The beauty of a bright smile

Dr. David Wyman and his family donated a year’s worth of dental supplies to the Harpswell Foundation Dormitory for University Women in Cambodia.

Wed May 07, 2008
Wicked Local (Arlington, Massachusetts, USA)

Arlington, Mass. - During a recent family vacation, Dr. David Wyman found a way to give back a smile. Friends and patients of Wyman know that he loves to travel and go on adventures with his family. And if there is a way that he can help or do a little something out of the ordinary to make it more exciting, he always finds a way.

Why Cambodia? Well, it is far away — always a first priority — and has one of the wonders of the world (Angkor Wat) — another priority. As well, it’s a chance to experience, with his wife, Maryellen, and sons, Micah, Ethan and Luke, how blessed they are here in the States and tohow war and poverty can affect people and places. The country was left devastated by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

“We want to teach our family about giving back, helping, little or big,” said Wyman. “In fact, the experiences during this trip were, by far, some of the most humbling that we have ever had.”

A few months before leaving for Cambodia, Wyman read the article “Lightman’s Dream” in the Living Section of the Boston Globe, which appeared Monday, November 19, 2007. Alan Lightman who is an MIT physicist and author, is the founder and chief supporter of a new three-story dormitory in Cambodia for university girls called the Harpswell Foundation Dormitory for University Women. This housing gives women the chance to pursue an education. After reading the article, Wyman called Lightman to express an interest in contributing dental supplies to the students. Lightman was very helpful and encouraged the family to visit.

After a few days of sightseeing in Phnom Penh, the Wyman family ventured off to find the dormitory. They spent an entire morning traveling down narrow dirt roads covered in trash and full of potholes, making U-turns and wrong turns, sitting on a trailer being pulled by a moped until they finally found it.

The house manager, Peou Vanna, generously welcomed the family, saying she had been expecting them. Vanna gave the family a tour of the facilities. The family found the dorm rooms neat and tidy with two bunk beds. The students, who range in age from 18 to 22 and study law, accounting and nursing, each had a desk covered with books and study materials.

On a weekly basis, the girls rotate duties such as cooking, cleaning and hand-washing clothing. The second floor had a small TV room with two computers for Internet usage. None have ever been anywhere beyond the province they were born and Phnom Penh where they study. To call home, they call the one or two individuals in their villages who have a phone and arrange a time when they can call back and have a phone shared with their parent. Each girl receives a monthly allowance of $16, which is carefully managed and can last the month.

The Wyman family had the opportunity to meet each girl and sit in a classroom talking with them. David enjoyed telling them a little about Harpswell, Maine (their school’s namesake town) since he is from Maine himself. The girls, who spoke a fair amount of English, used every formal greetings, bowing to acknowledge each person separately before they spoke to us as a whole. Having spent an hour or more with them answering their questions, the Wyman family took group photos and provided them with a year’s worth of dental supplies. The students told the family that they will be smiling very brightly when the Wyman family comes back for a visit!

The family called it one of the highlights of the trip but felt their contribution was a drop in the bucket compared to what Lightman has done.

“Putting aside the toothbrushes, paste and floss,” said Wyman, “we touched them and they certainly touched us. It was a wonderful lesson about how much you get from giving.”

My Believe - by Peou Vanna, Dormitory Manager

“I believe that in the near future Cambodian women could do a great deal with self confidence and freedom.

I think it is important to promote young women who have a great idea and motivation to become the heads of big organizations.

I also want to see women who have had families, who have to deal with real life, I want them to apply their life practice and their experiences to change Cambodia in gender equality!!”

A dream come true: Lightman lights up future for Cambodians

Adjunct Professor of the Humanities in the Program in Writing Alan Lightman sits in the mosque built by his and his wife's Harpswell Foundation with villagers, Muslim Chams (of the San Cham sect). Photo / Elyse Lightman
Alan Lightman, at right, shares a meal with Cambodian students. The Harpswell Foundation, which he and his wife founded, built a dormitory for the women so they could attend college in Phnom Penh. Photo / Elyse Lightman
This mosque, built by Alan and Elyse Lightman's Harpswell Foundation, was completed in December 2007 and will be inaugurated this week in Tramung Chrum, Cambodia. Photo / Elyse Lightman

May 7, 2008
Donna Coveney, News Office
MIT News (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

The inauguration this week of a new mosque in the Cambodian village of Tramung Chrum will represent a dream come true for residents of the Muslim enclave in the overwhelmingly Buddhist country.

That dream was brought to life by Alan Lightman, MIT physicist and writer who a decade or so ago, with his wife, Jeanne, made a pact to turn their energies toward humanitarian pursuits. Without a firm direction or funding, they formed the nonprofit Harpswell Foundation in 1999.

