Our New Library Project

Hello everyone! Last year we built our second classroom, and we currently have 2 teachers teaching 5 English classes, 5 days per week. Our school is working really hard to develop. Before Khmer New Year we did an environment project, and we will keep doing it more often and hope to start a communal vegetable garden as soon as we can. Today, though, we have one need, and we're requesting your help. Our students need more resources to advance in their English ability. Our school's vision is to help our students improve their studies with better conditions, so we decided to make a real library that can provide more way of studying through more books, a reading competition, and movies for our students and the whole community. For this project, we need a new building just for the library. We need you help again with our new project that is really important to us for improving our school. Please help us by contributing to this project. We hope to hear from you - thank you!

 


             

COUNTRYSIDE CLASS

The Library Project  

Situation now

                        The beginning of 2014 we finally got 5 different English classes at the week, one Khmer traditional dance class at the weekend and one small library with two books shelves that have more than 500 different books (story books, work books, dictionaries, etc - almost 50 percent of the books are story books). We now have 3 English teachers and one dance teacher. There are almost 150 students and from different ages, 5 to 18 years old. Every year we get more and more students faster than what we expected. Thankfully, each year we’ve been able to find more support in our community and from others to help us build up our school and greatly improve our students’ success. Even when we have some problems affecting our work and progress, we still keep going with slow and steady progress, finding a solution step by step together.

We have had many plans for extra projects since the founding of our school in order to support this school’s progress and help our students to improve themselves more quickly and easily. Many of these extra projects, such as an environment project to address pollution in our community, require more knowledge and understanding than our students currently have. So our first step is creating a library project so that they can learn about these other subjects as well as continue to improve their English. But the library we have now isn’t sufficient; we don’t have enough books or a budget to pay for a librarian to support programs like movies, Story Telling Corner, and reading competitions. 

30 of our students participated in a community clean up as part of an environmental awareness campaign over Khmer New Year in April 2014.

So we need help from you all to help fund improving our library to create useful programs and support our students.

One of two current bookshelves at countryside Class.

The Plan

This is the plan we have for our new library:

We need one salary for a librarian for one year in advance, one projector for the movie plan, a computer for keep documentary of the school and the movies; two books shelves and 500 different books, one

Khmer New Year at Kampongseyma Pagoda

Over Khmer New Year, April 14-16, 2014, our students wanted to continue our tradition of putting on entertainment for our village and the surrounding villages. Each night about 400 community members came to watch our students sing, dance, and perform. They were able to take part in traditional Khmer games sponsored by World Vision, spend time socializing, and watch live entertainment from 7-10pm.

Countryside Class's entire philosophy is concentrated on improving our own community, so our activities are focused on Khmer helping Khmer. And the community has begun responding.

This year Countryside Class also included an environment component in which we did a community clean up a couple days before the holiday, hung signs throughout the pagoda, and spoke about keeping our environment clean and reducing plastic waste. The community clean up sparked further interest in our students and our school, so attendance and donations increased this year. We were also able to continue our partnerships with World Vision and Phare Ponleu Selpak.

Around 30 of our students helped in the clean up, preparation, and performances. They were able to have a lot of fun while having an experience that very few children in Cambodia are able to have. And they continue to inspire their community. We're very proud of all of them!

You can watch their performances on our youtube channel; we particularly loved this song.

And you can find pictures in our facebook group.

Khmer New Year Performance and Games at Kampongseyma Pagoda in Wat Kor Commune

Join Countryside Class at Kampongseyma Pagoda, Wat Kor Commune, Battambang Province for our Khmer New Year's festivities. 

On Monday the 14th we'll have

4 - 6pm: Traditional Khmer games

7 - 10pm: Coconut Dance and songs from Countryside Class and a play from World Vision 

10 - 11pm: Dance Party!

On Tuesday the 15th we'll have

4 - 6pm: Traditional Khmer games

7 - 10pm:  songs and an environment awareness program from Countryside Class 

10 - 11pm: Dance Party!

On Wednesday the 16th we'll have

4 - 6pm: Traditional Khmer games

7 - 10pm:  songs from Countryside Class and a circus performance from Phare Ponleu Selpak

10 - 11pm: Dance Party!

For questions, contact us at countrysideclass@gmail.com or 089 224 517

For directions to Kampongseyma Pagoda, https://www.google.fr/maps?t=m&ll=13.0685976%2C103.1835193&z=15&output=classic&dg=ntvo

Join the event on facebook at

https://www.facebook.com/events/1384797101759543/?context=create&source=49

Hope to see you there!!

Our Upcoming Project - Please Consider Donating

Countryside Class

Environment Project

Introduction
Cambodia is a post-conflict society. The struggles that come with that identity are most evident in the rural communities, where a lack of infrastructure and inadequate education create widespread problems. Countryside Class is aiming at a community level to target these problems proactively by educating the next generation of Cambodia to be critical, social thinkers. Children have the potential to be the greatest agents of change because their youth allows them to be open minded to new ideas and better life habits.

Our newest project has been a goal of Countryside Class since opening its doors in 2010: to address the increasing plastic waste in our village and across the country. Environmental knowledge is not common and smaller communities do not have an easy method of recycling. So the trash builds up along our roads and in our river, or it is burned, releasing harmful chemicals into our air.

We have a plan, but we need your help! Starting this project requires certain start up costs that we don’t have on hand. We need $380 to get this project started and to keep it going. You can read more about our project and see the itemized budget below. Please consider contributing to our first social action project. Our students are extremely excited to do some work in the community, but they can’t do it without your help!

The Coconut Dance

On Sunday March 23, 2014, some of our students performed a traditional Khmer dance, Coconut Dance, at Create Cambodia Arts Festival.

You can learn more about Create Cambodia on their website:

http://createcambodia.wordpress.com/