School House Report – February 2010
We are only a month into the 2010, but it has been an eventful time for the Spitler School, and we are pleased to share the latest news.
In our last newsletter we informed you about the rice and mosquito nets which our foundation was able to provide to the village families. Thanks to the help of generous donors we were able to do an additional two distributions, thus helping to provide food supplements and protection from mosquito born disease for a large number of our students and their families. We will continue to keep supplies of rice stored at the school in case of additional emergency needs in the village.
We are very grateful to those who stepped up and donated additional funds, which were so instrumental in allowing us to provide this assistance to our students and their families following the flood that hit the village in early October.
We have maintained enough funds to do the road repairs that we told you about in our last newsletter, but the conditions have not become dry enough to begin. We are hopeful that the project will begin soon and we will be giving you an exciting report on this project in our next newsletter.
At the end of 2005, the year we began the school, Sarin invited the teachers to his modest home where he and Mary fixed them a Christmas dinner. We have encouraged him to continue this tradition, and this year we again furnished a Christmas dinner for our teachers and their families at one of the local restaurants in Siem Reap. It was also a good time to wish a happy first birthday to Sarin’s daughter, Vitee, who was born in November of 2008, only four hours after Sarin managed to get Pam and me on a flight to Saigon. As you recall this was after the Bangkok airport was taken over by protesters, playing havoc with our flight home.
In late December the Spitler School was invited to participate in a sports program being promoted by the Education Ministry as a part of their anti-drug campaign in the grade schools. The ministry is promoting sports activity and invited Spitler School to send a boy’s volleyball team to participate in a tournament in late January.