Monday, November 6, 2000

By JEERAWAT NA THALANG
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Philanthropist Bernard Krisher, chairman of the American Assistance for Cambodia & Japan Relief for Cambodia, is a man on a mission. The 69-year-old retired journalist is determined to put a roof over the head of students in Cambodia.

Krisher, who was in Seattle last week, is working on a project to build 200 three- to five-room schools in war-torn Cambodia. With 36 percent of the population below the poverty line (in 1997) and the GNP per capita of only $260, about 3,000 villages have no schools.

And where there are schools, many have no classrooms -- the students are forced to study in open fields, at the mercy of monsoon rains and the hot sun.

Krisher is asking people to contribute half or $14,000 of the total funding for the construction of one new school, the other half will come from a special loan to the Cambodian government from the World Bank.

Cambodia has a literacy rate of 60 percent. But Krisher was skeptical with the figure. "Some people can read but don't understand what they read," he said.

"But people in the village are very cultured, " Krisher said. "Children have the motivation to learn."

Krisher knows well how war can adversely affect children's education. He was born to a Polish immigrant family in Germany during the reign of Adolf Hitler. His family fled to the United States in 1937 when he was 6 to escape the Nazis, who killed 6 million Jews.

He said he wanted to give something to Cambodia, which is still recovering from the Khmer Rouge regime that killed 1.7 million people in the late 1970s.

Krisher said he preferred to focus his philanthropy on war-torn Asian nations such as Cambodia rather than countries in Eastern Europe, where his ancestors came from, because "people don't pay lots of attention to Cambodia. The other countries (in Europe) have friends; Cambodia does not have many friends.

"There is not a large Cambodian population (in the United States). They do not have a political impact or win or lose the presidential election."

He said that the key to helping war-affected children survive is education.

"I was lucky to have a good education," Krisher said. He wants to make sure children in Cambodia have the same luck.

Since the school program started in November last year, Krisher has helped build 64 schools in rural provinces, including some formerly controlled by the Khmer Rouge.

Donors to the program include Wakako Hironaka, a Japanese politician, the Nippon Foundation and the Japan-Cambodia Volunteer Association.

The program's schools will also prepare the younger generation for e-commerce. Each school will be equipped with solar panels capable of providing sufficient energy to operate a computer.

Shin Satellite of Thailand is providing satellite dishes and other equipment needed to link with their satellites.

Krisher said the program will help provide Cambodian children with choices in life. Otherwise, he said, for many of them, there only choice in life is to be a beggar or a prostitute.

"To avoid all that, we train them with a specialty they can use, like computer skills."

Krisher said his interest in Cambodia started when he was covering Cambodia for Newsweek from 1963 to 1964, during which he became friends with King Norodom Sihanouk.

In the early 1990s, peace returned to Cambodia, and Sihanouk came back from years of exile. Krisher, a resident of Tokyo whose wife is Japanese, went to Cambodia to start charity projects. And in 1994, Krisher founded the Cambodia Daily newspaper, the sole English-language daily newspaper in Cambodia.

"I have been a journalist all my life. And I believe the press may probably be the most important factor (in the society)," he said.

"Cambodia is, basically, a free country," he said. The press isn't censored by the government, he added.

Jeerawat Na Thalang covers international economic issues for The Nation, an English language newspaper in Bangkok, Thailand. She is spending five months at the Post-Intelligencer on an Alfred Friendly Press Fellowship. The fellowship provides professional journalists from developing countries with training opportunities in U.S. newsrooms.

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