The Cambodia Rural School Project
The Gloria and Henry Jarecki Special
Skills School
Bernard Krisher’s Year-End Message to
Friends (Dec. 2004)
Dear Friends,
When I was 12 in 1943, living in Kew Gardens, Queens and attending P.S. 99, I began my entrepreneurial activities selling Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post door to door until I had collected 80 regular customers. This won me a bike. But when one magazine after another folded because the circulations were too high and advertisers selling niche products were paying too much per prospective buyer, I was left with my customers but no magazine. So I bought a used mimeograph machine and began publishing my own publication, Pocket Mirror and then Picture Story when we went to photo offset. I held on to my customers and the circulation rose to 800 after appearing on “We the People,” and a split page story in the N.Y. Herald Tribune. I feel I’ve gone full circle with my own paper, “The Cambodia Daily” now celebrating its 12th anniversary of uninterrupted, uncensored publishing in Phnom Penh.
Another incident that brought me full circle was the reunion with Henry Jarecki, my classmate at P.S. 99. He used to come to our home to read the latest Batman and Superman comics, which his mother prohibited him from reading at home. My parents were more liberal and I maintained a comic library, charging users 3 cents to come over and read them there. Henry was a visitor but he also joined my staff covering the founding sessions of the United Nations at Hunter College and then Lake Success. We interviewed Secretary General Trygve Lie and Ralph Bunche, who resided in our neighborhood. Henry also interviewed Earl Browder the head of the American Communist party that nearly got us suspended from selling at school and a threat to have us expelled by a right-wing principal.
I lost track of Henry who went on studying and then teaching psychiatry at Yale and moving to being an entrepreneur in commodities and silver, becoming a legend as being the world’s silver king. I met Henry again six years ago and this year he inquired about the rural school project in Cambodia, handing me a check for $15,800 on the spot to build the Gloria and Henry Jarecki Special Skills School in honor of his wife. We built the school in the remote northeast region of Ratanakiri, bordering Laos and Vietnam, in a village inhabited by an ethnic minority tribe whose children had never attended school and spoke a dialect of their own. Henry and Gloria flew to Cambodia from New York in their own Falcon jet for the opening ceremony, making an inspiring speech, motivating the students to study hard with the prospect of being sponsored for college. A performance of traditional dances to the sound of drums followed The school now has a link to the Internet via our Motoman system and is one of 250 schools we have built with World and Asian Development Bank funds that are leapfrogging Cambodian children to great opportunities while providing telemedicine, e-commerce and participatory democracy to remote villages.
A fortunate blitz of positive publicity brought in donations and support, enabling us to expand the Internet Village Motoman program now to nearly 50 schools added vegetable gardens to schools where children can fight hunger and malnutrition, raise attendance and attentiveness by growing vegetables they can consume before school time. The New York Times ran a long feature on our Motoman system on January 26 and this story was front-paged in the International Herald Tribune on January 27. CNN did a 7-minuute spot on Global Challenges (which you can download with Windows Media Player) http://www.firstmilesolutions.com/vid/CNN_Global_Challenges_Full.wmv
I am looking forward to the day Debbie will wish to continue to run these projects and then Adam.
Happy Holidays and a Very Happy New Year from Debbie, Doug & Adam; Joseph, Akiko & Bernie (bernie@media.mit.edu) December 15, 2004
