The Cambodia Rural School Project
The Gloria and Henry Jarecki
Special Skills School
Speech by Henry Jarecki at the opening ceremony of the
Gloria and Henry Jarecki Special Skills School
Bernard Krisher and I went to school together more years ago than most of you here are old. And in the years since then, he and I have met every few years to exchange stories of what we have done.
We enjoyed telling each other these stories because both of us have had a good and an interesting life, I first in medicine and then in business; he first in writing for newspapers that help people know what’s happening in their world, and later in helping others.
In the last ten years his enthusiasm and passion have grown as he told me of the wonderful people he had met here in Cambodia. He asked me again and again to visit so we could see with our own eyes this friendly, gentle, generous,
and intelligent people. And so I am thrilled to be here and to see first-hand how true it all was.
Last year Bernie told me about the medical and educational needs that his adopted people have. He told me of his project to build schools to help Cambodia’s young people to learn all about the world in which they live, that which surrounds us wherever we live and that which people in distant countries experience.
He spoke so clearly about his desire to expand children’s horizons with learning, that I asked him to put up a school for me, a school in the name of my wife Gloria Jarecki who, without our friends Natalya and Howard, is with me here today. A few months ago he told me that that school could be here in Ratna Kiri and he told me that the town was far from the big cities and needed a school to ensure that the young people learn what they need to make a living and to better understand their world.
And so we have come to take part in the opening of this school of great promise and have come from New York for this purpose and for the purpose of meeting all of you. It is so beautiful a place and a people, especially the children, are so beautiful and bright-eyed that I am excited to take part. To take part in helping them all ask and answer new questions.
And I have a question, too. A question all of you children will help me to answer over the next five or ten years. The question is this:
In New York, where I live, almost every child finishes 10 or 12 years of school. Are they happy? Are they happier than this wonderful group of children I have met? Has their education helped the children of New York? Do they get better jobs? Why are some of them unhappy? Why do some of them take drugs? Why do all New Yorkers lock their doors at night? Does education lead only to desire, to desire for more? And does desire make people want what their neighbors have and be unhappy if they don’t get it?
I don’t know the answer to all these questions. You hopefully will within ten years know them. I think you will find what you learn valuable in improving your standard of living. But I have put my questions to you so that you will use well what you learn. That you will use it to help your families and your communities to overcome poverty, isolation, and disease. That you will not use it to live fancy or to abandon the excellent human values which today so obviously steer your lives. That you will, in short, use it to become happy.
If, when I come back in ten years – and maybe even before – you will tell me: We have happier families, we are better friends, we have used our education to learn from the mistakes of others. If you can tell me that, I will know how
important it was to do what we are doing here today. I will know that here in this happy land, you have used education in the way it was meant to be used.
I trust you to do that. And I will be back to applaud.
Thank you for inviting me.
American-Cambodian friendship
