Education
Sponsor Child Graduates Top of His Class!
Across Canada, June is graduation month. From big cities to small farming towns, teens are moving those tassels from right to left, grinning ear-to-ear as they stride off the stage of their childhoods and into the boundless world of adulthood. Moms are crying. Dads are cheering. Siblings have mixed feelings. But everyone is proud!
International Day of Education
In the past, we in Canada may have been tempted to take education for granted. Of course our children will go to school when they turn five or six and stay in school until they graduate at the vibrant age of 18, ready to take on the world—or, at least, university. But after nearly two years of rolling COVID-19 lockdowns, school closures, and various versions of online-only or hybrid learning, we’re no longer so quick to assume anything when it comes to our children’s education. “From its early days, the pandemic has been a terrible study in inequality, so it seems inescapable that the world’s poorer countries would bear the heaviest costs. But kids also disappeared from classrooms in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.”1
Building Back Brightly
For students in rural Cambodia, pandemic lockdowns have closed schools and have made learning a disjointed and difficult process. Schools have been mostly closed since the onset of the pandemic, jarred by reopening and closing again. The substandard education experience for children in the community weighed on the Prasat Krohom Meanchey village chief, Mr. Chhoeun Ngoun. “While COVID-19 was spreading through the community, 19 schools were temporarily closed and left children out of in-person school,” he explains. But Chhoeun had a plan to help kids continue learning together outside of school.