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MIT, Eastwood educate in Cambodia

Jackie Eastwood is armed with the expertise of engineering recruits from MIT and in search of $300,000 to $400,000 to relocate students from the dangerous streets of Cambodia’s capital city to a new — and safer — school in a rural area of the country.

It’s the latest chapter in Eastwood’s quest to support specialized education for gifted street children living in war-torn or developing countries such as Cambodia. MIT, in addition to supporting student participation, has turned the efforts at the Cambodian school into a five-year lab allowing students to engage in life-changing work and get credit for it.

Eastwood, former CEO of Dover, N.H.-based TissueLink Medical Inc. and a fund-raiser for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, is working through a nonprofit called The Global Child, which she co-founded in 2003 with her husband, sister and brother-in-law.

“It’s important because a little bit of effort has a huge impact on so many people,” said Eastwood, who has been on the stump raising awareness — and hopefully support — at events such as MassMEDIC’s Medtech Investors Conference in Boston earlier this month.

Eastwood said the group’s first school, serving 25 students, opened in 2004 in Phnom Penh. The students, who were either homeless or sent out to beg or work, were (and still are) compensated a dollar a day so they can instead focus on learning. The school’s curriculum has been tailor-designed, and students also receive three daily meals, health and dental care, and safe housing. Goals include providing tools for students to give back to their country, one that is still reeling from the events of the last few decades, including the deaths of nearly 2 million people during the regime of the former Khmer Rouge communist guerilla government.

The new school setting, said Eastwood, is necessary to relocate those 25 students from the still-violent urban streets of Phnom Penh to a more quiet, rural location in Siem Reap.

But with the move comes technical challenges. And that’s where MIT students come in.

Stephen Samouhos, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at MIT, is leading efforts to design the new school. In June, he and three other MIT students visited the Siem Reap site. Samouhos and his team came up with plans that include solar- and wind-powered electricity generators, an independent sewer, and irrigation technology to make the 4-acre rural campus, which lacks any utilities, self-sustaining.

Construction should begin sometime next year, he said.

“We want to marry the engineering horsepower at MIT with the on-the-ground vehicle that is The Global Child,” said Samouhos.

One upcoming project is to train the nonprofit’s students to design and construct agricultural systems. A second group of MIT scholars is slated to make the journey to Cambodia in January to begin the agricultural training.