Prime Minister Allows Myanmar Students to Study in Cambodia

Prime Minister Allows Myanmar Students to Study in Cambodia

The government has given the green light to the Nippon Foundation (NF) to enroll students from Myanmar in the training of how to make artificial limbs.

In a meeting with Prime Minister Hun Sen on Monday, Japan’s Special Envoy and NF’s president Yohei Sasakawa asked the premier the permission to enroll students from Myanmar in the training course on how to make artificial limbs for people who lost their limbs in Myanmar due to wars or accidents.

In response, Mr Hun Sen welcomed this move and said that Cambodia is able to share this technical skill with people of Myanmar.

Mr Hun Sen also said that as ASEAN Chair, Cambodia would like to do such humanitarian deed by helping Myanmar people to live in peace, and by bringing them humanitarian aids.

Kheng Sisary, country director of the Exceed Worldwide, an NGO sponsored by the NF to run the Cambodian School of Prosthetics and Orthotics (CSPO), said yesterday that her school provides training to Cambodian students and foreign students from 27 countries around the world on how to make artificial limbs since 1998.

“In Cambodia, our Exceed Worldwide trains prosthetist & orthotists (P&O) for them to become specialist in making artificial limbs for those most in need free of charge at physical rehabilitation clinics in the country,” said Sisary.

She added that her NGO also conducts community-based programmes to help rehabilitate people with disability at community level and other form of support and assistance to empower them by helping children and adults with disability to access education, get job, and start a new business.

Sisary said that so far, the CSPO has trained more than 20 students from Myanmar and after the training course, they become leaders in their country in making artificial limbs.

Sasakawa asked Mr Hun Sen the permission to officially train Myanmar students in Cambodia because after the coup in Myanmar, the training centre for P&O in Rangoon was closed, she said.

“When the centre in Rangoon was closed, some P&O Myanmar students did not finish their study. As a result, we need to bring them here in Cambodia to help them finish their study. Moreover, the training programme in Cambodia is more detailed because there are international students coming from 27 countries around the world to learn this skill here,” she said.

Social Affairs Ministry’s Disability Action Council secretary-general Em Chan Makara said, “Helping them to have a skill in making artificial limbs is one of many humanitarian aids to help people of Myanmar after civil wars.” Khmer Times