CU freshman raising money to help build school in Cambodia

University of Colorado freshman Heather Starbuck poses for a portrait while wearing a shirt she designed for Operation Lyhou, a project she founded to raise funds to build a school in rural Cambodia. (Will Morgan)

Heather Starbuck touched by trip she made in high school

09/06/2009
By Melanie Asmar, asmar@coloradodaily.com
ColoradoDailyMail.com

HELP OUT
To learn more about Operation Lyhou -- or buy a T-shirt -- visit operationlyhou.blogspot.com or e-mail Heather Starbuck at heather.starbuck@colorado.edu

Several things about Heather Starbuck's trip to Cambodia last year made an impression on her. The heat. The cockroaches that crunched under her feet when she walked down the hallway of her hotel. The way the kids at the school she visited immediately caught on to "The Macarena."

The kids surprised the University of Colorado freshman in other ways, too.

As she was saying goodbye on her last day, a particularly outgoing 13-year-old boy named Lyhou approached her. He was one of the poorest in the school, she said; he wore the same shirt, green-and-white striped with a sassy saying -- "I Do What I Want" -- printed in English across the front, almost every day.

That day, he took off his sunglasses and gave them to her as a keepsake.

"They were probably his only personal possession," she said. "He had nothing but he was so generous."

Starbuck has started a campaign in Lyhou's name to raise money to build another school in Cambodia.

The 18-year-old launched Operation Lyhou (pronounced Lee-how) this past summer with the goal of raising $13,000. To reach her goal, Starbuck is selling trendy T-shirts emblazoned with a sketched peace sign for $19.99 each.

So far, she said, she's raised $526.

Starbuck is working with an organization called American Assistance for Cambodia, which has helped build more than 400 elementary and middle schools in rural Cambodia since 1999. Through the organization, World Bank will match Starbuck's $13,000. The money will pay for the construction of a modest school and other amenities, including teachers, computers and solar panels, she said.

"The kids there love school," she said, adding that they often came early or stayed late and showed up on weekends to use the computers.

"It's amazing to see how much they took advantage of it," she said -- especially coming from the United States, "where school is seen as such a drag."

Starbuck traveled to Cambodia as a high school junior. Her school, the private Overlake School in Redmond, Wash., had raised the money to build a primary school in the town of Pailin, Cambodia, several years earlier, a project profiled in a New York Times column about the problem of sex trafficking in Cambodia and the positive effects of education.

Every two years, students from Overlake return to Pailin to make improvements and volunteer there, teaching English, dental hygiene and other subjects for two-and-a-half weeks.

Starbuck ended up on the trip by chance. She was new to Overlake and halfway through her junior year, hadn't chosen an activity for the school's "project week." Someone dropped out of the coveted Cambodia trip at the last minute and she snagged a spot, not knowing what to expect. At the time, she said, she was bitter, "an angry high school kid who thought school was boring."

Visiting Pailin changed that.

"I was feeling really down," she said, "but it made me realize there are so many better things you could be doing than feeling bad for yourself. Somewhere in the world, someone has it worse."

The trip inspired Starbuck to intern with two nonprofit groups -- a microfinancing organization called Global Partnerships and the aid agency Mercy Corps -- and eventually apply to CU, where she's studying international affairs.

She said she chose CU partly because the school is ranked the No. 5 all-time producer of Peace Corps volunteers, a path she's considering pursuing after graduation.

Starbuck keeps in touch with Lyhou, who's now 14 and in high school. At first, she said, the e-mails they sent were simple: "How's the weather? Did you go to school today?"

But in the year and a half since she last saw him, Lyhou's English has improved. In one of his last messages, he asked what she sees as a very important question: "How's college?"

Lyhou told her he wants come to the United States to study.

"He seems to have really big goals," Starbuck said.

So does she.

RandomKid Opens School in Cambodia

RandomKid marks the opening of a school in Cambodia that the kids named FOR EACH OTHER. Attending the event are 5 children from the USA representing 70 children from 19 countries around the world who participated in this project. In order of appearance: Talia Leman (IA), Robbye Raisher (NM) and Maddie Lawry (TN). In Part 2, you will see Allison Sant (OH) and Stevie Peacock (FL). The video has multiple cuts, because we edited out the Cambodian translator. This project was made possible by American Assistance to Cambodia, through Bernard Krisher.

Saving the World in Study Hall

Rachel Rosenfeld (R) and her family at the Rachel Rosenfeld school she helped build (Photo: AP)

May 11, 2008
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Op-Ed Columnist
The New York Times (USA)

Teenagers are supposed to be sullen and self-absorbed, but Rachel S. Rosenfeld never got the memo.