Within a few years, Lightman, Jeanne and their daughter, Elyse, would attend the opening of a school built in an impoverished village 50 miles from Phnom Penh, build and manage a women's dorm and leadership center in Phnom Penh and, finally, build the new mosque in Tramung Chrum.

Lightman has been entranced by science and the arts from an early age. Appointed professor of science and writing and senior lecturer in physics at MIT in 1989, he went on to head the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies from 1991 to 1997 and helped found the Catalyst Collaborative, a collaboration between MIT and the Underground Railway Theatre of Boston in 2004. His novel, "Einstein's Dreams," published in 1993, was an international bestseller and has been translated into 30 languages.

Professor Lightman first heard of Tramung Chrum, a tiny Muslim village in Cambodia, in 2003 from the Rev. Fred Lipp. Lipp, who had been working to keep young girls in school in Cambodia with his own foundation, told Alan of a village whose only school had a roof of palm fronds. Lightman's imagination was kindled and in December of that year he and daughter Elyse accompanied Lipp to Cambodia.

What they found was a village of about 500 people--mostly Muslim Chams, one of Cambodia's ethnic minorities. With neither running water nor electricity, the local economy was based on subsistence farming and menial labor.

"We were overwhelmed with emotion," Lightman says softly, his eyes lighting at the memory. "These people had gone through tremendous suffering since the mid-1970s and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, and in spite of that they had hope and resilience. "The best expression of that hope for the future," he says, "was when we arrived, mothers holding babies came up and asked for our help to build a school.

They had nothing, lived in abject poverty, but wanted a school, a future. We were so moved."

Funded by donations from family and friends, the school was finished in the summer of 2005. Where a roof of palm fronds had been now stands a concrete-and-steel-girder school.

The impetus for his next project came from Veasna Chea, a native of Tramung Chrum who had made it through law school in Phnom Penh by living with three female classmates in the space on the mud floor beneath the school for four years. Male students could live in the Buddhist temples, but in the gritty capital, there were few, if any, safe places for women to stay, so few women attended college.

Once again, he took on the challenge, found contractors and built the dormitory and leadership center.

But that was only the beginning. Lightman reckons, "One-third of my waking hours I spend on Cambodia daily." From sleeping security guards to the students' need for medical procedures, funds for upkeep, teachers, food and all life's issues, Lightman is the go-to guy. His daily electronic communications with the dorm represent the sole exception to Lightman's personal ban on using e-mail.

He is presently trying to raise a $500,000 endowment to keep the dorm and all it offers up and running in the future.

As he busied himself managing the dorm and leadership center, the villagers of Tramung Chrum, thrilled with their school, asked him to build a mosque. To Lightman, health care seemed a more compelling need, but he understood that it had to be what the entire village wanted. So he asked the men and women of the village to choose five representatives each, and he met with the two groups separately. The men wanted a mosque, the women wanted health care.

A meeting was convened to give the 10 representatives the opportunity to address the whole village and then vote on which project to take forward. After a civil discussion, all the men and three women voted for the mosque. The reason? The mosque represented their spiritual health, which they considered more important than their physical health. Lightman recognized that the cultural value and tradition was different than his own and that the social fabric of the community depended on the mosque.

"They are so proud," he says, "so deeply happy with this mosque."

[MIT physicist and author] Lightman's dream

MIT physicist and author empowers young Cambodian women by building a dormitory for them in Phnom Penh

November 19, 2007
By Tinker Ready
Globe Correspondent
Boston Globe (Mass., USA)

The new three-story Harpswell Foundation Dormitory for University Women is named for a town in Maine. But it's on an unpaved street in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, populated with fried fish vendors, motorbike taxis, and roaming chickens.

The name is a nod to the building's founder and chief supporter, Alan Lightman, the MIT physicist and celebrated author. Lightman, a soft-spoken, deep-thinking Southerner who summers on a quiet island near Harpswell, said he now spends about a third of his time running the dorm for rural women he built in Cambodia. While working on another aid project there in 2003, Lightman learned that a lack of secure housing prevents many village women from going to college. All the schools are in the gritty capital, and few offer dormitories. Lightman saw a clear solution. He raised money, bought a piece of land, hired contractors, and built a dorm.

Now, he is "Dad" to more than 30 women. Until the dorm opened about a year ago, they faced lives as rice farmers, tour guides, or possibly brides in arranged marriages. Now they want to work for the government, earn PhDs, and study overseas.

"As unexpected as it was to find myself on the other side of the planet in the culture I knew nothing about, I felt like I could make a difference," Lightman said. "It wasn't a lost cause. This is something that was not beyond my reach."

Lightman's vision for the dorm goes beyond offering a safe haven and a leg up to young scholars. A brass plaque inside House 50 on Street 508 spells it out in both Khmer and English: "Our mission is to empower a new generation of Cambodian women." A similar bilingual plaque outside the building announced the name of the dorm, but it has disappeared twice. Local kids can get $5 for the brass, Lightman said.

