February 24, 2010
LEFT: Former Teton Valley Rotary President, Pat Butts, center, with Jackson’s Rotary President Sandy Seitz, left, and Lisa McCoy at the dedication of a new school in the village of Ta Trav last week. COURTESY PHOTOHis Excellency Mao Vuthy, Personal Advisor to Samdech Ponthea Chakrei Heng Sam Rin, Chairman of the National Assembly was there. So was Alta’s Pat Butts.
The event was recorded by Cambodian television and village families and children came from far and wide to celebrate the official inauguration of this large six-room concrete school building located in the village of Ta Trav, about 20 km north of Siem Reap city.
This is a school in Cambodia that will provide education for countless generations of rural Cambodian children. For Butts, a first time visitor to this third world nation more than half way around the world, it is a long time dream to see the tangible realities of work through the nonprofit Trailblazers Foundation that she and members of the Teton Valley Rotary Club have long supported.
“I’m excited to see the people, the volunteers,” said Butts before her mid-Feb. trip. “I want to see the people and I want to see what the Rotary money is doing.”
The Rotary has earned two grants over the last five years to support the efforts of the non-profit Trailblazers Foundation. Butts, who also works as the grant writer for Teton Valley Healthcare, serves on the Trailblazers board of directors.
She has worked to raise $45,000 for the nonprofit that has accomplished a great amount on behalf of the people of Cambodia including building schools, water wells and providing vocational training and employment to the villagers. She has worked closely with Trailblazer founders Scott and Chris Coats who have traveled to Teton Valley over the years to share the message of their work in Cambodia.
Butts wrote: We arrived in Siem Reap (beautiful, energetic city) after an eight and half hour bus ride stopping at every wide spot to pick up supplies or drop off people and experiencing two flat tires. That after a long plane ride from Jackson to Seattle to Seoul, Korea, to Phenom Phen. What a beautiful country with beautiful people! We’ve managed to get out to Tra Trav to install maps in the school, which will be dedicated tomorrow. Along the way we passed Trailblazer water filters in many yards.
For this particular school, the Trailblazer Foundation hired the Sras construction team in 2007 to construct cement ring pit wells throughout Sras Village to provide water access for irrigation purposes. This project provided the construction team with additional vocational training, employment to other villagers, and cultivated their construction business.
The children capture your heart with their warm smiles and shy natures. They were especially delighted to see their pictures on the camera screen. The women in this village are expert weavers, making three baskets a day ($2.25) while the men gather pandaanas stocks from the forest which must be trimmed down to prepare for the weaving. The assistant chief was only too proud and happy to show us her productive villagers. The economy has hit hard here, too, with many of the villagers losing their rice crops in typhoon Ketsana. They’re now looking at traveling to Thailand for work--a long and arduous process.
According to the Foundation, Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in the world, having suffered the devastating effects of genocide during Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime (1975 through 1979). Several million people, representing 20 to 25 percent of the population, died as a result of mass executions and starvation during the regime.
Educated people were systematically eliminated, especially doctors and teachers. At the end of the regime all but 40 of 4,000 Cambodian doctors had either perished or fled the country, compared to an average of 250 doctors per 100,000 serving US citizens.
Cambodia’s economy and infrastructure was left in tatters. As a result, recovery has been slow and difficult. Currently, one out of every seven children dies before the age of five, many from preventable waterborne diseases.
Butts Wrote: Today we’re visiting the Trailblazer Cambodia compound where the water filters are made along with the experimental garden to practice growing various seeds to see which ones will be most productive. Just over the wall is the crocodile farm where the critters range in size up to 800 pounds. Scott (Coats) says it’s a “cow/calf” operation (Wyoming speak!) This farm raises babies for the commercial farms in the area.
To learn more about the Trailblazer Foundation, see www.thetrailblazerfoundation.org.
