What does it take to make an impact on the world? For Tammy
Pomroy, it took just a few hundred dollars and a lot of hard work.
Just over eight years ago, ABCs and Rice was a bamboo hut offering
free English classes to anyone willing to show up. It is now a school with an annual
operating budget of just under $90,000, supported solely on donations from
people all over the world. It has 6
classrooms, a staff of Khmer teachers, cooks, a janitor, and a project manager,
a volunteer coordinator from England, a rotation of dedicated volunteers
including Tammy herself, and most importantly, 220 incredible children making
their own waves in their own way. “Being
the change you want to see in the world,” it turns out, simply requires you to
take the first step. ABCs and Rice now provides the skills and the confidence
boost for hundreds of children to take their own first step every day.
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| The ABCs family celebrates longtime Project Manager, Chhut Long |
I sat down with Tammy recently and asked her, “If you had to divide the story
of ABCs into chapters, what would they be?”
“Chapter one,” she said, “is Close Your Eyes and Walk.”
In 2009, Tammy was traveling and volunteering her way
through Southeast Asia. After helping out a few communities in Cambodia, a Khmer
woman, who was a local landowner, said, “Tammy, you are helping all of these
other neighborhoods, but not this one.”
Tammy always wanted to start a school, but she
initially thought it would be a couple of years down the road. “After my trip,”
Tammy said to me, “I thought I’d go home, develop a plan, raise money, and find
investors first, like any rational person would.”
Everything changed in that village outside of Siem Reap. The
Khmer woman said to Tammy, “Sometimes in Cambodia, we just close our eyes and
walk.”
Instead of doing the rational thing, Tammy closed her eyes
and walked.
With only $300 to her name, she paid $140 to the woman for
first and last month’s rent on the property and bought bamboo for the walls and
wire to tie it all together. With a grass roof, she had all the makings of a
school hut.
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| A one room school hut! |
She had so little money left over she had to live on ramen noodles. She
found a teaching job in town to support herself and her mission, and rallied
her Khmer friends to build the first ABCs classroom. “If I’d had a plan,” she said, “it probably
wouldn’t have worked.”
“Chapter two,” she
said, “though it’s kind of cliché, and stolen from somewhere else, is If You Build it, They Will Come.”
The property was rented, the bamboo hut was in place, and
the word got out. Nearly 100 adults and children flocked to attend Tammy’s free
nightly English lessons.
English, for Khmer people in Siem Reap, is often the
key to good jobs in a tourist economy.
Whether they are a tuk-tuk driver who takes visitors to see the temples of Angkor, a shop or restaurant owner, or a pharmacist, Khmer people find success
when they know English.
Though, for
Tammy, it wasn’t just about the kids getting an education. “Seeing animal
abuse, garbage everywhere, poor sanitation…There was no safe place to be during
the day,” Tammy said. “It was more about getting them into a safe, happy
life.”
With 100 kids attending her classes, she had to build three
more bamboo huts. “Every new paycheck I
got from my job, I put it toward more supplies for school in order to keep building.”
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| Expanding ABCs |
Just as quickly as the wave of people flooded into ABCs,
people started dropping out, though.
Tammy felt discouraged. Was it the lessons? Was it the location of the
school? She went into the village and found some of her students. She spoke to
them and their families to try to figure out what was going on.
Everyone had the same response: “We just can’t afford to
have our kids studying English.”
“What do you mean,” Tammy asked, “they are free English classes?”
“If the kids are learning,” they said, “then they aren’t
working.”
“There were points like this,” Tammy told me, “where I
thought, what am I doing? I should leave,
but you have to be able to roll with the punches, man. It’s never what it’s
supposed to be. Just be flexible. What’s that expression? The trees that
survive the storm are the ones that are strong enough to bend.”
This is when Tammy took the second step. “Maybe the kids
weren’t working for the family,” Tammy said, “but being a kid IS their job. I
just wanted them to have access to being a kid. I got to be a kid. I don’t need them to be smart, I don’t need them all to
be doctors, but just to be happy in their life.”
