When the Khmer Rouge regime destroyed the entire Cambodian education system during its four-year extreme Maoist revolution in the late 1970s, education itself was the enemy and all educated people were targets. It is not surprising that an educated person today would still fear for his life when an ex-Khmer Rouge commander moves into his village to conduct massive illegal logging. Illiterate former soldiers can work in an illegal trade at a wage five times what a teacher makes.

At our partner school in Aural District of Kampong Speu Province that serves children from the Souy hilltribe, a culture dependent on the forest for survival, students started dropping out of school to help parents chop down trees; bribes were paid to policemen right in front of the school as the children entered the gates; water resources started to dry up and children skipped school to haul water.

The parents were distressed but afraid to speak out. Fear dominates community life in Cambodia, an ongoing legacy of the Khmer Rouge genocide.

I asked the parents to write a letter but no one wanted to do it for fear of “the power man.” Finally a woman came forward. Tau Soka was 20 years old and pregnant with her fourth child. She had learned to read and write at the school we support. Her letter said everything. Her husband had been a corrupt policeman taking bribes from the woodcutters but together they had decided to stop. She had specific demands. She wanted the policemen to enforce the law and stop taking bribes from the drivers of the oxcarts hauling logs. She was concerned about what the children learned from this. She wanted the teachers to show up every day and to explain the lessons well. She wanted the school to teach morality.

Her letter inspired other community leaders, teachers, monks and minority villagers to write letters -- or, if illiterate, affix their thumbprint to letters they dictated to neighbors who could write. All told, we sent 177 letters to media, conservation groups and human rights groups in Phnom Penh and around the world to call attention to the forest destruction problem. The students and teachers were interviewed by telephone from Washington, D.C. and featured on Voice of America Khmer Service, a broadcast widely heard in Cambodia. The attention brought 100 primary student drop-outs back to school.

A small show of law enforcement followed and although it had little long-term effect on the illegal logging problem, it had a powerful effect on the community. They had spoken together with one voice and something happened. No one felt threatened and they knew they been heard. “We not afraid of the power man anymore,” the school director said, “because we have a voice to the world.” With the school as a foundation for community solidarity, they understood that education gave them a voice.

These events changed the scope of our education vision realizing that a school is an integral part of the community it serves, and a natural community center in a remote rural village where it is the only permanent structure. We need to be a different kind of education organization, one that forges a partnership with the communities we serve by involving them in the education of their children and supporting their aspirations to sustain their school without us. We learned that to be an effective partner, the most important thing we could do was to help people make sense of and work to transform their historical, social, political and economic situations. We learned that in order to transform those situations, they have to learn to trust in each other and pursue change together.

SSI is committed to promoting and strengthening community trust, partnership, diverse leadership, and empowerment. Implementing this ambitious approach begins by creating an organization with the human capacity and resources to make a 5-10 year commitment to each community toward education sustainability. Sustainable Schools International is born of this commitment.