of helping teachers elsewhere in the world, who struggle with adverse social and economic conditions that most U.S. teachers would consider intolerable and unacceptable.

Not only has Heidi Roupp accomplished her goal, but she has done so in a way that has allowed other Aspen teachers to do their part toward achieving the same end.

And at least one of those local teachers - Aspen High School's Barbara Smith - used part of her Dick Butera Distinguished Teacher Award, a $10,000 grant she received in the 2005 school year, to pay for her travel and purchases of art supplies for the teachers/students she would be working with.

Aspen High's college counselor Kathy Klug has gone to Cambodia two years in a row to help teachers there, and Barbara Smith went last summer for the first time. Both teachers say they are already planning to go back next summer.

"It's a place that gives you a profound respect and a humbleness for what we have," said Smith, a teacher with more than 30 years' experience. "They were a civilized country that got wiped out ... and the Americans helped it happen."

Smith was referring to the brutal regime of the Khmer Rouge, which reigned in Cambodia from 1975 through 1979 and is credited with killing up to 3 million people either directly or indirectly. And much of the brutality was directed at the nation's intelligentsia, to the point where at one time anyone wearing eyeglasses or showing any sign of education was in danger of assassination. Schools were closed across the country as the populace was forcibly moved from urban centers to collective farms for forced labor.

It is widely accepted that U.S. bombing campaigns against Cambodia during the Vietnam War contributed to the internal collapse of the country and to the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

Smith said she spent two weeks in the city of Siem Reap, near the fabled Angkor Temples district, teaching from early morning until mid-afternoon, after which many of the teacher/students would dash off to work, whether in their teaching jobs or some other.

She worked with two translators, suffering in 90-degree heat and 100-percent humidity, helping her students learn teaching techniques related to artistic instruction in a building with no electricity in the classrooms and where the blackboards had been painted over so they looked and felt like the walls themselves.

"It was a real learning experience" for all concerned, she recalled, adding everyone she worked with and met "were wonderful ... they were just darling."

After the teaching was over, she said, she spent a week sightseeing in Vietnam.

As for using her Butera grant in this way, Smith said, "I figured this was a way of paying it forward," a reference to a popular movie about passing on to others the gifts we ourselves receive.

"We came back with more than we ever gave those people," she added with a smile.

Roupp, who retired from the Aspen School District in 1998 and now lives in Phoenix, co-founded the Teachers Across Borders organization with a colleague, former Denver public school teacher Marilyn Hitchens, in late 2001. They did it, she said, because "we wanted to help teachers who were in underfunded schools."

School teachers in Cambodia typically earn a maximum of $35 a month, have little formal education and teach in dilapidated buildings with scant supplies.

"They have nothing," Smith said. "A felt-tipped pen is something for them." Among her gifts to her students, she said, were "packets" including pens, pencils, ink, brushes, water-color paper, glue and other art supplies.

The organization's efforts so far, Roupp said, have included sending teaching materials to a kindergarten class in Iran after the 2003 Bam earthquake; sending money to schools in the Dominican Republic to provide breakfasts to impoverished and undernourished kids; sending teachers to the nation of Burma/Myanmar; and the Cambodian teaching initiative.

"The reason we wanted to work in Cambodia," she remarked, "was because of the genocide," and the fact the country essentially has had to start over from almost nothing once the Khmer Rouge was finally routed following a lengthy guerilla war against a puppet government installed by neighboring Vietnam.

In the future, Roupp said, the organization hopes to send teaching materials to a variety of other locals, such as the former Soviet republic of Mongolia, which she said is badly in need of English language instructional materials.

The teachers sent to Cambodia, Roupp said, "had to be someone who really knew their subject matter, and could adjust to whatever changes occurred" in their surroundings, which are in Phnom Penh as well as in Seim Reap.

In addition, teachers are asked to pay for their own travel, help pay "a small honorarium" of $25 for each teacher/student, and to buy any supplies they think they will need.

Roupp estimated the cost to each volunteer teacher from the U.S. is about $2,500. So far, she said, about 65 U.S. and Australian teachers have taken part, along with perhaps 650 Cambodian teachers. And she expects the roster of volunteer teachers to expand in the future to include New Zealanders, Brits and Canadians.

John Colson's e-mail is jcolson@aspentimes.com