For her work in Cambodia, the University of Washington has awarded its 2011 faculty award for outstanding public service to Orcas resident Tracy Harachi, associate professor at the UW School of Social Work.
“It’s been very awkward for me to receive this award,” Harachi told the Sounder. “If I hadn’t met all these wonderful people along the way this project wouldn’t have happened.”
The award recognizes Harachi’s role in helping the Cambodian Royal University of Pnom Penh establish the country’s first college-level department of social work. The program will train local social workers to help address the country’s ongoing problems with poverty, health issues and human rights violations.
Prominent citizens beg to differ with Harachi’s self-effacing views.
“I’ve been [the UW department of Social Work] dean for five years, and on campus for 20 years,” said Edwina Uehara. “I have never seen any faculty member acccomplish what Tracy’s accomplished in Cambodia. It’s astounding; it’s beyond a large accomplishment. She is making an incredible difference in the service infrastructure in the Cambodian nation.”
US Ambassador to Cambodia Carol Rodley wrote in her recommendation of Harachi, “It is not so often that one person is able to make such a difference in the development of a country.”
The Asian nation caught at Harachi’s heart in 1979, when she heard of its refugee camps after the fall of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Dictator Pol Pot’s efforts to create an agrarian, classless society also killed or drove out most of the country’s educated.
“Their whole education system was devastated,” said Harachi. More than 30 years later, the country struggles to rebuild its university system.
Harachi was asked in 2004 to develop a department of social work for the University of Pnom Penh.
“Tracey saw a crying need for the kind of work that social workers do.. but no formal educational commitment to that,” said Uehara.
The request was a challenge: “There were so few people even with a college degree; how do you build that?” said Harachi.
So she sought out English-speaking Cambodians already occupied in areas of social work – community development, social policies, community organizing, mental health, HIV, trafficking, trauma or disabilities – and arranged for them to earn their graduate degrees at UW, equipping them as social work professors for Cambodia.
The process has involved an enormous amount of fundraising, as there was very little funding in the startup budget. The university provided a building, electricity, and salaries comparable to Cambodian garment workers’ pay.
[Fundraising] is mostly talking to people, really grassroots,” said Harachi – and purse sales of fair-trade, Cambodian-made bags donated by a generous Edmonds resident.
After pursuing her fundraising goals with determination so dogged, she jokes that her friends now take off running at the sight of her, Harachi has secured the department $50,000 to help sustain its basic operations through the next 10 months. She is willing to speak at homes, churches and other groups to share how the program can help effect social change in Cambodia.
In five or six years, it is expected that a full enrollment of private, fee-paying students will create adequate cash flow to offset a population of non-paying “scholarship” students.
The faculty has now developed 23 courses “from scratch.”
“There’s been a tremendous amount of work, which tells me they can do this,” said Harachi.
Harachi, who moved to Orcas full time about a year ago, travels to Cambodia three or four times a year. She also provides a significant amount of support to Cambodian immigrants to the US.
