CLEW students achieving their goal: Graduation Day, Feb 11, 2015
A close friend told me a story about a boy walking along the seashore, finding starfish and throwing them back in the ocean. A man stopped him and asked what he was doing it for. Saving one starfish wasn’t going to change anything given the thousands of starfish beached along the coast. The boy just shrugged and said that he had just made a difference in the life of that one particular starfish and that was enough for him.
Once you have had your chance meeting, inspiring you to help a group of students, women or destitute poor, you will wonder at some point about whether your small, little project will have much effect for change. Be rest assured that the impact will be far beyond what you initially comprehend due to the “social multiplier” effect.
Taking CLEW as an example, Cambodia has huge social, political and economic problems and presently, we have only helped 50 students which is somewhat akin to the starfish story. Drive from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap (where Angkor Wat is located) in the middle of the day and you will see hundreds if not thousands of primary and secondary school students all walking or bicycling to/from home in immaculate white shirts and blue pants/skirts. It is easy to become overwhelmed by the sheer need of providing a post-secondary education to this enormous group of students.
We certainly make a difference in the lives our students but CLEW has a much broader impact and that is where the story of CLEW and the boy with his starfish differ.
Our program may seem ad hoc but it only appears that way. It has a solid basis in international development theory. When you support women, the wages they earn stay in the family. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for men and their wages. There are other competing distractions for the men, to put it mildly. So, when you support our students, you are supporting their families too. Let’s assume that each of our students has two siblings and two parents and so now our program begins to help 200 family members (50 X 4), which increases to 250 when our students are included.
One of the problems we face in recruitment is finding female high school graduates who have sufficient grades for admission into law school. One of our students, Champa (third from left in the picture, above), is a case in point. Her parents were divorced when she was three years old and her mother raised her on her own as a farmer. The hardship involved defies description and it reflects a rare level of determination. Her mother kept Champa in school and she graduated high school, but when Champa was admitted into CLEW, other women in the village questioned her going to university. ‘Why go, she will just get a degree over four years, won’t be able to get a job and will be back in the village as a farmer. Why delay the inevitable by four years?’ Champa’s mother stuck to her guns and Champa graduated from both the Khmer and English law degree programs. She now has a good job working at the Royal University for Law and Economics in the English program as an administrator and is providing funds back to support her mother who, quite rightly, is bursting with pride.
Champa, Marnie Ryan and Champa’s very proud mother
But her education has had another consequence. She has become a role model which has encouraged other families to keep their daughters in school and thinking of a post-secondary education. We have heard from a number of our students that they have become role models and inspired others too.
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Chhaignim (just to the left of Marnie in the gold t-shirt) was interviewed at her home in November, 2014. A group of women and children gathered for the interview, along with Sonan (right) and Sreynou (kneeling). This always happens during CLEW’s interviews in the field. We expect that Chhaignim will be a role model to these young girls and hopefully they will be CLEW students in the future.
We will accept for sake of argument that each of our students inspires the families of two female students to graduate high school and go on to a post-secondary education. The number of people affected by CLEW increases by 100 (50 X2) and the total increases from 250 to 350. Making the same assumption of two siblings and parents for each of the students so influenced increases CLEW’s reach by an additional 400 people (100 X 4). The total number of students affected by Clew increases to 750 people.
Finally, let’s assume for the moment that our students (all in their late teens and early twenties) will each have a career lasting thirty years. This means that those students represent 1,500 woman years of pressure for change within Cambodia. We can also make the assumption that our students will each influence two women in every year of their career and this represents another 3,000 women affected by CLEW.
This means that our modest program of 50 students will generate 1.5 millennia of pressure for change within Cambodia and affect the lives of nearly 4,000 women. And of course, this is only as the program stands today. Think of the effect over the next ten years with all the additional students we will admit to the program!!
So, when you are thinking of starting your small international micro-charity, you will probably be surprised when you learn just how many lives you will affect in the future. The starfish analogy will not apply to your program.
Chuck G