Portsmouth Grammar School after one of their events to raise money for schools in Cambodia 28 July 2009
By Sion Donovan
Education reporter
Schoolchildren and teachers have been swimming, running and throwing wet sponges at staff to help build a school in Asia.
Portsmouth Grammar School has started a drive to raise £10,000 to build and run a school in Cambodia.
The new school is planned for the deprived region of Ratanakiri and will be constructed in conjunction with United World Schools, a charity which aims to build 10 schools in the area.
At least 80 villages in the Ratanakiri region have no school at all and those that do exist are said to be poor with a shortage of teachers.
PE teacher Steve Hawkswell is setting an example by taking part in the London to Brighton ultra-distance race in September.
At 45, he will run 56 miles, hence the name of the fundraising campaign 56at45.
Dozens of pupils have also run 56 miles between them for a mass run around Southsea Common, and Year 9 pupil Tyler Dutson raised £87 from swimming 56 lengths in two and a half hours.
Cash was also raised by pupils wetting teachers with sponges and a teacher's husband paid 10p for every point scored by the junior and intermediate girls' athletics teams at an English Schools Track and Field Championship qualifying event. This amounted to £75.50 with £21.29 gift aid.
Teacher Anna Howarth, the driving force behind 56at45, said: 'Cambodia has had a long and gruelling history, and even today in the Northern Territories there is an illiteracy rate of over 85 per cent. We want to get the whole school community involved by completing their own personal challenges, whether it is running 56 miles as a group, running for 56 minutes or something completely different, like cleaning 56 cars.
'The popularity of this has been immense. Pupils have been given a simple idea and picked it up and run away with it. It is quickly turning into something very special.'
In August, Miss Howarth and colleagues Lara Pechard, Helen Linnett and Jon Cooper will help run some educational projects in Cambodia.
'This is jungle land where the hill tribes have very little formal education,' she said.
'I was lucky enough to be involved in these projects last year and know help is badly needed. As a team we will be involved in meeting and planning the PGS school build with village leaders there.'
CAMBODIA
Cambodia is in south-east Asia, bordering Thailand, Laos and Vietnam. It has a population of more than 14m people.
It was a protectorate of France from 1863 to 1953 as part of the colony of French Indochina, before independence was granted.
The radical Khmer Rouge under their leader Pol Pot seized power in 1975 after years of guerrilla warfare. An estimated 1.7m Cambodians died during the next three years, many from exhaustion or starvation. Others were executed.
A recent UNICEF report said Cambodia is in the bottom 10 per cent of the poorest countries in the world.
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