A School For Phoujong tells the story of how a couple of veteran Australian journalists developed a project to build a new primary school for a remote and severely impoverished village in northern Laos. Phoujong Village has a population of about 300 mainly ethnic Yao and Hmong people.It has no electricity, just a rudimentary water supply and only primitive sewage facilities.The houses are mainly earthern-floored, with an open-hearth fire in the middle and the village had just one dilapidated hut used as a schoolfor more than thirty children aged from five to twelve, with only one teacher. Its an inspirational story abouthow the new school was funded and then built...over a period of just on eight weeks in early 2015, with several heart-warming consequences, including a new walking aid for a young student crippled by polio and a joint children's art exhibition with Chillingham Primary School in northern New South Wales.
About the Author: Trish Clark has been a journalist all her working life, a period of over fifty years, in which she has worked as a newspaper columnist, a feature writer for major magazines and newspapers, a radio broadcaster and television reporter, as well as a producer of radio and television programs that have been broadcast nationally and internationally. She helped establish and worked with the internationally successful science program for television, Beyond 2000, which was aired by the Discovery Channel for more than a decade. In 2003/4 Trish spent 18 months working, with her husband, Iain Finlay on the Voice of Viet Nam Radio network, as Editors and Radio Programmers, while training local Vietnamese reporters in English usage, editing and on-air presentation techniques. Since 2011, she and Iain have been involved in three major projects they developed together in two remote villages in northern Laos. First, building a decent road to the vilage of NaLin, then a series of 16 large culvert drains over a distance of some ten kilometres to NaLin and Phoujong villages. And most recently in 2015...and the subject of this book, building a new primary school for the village of Phoujong Trish is the author of eleven books, which include a biography, as well as fiction and non-fiction publications, five written jointly with Iain, on Africa, South America and the South Pacific, Viet Nam and Central Asia. She and Iain have children and grandchildren and when not traveling, live in Australia in the Tweed Valley, in northern New South Wales.