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| Nearly 200 kids employed! |
To keep the kids in school, learning skills to get out of
the cycle of poverty, and have a safe place to spend their day, Tammy had to
find a way to get them to stay. “I didn’t want the kids to keep having to lie
to their parents about where they were.
There was one boy, who is now in medical school, whose parents didn’t
allow him to go to school. He lied to them saying he was out taking care of his
cow.”
Tammy’s school was already free. She couldn’t offer scholarships like
universities do to get them the education they so deserve. She began offering a
kind of reverse tuition which would
benefit the entire family. What started
as ABCs, in a stroke of genius, became ABCs and Rice. Twice per
month, with attendance at ABCs, Tammy sent the kids home with 6 kg of rice to
support their families. Nourishment for the whole family and an incentive to stay in school.
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| Students at ABCs on Rice Day! |
“Something About
Angels,” Tammy said, when I asked her about Chapter 3. “That’s a silly title for a chapter, though,
man.”
No one builds a non-profit school like ABCs from wire and
bamboo without the help of others—something about angels, indeed. “Even today, ABCs never has more than 2-3 months of
operating income to support itself. In the early days, some
volunteers brought money,” Tammy said, “some people taught us curriculum, some taught us to feed the children, how to take care of their wounds…whether they were there for a week, or a month, to
me, they are all just one brick.”
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| A few volunteers recently gave out toothbrushes and donated rice to ABCs! |
Tammy faced many roadblocks along the way, but this brick of volunteers was the capstone that held everything together. Corruption
from the government and a lack of trust in the community were just two of the
hurdles to overcome. “Each day I reminded myself,” Tammy said, “that there is
good in everything that’s bad, and there’s bad in everything that seems good.
You have to be able to lean on people when those shocking realizations hit.
There’s lessons to be learned in everything. Life isn’t about you.”
She overcame both of the roadblocks by building trust,
supporting the community, and getting the ABCs name out there. “Initially,
parents were afraid of sending their kids to ABCs,” Tammy said, "but, man, volunteers and donors brought in more bamboo huts, a toilet, and a water pump, and the community
started to see us making real change—and with that came trust. Ultimately, parents started looking to ABCs
for advice on parenting."
Tammy believes one of the most important successes of ABCs is that “culturally, it’s unusual for girls to be educated enough to go after what they want. Girls used to get pulled out of school at 12 or 13, but today, they continue on, some even on to university. At ABCs, they’ve learned that education is important and there are some really confident young girls.”
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| Tammy takes the girls out for Girls Day |
Though ABCs relies on a steady rotation of volunteers and other angels, the majority of the staff are local Khmer people. “ABCs is now about Khmer people helping Khmer people, which
is the way it should be," Tammy said. "Crossing the culture gap has built even more trust."
With trust comes an attitude shift. The same parents who once said that
they couldn’t afford to have their children go to school, now look to ABCs for
parenting advice and encourage their kids to get an
education. Be the change.
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| ABCs then and now |
Tammy and her husband Charlie work as teachers at schools nearby to support themselves and their three adopted children. Tammy spends all of her time outside of work and family as volunteer Director of ABCs and Rice. She built a school from the ground up and hasn't earned a dime doing it. "It's awesome to know that I'm where I'm supposed to be, doing what I'm supposed to be doing," Tammy said.
I asked Tammy if she were to do it all over again, would she
change anything about how she started ABCs and she said, “Probably everything, but really, I
just would have given more thanks along the way.”
In just 8 years, ABCs has dozens of former students who are university
graduates, currently attending university, or who are
working/supporting their families. EVERY ABCs student has a safe place to be a kid every day, all thanks to one woman's guts to take that first step.
ABCs requires continued work and support, though. As Tammy said, at any given time, ABCs only has 2-3 months of operating income. I want to raise $5,000 to support ABCs' projects including getting bicycles to help children get to and from school every day.
So far, together, we've raised over $1,000! Just $6.80 (£5), will feed a child at ABCs two meals per day for 1 month. Please help ABCs continue to "be the change" and donate what you can!
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