Sustainable Cambodia: Creating the Village of the Future

offices in Florida. Mastin, a former educator, heads back to Pursat two to three times a year to participate in the newest project or just to spend some time in the classroom. She noted how Sustainable Cambodia began as a small school named after one of the founders’ mothers, Sylvia Laskey. The Sylvia Lasky Memorial School was then just a project that provided books, clothing, school supplies, bicycles, and English classes to approximately sixty children from the surrounding community. Today, the Sylvia Lasky School has grown to nearly 300 children and has two groups of older students who have gone on to the capital city of Phnom Penh to pursue advanced studies. “We’re seeing our young people just blooming. They’re problem solving, having points of views, and just expressing themselves more.”

This may be because of the children who are educated in the village and continue their studies elsewhere, 90 percent return to help with furthering village development. And it’s the diversification of the village’s programs that keep the villagers coming back. For example, thousands of families participate in the Gardens and Irrigation programs because of the emotional commitment by the all-Cambodian staff. Since half of the year in Cambodia is spent in drought, and the rest of the year the country experiences flooding, rice has been the only crop for centuries. The wells that are dug within the village help not only with clean drinking water, but irrigation for the dry season, and allow for fruits and vegetables to be grown year-round. This model comes full circle when the nutritional needs of families are met, which allows more time for adult literacy, community projects, and vocational training. Children are then in school and not out of the fields, which directs them toward a more prosperous future.

Sustainable Cambodia connected with Seeds of Change, which helps preserve biodiversity and promote sustainable, organic agriculture by selling its all-organic seeds. This allowed diversification of their vegetables and brought new cash crops to the daily market. Mastin was excited by the end result around the sunflower seeds they brought in to support the local bee colonies. “They said, ‘This is going to work.’ They just knew.” So now, the village became known for their model farmers and Mastin agrees. “When families have food available and enterprise situations, there is a connected community.”

They also looked to larger organizations, like Heifer International, who had already invented certain wheels in order to keep the community connected, which Mastin says is another success. “We set up opportunities [for the villagers] to give back [to their community].” In Heifer’s model, which the villages have mirrored, each family that receives an animal promises to give back to their neighbors by giving an offspring of that animal to the family most in need, which keeps the chain of giving going within the community.

Other villages are catching on to what is happening in Pursat.