The Nutrition Education and Promotion Project (NEPP) is pleased to introduce the story of change - Ms. Va Reaksmey’s story, a teacher at Srei Santhor High School, one of our target schools. She, a secondary teacher, has been working there since 2015. This is the story of her growth in the health education subject.

NEPP team first met Ms. Reaksmey in early 2019, when we started to engage in target school activities. At that time, while we were in the beginning process of drafting the health education textbook, we also held our first workshop to introduce the Cambodian Food-Based Dietary Guidelines (FBDG) in the school. Ms. Reaksmey was one of the participants. We still remember her sitting at the front row, listening attentively and showing great excitement about nutrition.

Afterwards, NEPP reintroduced FBDG at the second workshop and guided teachers to create teaching materials. To our surprise, Ms. Reaksmey worked efficiently and produced outstanding materials. In fact, she is a Khmer literature teacher. You might wonder, "Why would a Khmer literature teacher teach health education subject?" That’s due to the shortage of teachers in Cambodia. In addition, she was also teaching Moral-Civics subject. She was expected to teach health education subject in the future. That’s why she participated in the workshop.

Ms. Reaksmey, who takes the initiative in group work

When selecting target schools, NEPP considered various key points, such as previous support from other NGOs in the past, the school principal's motivation, collaboration with the government, the size of the school, and the state of the overall environment. Another important point was the “Attitude of teachers”. Seeing positive and proactive attitude of Ms. Reaksmey during the workshop, our team felt confident: “With such a teacher, our collaboration with this school will surely be successful." This was one of the reasons why we selected Srei Santhor High School as one of four target schools.

However, when we actually started the project in January 2020 at Srei Santhor High School, Ms. Reaksmey was on leave from her job to focus on her studies and further improve her skills at the Royal School of Administration (RSA). Naturally, we felt a little disappointed about it.

About a year later, Ms. Reaksmey returned to work and assigned to teach health education class. She also restarted participating in our training again. We felt relieved when we saw her paying attention to the training, but she no longer asked questions like before, and seemed less confident during the teaching trial. But, in 2024, there was another teaching trial after the training on nutrition topics. There, we were delighted to see Ms. Reaksmey was teaching with confidence and enthusiasm.

A teaching trail on health education subject

"Amazing! You've done a great job!" NEPP team praised Ms. Reaksmey.

We were so surprised and curious about her positive change. She told us that “After completing my course from RSA, I returned back to teach at school. When I rejoined NEPP’s training, there were many things I could not catch up about nutrition. And I had to give the demo lesson without fully understanding, it was very difficult for me”.

Recognizing the problem, Ms. Reaksmey had self-learning little by little during weekends, researching anything and gathering information she did not understand. Before teaching a class, even she prepared a lesson plan and practiced it with her colleagues in advance.

She could make such efforts because she realized the importance of health and nutrition through our training, saying “After the training, I applied the knowledge into my own daily eating habits. I also shared the importance of diet and health with my students as well”.

The teachers participating in the training typically had different levels of understanding. Some were not familiar with new contents and felt pressure. Even though it was also difficult for Ms. Reaksmey, she never gave up because she deeply cared about her students' future. A teacher like her is truly a star of hope. She gives us confidence that health and nutrition education will continue at her school even after our project ends.

Even the serious Ms. Reaksmey (far right) takes a moment to relax during breaks.