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How a group of Hong Kong students built four schools in rural Cambodia

Many Hong Kong students help in poverty alleviation schemes around Asia, but few set up their own charity and keep it going, as James Mak and his friends at Project Little Dream have done

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Project Little Dream volunteers help to build a school in Prey Run village, Cambodia, for 150 children.

During Cambodia’s dry season in 2010, James Mak spent a lot of time carting bricks through rice paddies to help build a school in remote Khna Rong village.

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“It wasn’t too far, 50 or 70 metres to walk, but every piece of wood and brick had to be transported by hand,” he says.

Mak and other volunteers had to hand-carry all the building materials through a rice paddy because the site wasn’t very accessible.

Hong Kong volunteers and local children transport floor tiles by hand to the school they are building in Khna Rong village.
Hong Kong volunteers and local children transport floor tiles by hand to the school they are building in Khna Rong village.
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Now a graduate student at the Architectural Association in London, Mak chairs Project Little Dream, a Hong Kong charity that he and a group of like-minded friends set up in 2008 to design, build and run village schools around Takeo, a provincial town in southwest Cambodia.

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