Rachel is a high school junior in Harrison, N.Y., who came down with a painful intestinal ailment that forced her to miss the entire 2006-7 school year. So she resolved that if she couldn’t go to school herself, she could at least help other kids who wanted to.

From her sickbed, Rachel sold T-shirts and solicited contributions to build a 316-student elementary school in rural Cambodia. Borrowing an idea from university fund-raising, she offered naming opportunities: for $25, donors could buy chairs to be named for them. All told, she raised $57,000, which was channeled through an aid group, American Assistance for Cambodia.

Now Rachel is mostly healthy again and back in school, but over the December vacation she traveled to Cambodia to cut the ribbon at the R. S. Rosenfeld School.

“The children were all so grateful and well-behaved,” Rachel said. “It truly was a life-changing experience.”

College students used to be the activists, but increasingly they’re joined by high school pupils and even younger children. The spotlight may be on billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates, but one of the country’s healthier trends has been the rise of piggy-bank philanthropists.

Two high school students in Massachusetts, Ana Slavin and Nick Anderson, started a nationwide high school campaign, Dollars for Darfur, that has raised $420,000 for the people of Darfur from 440 schools.

The humanitarian prodigies like Ana and Nick are laudable for going beyond simple protesting to help their causes. Today’s young social entrepreneurs come across as more constructive than my generation of student activists, and more savvy about how to accomplish their goals cost-effectively.

Senator Chris Dodd has pushed for a requirement of 100 hours of public service in high school. There’s a risk that a mandate undermines the virtue, but on balance I’m in favor. Colleges should also emulate Princeton and encourage young people to take a “gap year” of public service abroad (I list a few possibilities for a gap year and for student activism on my blog, nytimes.com/ontheground).

Climate change has particularly galvanized high school students — perhaps because it’s their world that we’re cooking. A 16-year-old in San Francisco, Taylor Francis, has been speaking to groups around the country about global warming; after some training by Al Gore, he has set up his own Web site and is heading to China in June to give a dozen lectures there.

“There’s an enormous outpouring of young people who are trying to do community service,” Taylor said. “Unfortunately, a lot of that is probably just to get into college.”

These days, even some elementary children are getting involved. More than 2.5 million children participated in a drive on Club Penguin, a children’s activities Web site, that directed $1 million to charity.

In keeping with thousands of years of tradition, I should be wringing my hands about adolescents these days, so lazy and degenerate compared with my own upstanding generation. But when I see high school students working energetically to save the lives of people half a world away, before they are even allowed to buy a beer, I’m reduced to mumbling admiration. These kids are truly inspiring.

As a 16-year-old in Melbourne, Fla., Allyson Brown organized a Valentine’s dance at her high school, with the proceeds going to fight malaria in Africa. That dance grew into Stayin’ Alive, a campaign that has attracted more than 100 schools in 31 states to raise money to buy mosquito bed nets that cost $10 each and protect a family from malaria.

The aim of Stayin’ Alive, which is run by a group called Malaria No More, is to buy enough bed nets to protect two million children. Allyson, who remains very involved in the program, will have saved more lives as a student than many doctors save in a lifetime.

It’s true that some of the activism may have less to do with humanitarianism than with college applications. But even when greedy, self-absorbed cynics take on some worthy cause for the most selfish motives, they often learn and grow from the experience.

“I’ve seen some people who just want to bump up their résumés,” Allyson acknowledged. But she said that most participation seemed heartfelt — including that of a girl, about 7 years old, who ran a lemonade stand to buy bed nets for African kids.

“A lot of people say that teenagers aren’t thinking about the greater good,” Allyson added, just a hint of protest in her voice. “But when you give teens a chance to help, and they know their contributions will make a difference, then they help a lot.”

So maybe it’s time that we all learn from our juniors.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

Hands-on help for Cambodia

School project offers education in caring, sharing

May 11, 2008
By Victoria Cheng
Boston Globe Correspondent (Massachusetts, USA)

Four letters may not be a lot, but it's enough to underpin a $20,000 fund-raising effort to build a school in rural Cambodia. Calling itself the Cambridge School for Cambodia (and Camb-Camb for short), the campaign brings together students, businesses, and several groups across the city, some with deep ties to Cambodia and some who have always called Cambridge home.

Rachael Harkavy, a fifth-grade student at the King Open School, started learning about Cambodia in January when she and her peers in the school's fifth through eighth grades joined the effort by hosting weekly penny drives. She reels off statistics about the country that highlight how Cambodia compares with the United States. "It's about the size of Oklahoma and has the population of Pennsylvania," she began.

Camb-Camb is raising money to send to American Assistance for Cambodia, a nonprofit organization run by former Newsweek journalist Bernie Krisher, that has built more than 400 schools across the country.

