Children in Cambodia have an unnatural thirst for knowledge. If you take the time to do anything with the kids of Cambodia you will instantly be rewarded with attention and a keen desire to participate. Sounds like everyone will attend kindergarten right? Well unfortunately roughly 67% or children do not get the opportunity to go to kindergarten and only a small percentage of them make it to a state funded kindergarten with qualified teachers.

So how do you make improvements in this situation?

Obviously the job is far bigger than our meagre little operation so we decided to do what you do on any great journey and start off with the first step.

Through our experience in working in 6 preschools in Pursat province we have noticed;

• Some teachers are not qualified kindergarten teachers.
• Teachers lack any resources to teach with. Things such as art supplies, books and games are not available.
• Teachers are not always relying on the government curriculum to teach. (Mainly village kindergartens. State run kindergartens now have a strict adherence to the curriculum.)

From what we have seen, teachers have a black board, some chalk and that is about all. We think that we can do something about this. First we looked at a library for a preschool and realised that the cost would be large and without a librarian, it would be difficult to maintain. We then come up with the idea of a mobile library where we rotate the same amount of books through 6 preschools with the following advantages;

• Books that would originally only cover 1 school can now cover 6 by rotating the books through them.
• Any books that are damaged can be found and repaired on a monthly basis.
• Constant feedback on what children do and don’t like can be used to fine tune what we offer.