2025 Dream Cambodia Candy for a Cause Campaign YIS Express

By Hannah Greaves

“How long does it take you to get a drink of water when you want one? You probably walk just a minute or two to the nearest water fountain. But imagine if you had to walk all the way from your classroom at YIS to Don Quijote in Motomachi every time you needed water to drink or wash your hands… And now, imagine that, instead of getting clear water from a faucet, you drank your water from the river there. This experience sounds so different from ours - but this is what getting water is like every day for many kids in rural Cambodia.”

If you had been in elementary school classrooms this week, you might have overheard this analogy from some of our grade 10 students in the service club Dream Cambodia. As our club prepares to return to rural Pursat province next year, students are sharing what they have learned about access to clean water and sanitation in Cambodia with fellow learners across the school. Our goal is to not only raise awareness in YIS about access to clean water for the UN World Water Day on March 21, but also to make learning safer and healthier for Cambodian students by fundraising to provide a latrine in their new school.

Through reflecting on the experiences of those of us who traveled to Cambodia to do service in 2024 (never drinking tap water from our hotel rooms, always armed with multiple filtered water bottles for the 39 degree weather) and researching with data from our partner NGO Hope International, our students have been practicing empathy, realizing just what lack of clean water access means and looks like. We’ve discovered, for example, that 60% of primary schools in Cambodia lack basic handwashing and sanitation facilities. And that 81% of the poorest rural Cambodians practice open defecation. This last fact hit home with our grade 10 students: “Oh, that’s like what we had to do to go to the bathroom on our hiking Expeditions this year… but every day.”

Spurred to action by this new knowledge, Dream Cambodia members are leading a two-week, school-wide campaign to make a difference for Cambodian students just like the smiling, energetic ones who mobbed us with hugs and high fives on our visit to Pursat. 

Students purposefully designed this campaign with an opportunity for many different members of the YIS community to get involved, so we hope you’ll join in! Elementary, middle, and high school homerooms participating in the Candy for a Cause Campaign will be competing to see who can fill their tube of Marbles candy with the most 100 yen coins, with the winning homeroom getting a sleeve of chocolate candy for each student in the homeroom. Teachers and staff will have a Jeans Day on Friday, March 21, World Water Day, contributing a few coins themselves to wear blue jeans to raise awareness of clean water. And parents are welcome to get involved by contributing coins to their child’s homeroom and joining in on wearing blue jeans on the 21st! 

Dream Cambodia students have been so encouraged by how supportive their classmates and parents have been of our efforts. We look forward to continuing this 15-year YIS legacy of service in Cambodia with the YIS community.