In 1991—the year that the Paris Peace Agreements provided for elections and a new Constitution for a decimated Cambodia—a seasoned, occasionally acerbic but dependably sanguine Maryknoll nun arrived in Phnom Penh. Her first impression of the city, with its acrid fumes from omnipresent generators, was that it was “very, very poor, dirty, noisy”. Still, this was where Sr Dr Luise Ahrens, a fifty-one-year-old education innovator from the US, wanted to be.

Ahrens was a committed nun who wanted to work in service. But she also craved travel to lands far from home. “If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t do it,” she told me. “The Cambodians said that, too: ‘If you didn’t want to be here, you wouldn’t be.’”

She hit the ground running. Cambodia’s Ministry of Education sent her to Pit Chamnan, the vice-rector of the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP), who wasn’t sure how to use her. Ahrens had worked in higher education development in Indonesia for twelve years, but RUPP, the country’s largest post-secondary institution, was in shambles after the Khmer Rouge regime and years of Vietnamese occupation. The few Cambodian instructors were dedicated but distressed, teaching materials were scarce, new methods nonexistent and the physical infrastructure was in decay. “There was no internet, no labs, no water, no electricity, no nothing,” Ahrens recalled. World Bank officials had commissioned a higher education strategic plan, but when she asked Chamnam for potential collaborators, everyone he could think of was dead. “90 per cent of Cambodians who’d had a high school education were dead, were gone. So you could see that higher education would be a goal, but a long-term kind of goal.”

Chamnan asked her to set up a training programme for Cambodian instructors who’d taught Russian and Vietnamese to teach English instead. Now that the former occupiers were gone, these teachers were expected to pivot to the language increasingly seen as a global lingua franca. Armed with donor money, Ahrens hired workers to “go room by room, cleaning out an abandoned building at RUPP to create classrooms where whole families had previously been living”. She travelled to Singapore to buy textbooks and sought volunteer instructors “from around Phnom Penh; some of the UN people, some of the US Embassy people”. Very few had teaching experience, so Ahrens provided pedagogical expertise. The endeavour served three hundred Cambodian teachers and students.

• Tags: Cambodia, Debra Carney, Issue 39, Luise Ahrens