by 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.
The school’s assistant principle, Teng Chan Srol, and our sixth grade teacher, Dy Samnang, both have volleyball experience and volunteered to coach the team. They quickly organized tryouts and selected a ten man squad from the fifth and sixth grade classes. Srol and Samnang began putting the boys through conditioning exercises as well as volleyball instructions, and within a short four weeks the Spitler School had a competitive team of energized young boys, who were getting their first exposure to being part of a team effort. Pam and I sent several emails to Sarin asking him to emphasize to the coaches and the boys that, while winning is nice, what we wanted them to learn from this experience was the importance of working together as a team, supporting your teammates, and working toward a goal.
To add to the experience we provided the team with nice uniforms and each boy received a pair of sports shoes. We provided them with a soy milk drink for some extra protein, and Sarin arranged for a van to pick up the boys in the village and transport them to and from the city during the three day tournament. While our valiant little team did not win many games they played well for only having a month of experience, and they represented our school well. A few days after the tournament Sarin treated the boys and coaches to a hearty barbeque meal. We look forward to entering our team in future events and continuing to emphasize teamwork and camaraderie.
For those of you, like Pam, who would have preferred to see some girls on the team, we hear you, but Title Nine hasn’t made it to Cambodia yet, so we are playing with the rules that they have. We’ll keep looking for a similar program for our girl students.
Speaking of girl students, we have a small student by the name of Sari Malin. Her little face was in one of our Christmas photos, and one of our donors picked up on the fact that she had an eye problem. Peter and Sally Preston offered to help with the cost of getting Malin’s eye checked to see if her condition could be corrected. They had heard of a Dr. Phara who treated eye problems at the Angkor Children’s Hospital. After a few emails and inquiries we located Dr. Phara, and she was able to provide an opinion of Malin’s condition from her photo. She suggested that Malin be brought to the hospital for an examination, as she believed the condition was quite treatable.
Our assistant principle arranged for a tuk-tuk to bring Malin and her father to the clinic where Dr. Phara examined her and emailed a diagnosis which read as follows:
She has V pattern Esotropia and Left eye severe Amplyopia(Lazy eye). Refraction is RE: +5.25 Dioptre, LE: +7D.
Despite the ominous sounding diagnosis the condition is curable. It requires that Malin wear a patch for several hours a day on her good eye to exercise her bad eye, she will received some special glasses, which the clinic ordered for her, and she will have follow up visits with the clinic. After her appointment with Dr. Phara there was already a considerable improvement.
It was an exciting process to locate Dr. Phara, communicate with her, and to help facilitate Malin’s appointment and her healing process. A big thank you to Peter and Sally for picking up on Malin’s photo and passing along Dr. Phara’s name to us, along with a donation to be used toward the medical needs of our students.
AND – speaking of medical needs! Those of you who have been receiving our newsletter for at least a couple of years will remember the Angkor Children’s Hospital (ACH) sent a team to the school to examine our children back in early 2008. The hospital was scheduled to send another team last October, but the typhoon hit several days before the scheduled visit and that took care of that. We were finally able to reschedule, and we were pleased to learn that ACH would be sending their teams out for two full days. Each day the team consisted of a doctor and seven nurses. During their two days at the school they were able to examine over 300 of our students and update all of the medical records that we began back in 2008.
We are very grateful to the staff of ACH for the great work that they do for the children of Cambodia and for sharing some of their staff for two days at the Spitler School. We authorized Sarin to make a donation to ACH of $150, which covered half of the nurses’ salaries for the two days of medical exams (the nurses receive $22 for the day’s work or around $2.50 per hour). If any of our readers would like to know more about the work of the Angkor Children’s Hospital please visit their website at: www.fwab.org
As you can see there is no shortage of exciting news from Spitler School. We hope that reading about these events brings a smile to your face. We hope that we can provide a reminder that amongst all of the bad news, and the fear and suffering, there are plenty of folks like Dr. Phara and the staff at ACH who “SHOW UP.” So many good things can happen when we decide to just “SHOW UP” and make difference.
Here is a special thanks and acknowledgment to the following donors who have made financial contributions to the Spitler School Foundation since our last newsletter.
Peter & Sally Preston
Melissa Fox
Ida Cuthbertson
Les & Shirley Hoffman
Dennis DeFrain
Joan Gilbert (in honor of her grandson’s 14th B-Day)
Jeannine Watson (in memory of Carol Schoenrock)
Daniel & Pam Spitler, Directors
Spitler School Foundation
P.O. Box 730
Peoria, AZ 85380
“Resource Providers for Cambodian School Children”
http://dannypam.smugmug.com/gallery/2466201_eEC9c
IRS EIN # 20-8085411