"We'll be the 405th school, but it's not enough," Harkavy added. "Massachusetts is about half the size of Cambodia and has about 1,000 schools, so that just brings into perspective how many schools Cambodia needs."

The planned Camb-Camb school will be 40 miles north of Phnom Penh and accommodate between 200 and 400 students. Krisher started the initiative in 1993 and negotiated a memorandum of understanding with the World Bank that called for it to match whatever money he raised for the project. The cost of a school, Krisher said, "is actually about $30,000, and the donor only pays about $13,000." By contributing an extra $7,000, the Cambridge School for Cambodia will be able to equip its school with an English teacher, solar panels for a computer, and Internet access, he said.

Longteine de Monteiro owns the Elephant Walk restaurants, which feature French and Cambodian cuisine at locations in Cambridge, Boston, and Waltham. The Cambodian native explained that outside assistance is sorely needed in the country, which was devastated first by the spillover effects of the Vietnam War and then by genocide during the brutal rule of the communist Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

"The government now doesn't really do much to help education," she said, "so all the foundations from outside of the country who go there and build whatever the country needs, especially schools and hospitals, are very important."

When Camb-Camb contacted de Monteiro to explore opportunities for collaboration, she agreed to host a benefit dinner at her North Cambridge restaurant early last month.

"We served the meal that we usually serve on New Year's Day in Cambodia," which is April 15, de Monteiro said. "We did chicken curry, Salade Cambodgienne, and beef short ribs with green coconut juice."

The event raised enough money to bump Camb-Camb's funds to the $13,300 mark and also gave attendees like East Boston resident Selena Sang, whose family is Cambodian, a chance to revive memories of childhood traditions.

"My parents live in California," she said, adding that she had not eaten a traditional Cambodian New Year meal since moving here. The event also gave de Monteiro an opportunity to showcase a prominent part of Cambodian culture - its cuisine - and the desire to teach Cantabrigians about this small country perched on the southeastern peninsula of Asia.

At the King Open School, Rachael and fellow fifth-grader Eliza Klein have made it their goal to involve younger students in the project. "In the library we have a display with recipes and books and how to make origami elephants," Klein explained. "We don't want to be collecting money from people and having them say, 'Oh, we're sending it across the world to do blah blah blah.' We want them to really understand it, so that then they'll feel closer."

Before classes one day earlier this month, the girls helped set up an origami table at the school entrance, along with an empty water jug inviting donations of spare change. Sixth-grader Brianna Lavelle patiently guided the younger students through the steps of folding a colorful square of paper into the shape of a crane.

"See all these points here?" she said, indicating the triangular sections where the corners met. "Point it down and fold it like this," she instructed, pressing the edge of a flap against the table.

Eventually, the students managed to fold their pieces of paper into diamond-shaped creations that they then bent to create long necks and pointed tails.

"What is this for?" asked 6-year-old Bianca Byfield, as she handed over her crane to be placed on a large branch of a tree that will eventually hold 400.

"Every crane represents one child who will go to school in Cambodia," said Lavelle's mother, Risa. "And all of Cambridge is helping raise money."

Author raising money for Cambodian school

Tue, Mar. 04, 2008
By JENNIFER BHARGAVA
The Kansas City Star (USA)

Kari Grady Grossman is coming to northeast Johnson County to tell her story.

The Wyoming resident, and author of Bones That Float, A Story of Adopting Cambodia, will be giving a presentation at St. Agnes Catholic Parish this weekend about her efforts to help children in the Asian country.

She will read excerpts from her book, answer questions, show a short documentary and offer ways Kansas City area residents can help.

The presentations are part of her small grass-roots campaign, started seven years ago.

When Grady Grossman and her husband adopted their son from Cambodia in 2001, she said, their lives took a drastic turn.

Struck by the poor conditions surrounding children in the Third World country, the couple raised money to build the Grady Grossman School there.

“After we built the school, we thought we would go home with the baby and continue our normal lives,” Grossman said. “But when we took a trip back, we realized that the school wouldn’t be able to function without community support.”

She is trying to raise money for teacher salaries, school supplies and education for the community on how to operate the school. She would like to come up with a business model that could serve as a pilot for other schools in Cambodia.

The experience prompted her to write a book and start an organization with her husband called “Friends of the Grady Grossman School.”

Now she is asked by readers all over the United States to come and tell her story.
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Appearance

Kari Grady Grossman will be holding a presentation at 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. Sunday at St. Agnes Catholic Church and School, 5250 Mission Road in Roeland Park. She will be selling books and Cambodian silk and silver crafts after the show. All proceeds will benefit the Grady Grossman School in Cambodia.

For more information, visit www.gradygrossman