ប្លុកស្នេហ៍ សំរាប់អូន

Footwear-factory body to form

Friday, 13 May 2011 15:02
May Kunmakara

Photo by: Pha Lina
Commerce Minister Cham Prasidh speaks during a Ministry of Commerce meeting in Phnom Penh yesterday.

Cambodia's footwear factories will form a separate association to represent the industry and attract buyers and sellers, said Garment Manufacturers Association in Cambodia Chairman Van Sou Ieng.

The initiative would allow footwear factories to act collectively in a similar manner to garment factories in GMAC, he said yesterday on the sidelines of a Ministry of Commerce meeting.

“We want them to set up an independent association, letting them work together and understand the issues among its members,” he said.

Garment manufacturers had trouble solving problems before the industry body was set up in 1999, he said. GMAC is a mandatory organisation for Cambodian garment factories that export.

“The association provides a single voice to deal with the issues we confront. The government protects us and gives us ideas for us to improve our businesses – especially it helps buyers trust us.”

Minister of Commerce Cham Prasidh said during the meeting that exports of footwear products increased gradually year on year despite the crisis.

“Although the crisis hit us, the footwear industry did not decline – it still rose while the garment industry dropped, meaning that we have the ability to improve and grow.”

The Kingdom had 36 footwear factories at the end of 2010, in a year that saw it export some US$172 million worth of footwear products, he said. The industry has exported $65 million worth of footwear in the first quarter.

Total production of footwear ought to hit $250 million in 2011, as four or five large factories have been approved to begin production this year, according to the minister. The new factories are thought to employ between 3,000 and 5,000 additional workers.

The Kingdom had a total of 273 garment factories at the end of last year, he said.

Three footwear factories are already a part of GMAC, according to Van Sou Ieng.

He said he was not sure whether a separate footwear body would set up an independent association or stay with GMAC.

“[Yesterday’s] meeting, we held discussions with the footwear factory owners. We don’t know yet whether they will want to be our members, or set up on their own.”

The final meeting to set up the association will be held next month, he said.

“If they join with us, we will change the name to Footwear and GMAC.”

Sexy Student Uniforms – Girls Outfits

Thailand university uniforms for girls consist of a short-sleeve white blouse and a short black skirt. Student uniforms in Thailand has been a sensitive topic of public discussion since the get-go, as they are regarded as "too sexy" (so they say). The subject attracted public attention once again when the Thai girl iniform were found to be the world's sexiest student uniform, based on an online survey publicized in Japanese media at the beginning of 2011.

Japanese school girl wearing an extremely short skirt

Thai student with short skirt

Thai students have for years said they dress the way they do precisely because they see the uniform as a rule from an earlier time and they just want to appear stylish and young.

In reacting to news of the Japanese uniform poll, a columnist for Naew Na spun the usual line in calling for greater moral teaching to stem the tide of eroticism on campus.

“At least, the existence of uniforms will help teach our children about discipline and courtesy. Uniforms will remind them of their status as students whose role is to study and seek knowledge.”

“Students in uniforms should be mindful in whatever they do or don’t do,” wrote the author of the Kuan Nam Hai Sai column.

“The most practical solution could be to educate and make students appreciate the value of wisdom and good deeds, instead of external beauty, stardom and fame.

Quite a few people suggest that student uniforms be discontinued in order to end the fuss.

Educational institutes, themselves, are partly to blame, many have made their student uniforms more flashy in hopes of attracting more students to enroll. The practice is prevalent among business and vocational schools.

A Japanese girl wearing a skirt so short that even her pantie is exposed when she bends over slightly.In universities, although there are rules governing student uniforms, students usually modify their outfits to make them more attractive, like making the skirt shorter or the shirt tighter than is permitted.

Teaching Vietnamese boat children

Friday, 13 May 2011 15:08
Mark Bibby Jackson
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Photo by: Hector Bermejo
The children of boat people play at a house in the floating village of Chong Koh on the banks of the Tonle Sap, in Kampong Chhnang province.

Tran Minh Tri, 56, stands in front of his class holding a large stick in his right hand. He strikes it against a desk to draw his pupils’ attention. They repeat back his instructions in Vietnamese.

The blackboard behind him is covered in Vietnamese. This could be a scene taken from anywhere in rural Vietnam, only Lien Huu School is in the floating village of Chong Koh, Kampong Chhnang province.
“None of the lessons are in Khmer,” says Tran Minh Tri. “I can’t teach in Khmer.”

Born in Vietnam, Tran Minh Tri came to Cambodia 20 years ago to trade fish. He started teaching at the school five years ago because he “believes in Jesus”. The cross above the school gives away the religious nature of the school.

“The children are good,” he says. “They live around here and come by boat.”

The overwhelming majority of Kampong Chhnang’s boat people are Vietnamese.

Huon Vorn, the village chief for neighbouring Kandal village, estimates there are about 360 families in Chong Koh, of which maybe 30 are Khmer. In his village only 40 out of the 474 families are ethnic Khmer, including his own.

