Visiting our students' homes

In the past 12 months our colleagues in Battambang visited our scholarship students' families at home. Take a look at the snapshots and read about the families' wishes and sorrows in the new "Report from the dorm" below, and how we want to act:

In February 2014, we organized a parent meeting with all our students' families to have some profound talk with them and their parents about the future of the Scholarship Program, to eat lunch and have a chat together. Yet an important feature of the past ten months. in the Scholarship Program was also visiting the students' families at home in the countryside.

The purpose was to discuss their performance at university, their personal development as well as problems. At the same time we intended to give the parents the opportunity to express wishes and concerns so that Banyan Tree e.V. can improve the program accordingly.

Thus we eventually hit the road to the communes in Battambang Province several times, with sometimes having three people on a moto for a 90-minute drive to reach our destinations. But going the long distances proved rewarding as the parents were happy to tell us their opinions. The seven meetings always had the same essence: First the parents' deep gratitude for the chance their children have received (some parents had never imagined that their kid would ever live in a concrete house or attend university). Then the massive labor migration toward Thailand, which has affected every single village and seems to be the only solution especially to the poor and hopeless in the countryside. And finally the unanimous wish to help our scholarship students with getting somewhat decent jobs after their graduation.

But we were also told about very diverse sorrows and problems. While one family struggles to finance the education of their three sons, one widdow has to take care of even four nearly-grown-ups, and yet another one tries hard to convince her younger daughter of continuing her studies at high school. Other families are lacking money so desparately that they had to take up a loan with a exorbitant interest rate, which shows the true face of today's microfinance market. To earn more money, several families think about going to Thailand not only recently. (Although this might be not so easy with the current oppression and mass expulsions by the Thai military.) Indeed, the parents and the older sister of one student have been in Thailand for almost three years and perhaps come back to Cambodia next year - for the very first time after they left.

Unfortunately, Banyan Tree e.V. cannot fulfill the wish of some families to provide their children with scholarships for master studies or to enable their nephews to study at middle school. We will, however, do everything possible to help our students with applications and interviews as well as to establish contact to organizations that can help the nephews. At last, we do hope that the part-time jobs give the students a good basis to get a foot into the difficult labor market after their graduation next year.