Build dreams! Send Cambodian Students to College!

Mark has just returned from Cambodia , so it is a great time to provide an update on our program.

Ms. Li Bopha, the director of our Aids Patient Family Support Program, has now taken on the  the additional responsibility of day to day contact and mentoring for our students. Bopha is a math teacher by training.

Like all things, programs that start as a “ good idea” evolve and become more formalized. This project was conceived as a way to send worthy low income students on to achieve their “ impossible dream”, a college education. In a country were only a minority of middle class students even finish high school, the idea of a college education for low income students really is , without a program like this, an impossible dream. Yet here we are, now in year two. We are informally calling our program “ Kasumisou Scholars” . With your help, we can continue to give these great kids the opportunity to take a giant step up and leave the subsistence lifestyle of the urban poor in an undeveloped country to achieving a middle class life. Together,right now,  we are giving  these students the opportunity to break the cycle of inherited poverty.

The current census for the Kasumisou Scholars are eleven students. All have come either from our AIDS Patient Family Support Program (FSP) or our RAP (Rural Assistance Program in Prey Veng province) . Currently  three of our ’scholars’ come from the FSP and the remaining eight come from the RAP. These students have all successfully completed the national high school graduation examination and have moved on to university studies in Phnom Penh with scholarship assistance provided by Kasumisou. In addition, this year we had two kids from our FSP who have completed their high school studies . These two students are now waiting to get their results on the high school graduation examination. They must pass that national examination in order to be eligible for admission to most colleges in Cambodia. If those two students do receive passing grades on the national exam, they will join our Kasumisou Scholars program and enter university in Phnom Penh in November, raising our count to 13.

We hope that you will continue to tell your friends about our program and encourage their support. Our funding for this project is moment by moment and it is a big challenge   to have the timing of donations match expenditures.

We cannot adequately express our appreciation to all of you, for it is your generosity that makes it possible for these students to have this amazing, life changing opportunity of attending university.

Your donations make it possible for us to continue to support these hard working students. It is one more example of how small individual acts of kindness can combine to create a nearly unimaginable force for positive change.

Thank you .

Barbara and Mark Rosasco