Like most of the structures in the floating village, the school is built on buoyant pontoons. Most of the houses in Kandal village are built on stilts.

“The main problem is when the big storms come,” says Tran Minh Tri. Then houses can come loose from their moorings.

With an average class size of about 50 students, Tran Minh Tri admits it is tiring work. He also has no cover. “When I am ill there is no school,” he says.

According to Huon Vorn, Lien Huu is one of two floating schools in Kampong Chhnang. Neither teaches in Khmer. The few Khmers who live on the water send their children to school on the mainland. The Vietnamese children also go there once they have completed Grade 4.

“We try to teach Vietnamese to the children first and then they go to the Khmer school afterwards,” says Tran Minh Tri.

However, change is on its way.

“A primary school is being constructed on the land near the Vietnamese pagoda,” says Huon Vorn. “The funds for the new school have come from a Vietnamese association in Australia. It will be completed by the time the floods come.”

The village leader adds that there are plans to move his villagers voluntarily from the water to dry land, although precise plans have not yet been presented to the villagers. “The majority of them do not want to go anywhere,” he says. “This is where they work.”

INTERPRETER: RANN REUY

ECCC spokesman mourned

Friday, 13 May 2011 15:02
Vong Sokheng and James O’Toole

110513_06
Photo by: Eccc/pool
Reach Sambath, who was chief of public affairs at the ECCC, speaks to 6,000 students at Samaki High School in April.

Reach Sambath, the head of public affairs at the Khmer Rouge tribunal, a beloved lecturer at the Royal University of Phnom Penh and one of the premier Cambodian journalists of his generation, died on Wednesday night in Phnom Penh. He was 47 years old.

After suffering a stroke on Tuesday, Sambath was taken to Calmette Hospital, where he passed away before he could be evacuated to Bangkok for further treatment. He is survived by his wife and three children.

Tributes poured in yesterday from around the world from people who remembered Sambath for his wit, charisma and warmth. Colleagues recalled a reporter who bravely chronicled the Kingdom’s turbulent 1990s, while students spoke of a jovial professor who took pride in imparting his skills to young Cambodians eager to follow in his footsteps.

Sambath was born in Svay Rieng province as one of six brothers, his older brother, Reach Samnang, said yesterday. The two were evacuated to Battambang province when the Khmer Rouge came to power, returning home by foot on a month-long journey after the fall of the regime in 1979.

“We made a pull-cart to carry two sacks of rice, dry beef and fish to eat during our trip back home,” Reach Samnang said.

When they arrived back in Svay Rieng, they found that their parents and four older brothers had perished. They then moved briefly to Kampot province’s Kampong Trach district, Samnang said, where Sambath survived by climbing palm trees to harvest the sap and make sugar. The same year, they moved to Phnom Penh, where Sambath, then 14, earned a living as a bicycle-taxi driver and later studied at Preah Sisowath High School.

Sambath joined the Agence France-Presse news agency in 1991, going on to report on the fractious partisan fighting in the years that followed and the collapse of the Khmer Rouge movement. Moeun Chhean Nariddh, director of the Cambodia Institute for Media Studies, said Sambath stood out for his bravery even among colleagues in what at the time was a dangerous profession.

At one point during clashes between government troops and the Khmer Rouge insurgency in the 1990s, Sambath “went to the battlefield near Pailin, and he had to ride in the tank with the government army,” Moeun Chhean Nariddh said. “He took the risks to fulfill the people’s right to know, to keep the public informed.”

Sambath eventually won the opportunity to study journalism at Columbia University in the United States, graduating in 2001, and returned to the Kingdom to teach in the department of media and communications at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. There, he introduced modern journalism techniques to hundreds of students while keeping them entertained with his famous sense of humour.

“Sambath loved being a funnyman, and his students never got bored,” said Heng Sinith, a photographer with the Associated Press.

Sinith last saw his friend on Monday night, when Sambath came to pick him up after his car broke down. He said Sambath would be remembered both for his personal generosity and his role in the development of the Cambodian media.

“He was a great contributor to society and to the professionalism of journalists here,” Sinith said.

In 2006, Sambath became one of the first staff members at the Khmer Rouge tribunal, where he eventually became chief of the public affairs section. There, he lent his genial manner and skills in communication to the task of explaining the complex workings of the court to the Cambodian public.

“I have never seen anyone more engaging as a public speaker to any kind of audience,” said United Nations court spokesman Lars Olsen, who worked closely with Sambath for the past two years. “He had a passion for teaching. He wanted knowledge, and he wanted other people to search for knowledge as well.”

On the day of the tribunal’s verdict against former S-21 prison chief Kaing Guek Eav last year, Sambath spoke of the importance of this work. Standing under a cloudy sky outside the court, he said he had worked the previous evening with his 14-year-old daughter in composing his remarks for the post-verdict press conference, showing off her handwritten comments in the margins of his notes.

“I’m very, very proud that the younger generation like my daughter had a chance to learn about the history, especially the dark history that affected the lives of their parents and grandparents,” he said.

Khmer star Pictures