A Memphis native, Lightman is a theoretical physicist by trade. In the 1980s he taught astronomy at Harvard and moved on to MIT, where he is still part of the science writing program. He has two adult daughters, and he and his wife, painter Jean Lightman, split their time between Concord and Maine.

Change within reach

A phone call from a stranger started Lightman's journey to Cambodia. Frederick Lipp, a Unitarian minister in Portland, Maine, wanted to use Lightman's book "Einstein's Dreams" in a sermon. The two men became friends, and eventually Lightman joined Lipp's effort to help a small, Spartan Cambodian village about 50 hard miles from Phnom Penh.

Lightman recalled the day he and his daughter Elyse first went to Tramung Chrum to meet the villagers. He was thinking he might want to join Lipp's effort, but he was unprepared for the emotions that hit him.

"The women started coming up to us, holding their babies, and said, 'Please help us build a school,' " he said. "I was just amazed that in this remote village with no electricity, no plumbing, no toilets, they were talking about education. . . . I was overwhelmed by their courage and their ability to think in the long term."

So Lightman - a serious and unflashy person - did something he finds extremely difficult. He asked family and friends for money. He talked about Cambodia's painful recent history, which remains defined by memories of the 1970s, when the United States bombed provinces at the Vietnam border and the Maoist Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and sent everyone to virtual prison farms. Almost four years later, the Vietnamese invaded, but not before about 1.7 million people were summarily executed or died of disease or starvation. In 1994, the Vietnamese left, and the United Nations sponsored elections, but the country still suffers from years of isolation, decay, poverty, and corruption.

What this meant for Tramung Chrum is that no one ever remembers having a "concrete" school, Lightman told potential donors. Instead, they hold classes in a makeshift palm-leaf shelter. The 50 or so contributors who stepped up became the core supporters of the Harpswell Foundation.

In the process, Lightman met Chea Veasna, a Cambodian lawyer working on the Tramung Chrum school project. She told him that she lived in an unfinished space underneath the law school building while studying there. There were no college dorms in the city then, and there are few now. Male students can bunk in the city's many temples, but Buddhist rules bar women, she explained.

"Veasna convinced me that this was a critical problem, and she and I together hatched the idea of building the dormitory," Lightman said. The dollar goes a long way in Cambodia; they were able to do it for $150,000.

Lightman travels to Cambodia several times a year. Even when the family retreats to the quiet of their purposely unwired house in Maine, Elyse Lightman said, her father often slips into town to check dorm-related e-mail.

"It's like anything else in his life; he puts a lot of his own care and time into," she said. "He is very passionate about it."

Lipp called the dorm project " 'Einstein's Dreams' live."

"In Alan's book, you're captured by something that you have never thought before," Lipp said. "You dream yourself into a new reality where the world has changed. . . . That's what happened here."

The smartest and bravest

For So Dany, a smiley 20-year-old from a village in western Cambodia, "new reality" might be an understatement. So's parents are farmers, and both are Khmer Rouge survivors. She wanted to go to college, she said, but her parents were afraid to send her to the city.

One day, dorm manager Peou Vanna appeared at her school, asking for the smartest, "bravest" girls in her class, she said. After a series of interviews and tests, So was chosen.

"If I did not have the opportunity to get a college education, I would end up being a market seller in my village," she said in Khmer.

Instead, she and the inaugural group of about 30 women - also plucked out of their villages - moved into the pinkish, cement building about 15 minutes from the city center. By habit, they head out to school on their bicycles wearing the traditional white shirt and pleated skirt uniforms. But unlike the generation before them, they tend toward jeans instead of sarongs.

In the dry season, Street 508 is dusty; during the rains, it is flooded. The air smells of cooking fires, roasted fish, or whatever street-food vendors have to offer. The dorm is set back a bit but stands out among the vegetable shops and run-down villas for its newness and for the large, medallion-like facade vents on each floor sculpted into the shape of Cambodian dancers.

Inside, some of the residents listen intently as an American volunteer teaches computer skills, in English. In addition to room and board, life in the dorm includes English classes, access to Internet-equipped computers, and weekly discussion of the news in The Cambodia Daily. They also have 24-hour security.

Back home in leafy Concord, Lightman tries to manage problems like sleeping guards via e-mail. He has other things to worry about - like reviews of his new book, "Ghost." But the dorm is now a part of each day. When he talks of what drew him so deeply into the project, he always goes back to that first day at Tramung Chrum. The well-traveled Lightman said he is sure he wasn't reacting to the shock of seeing desperate poverty firsthand.

"I was reacting to something that rose above the poverty," he said. "I guess hope is what really got under my skin. I found there was hope there."

Tinker Ready spent 1996 working with The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. Lor Chandara, a senior writer at the paper, contributed to this report.