About
Krasaing is a small village in Ta Meun commune, Thma Koul district, in Cambodia's Battambang province. Chhai Bunsorng grew up there. In 2021, while working in Siem Reap during the COVID-19 school closures, he started carrying a basket of books back to the village so that the children of his home district would have something to read while their classrooms were shut. Four years later the basket is a daily learning space.
About thirty children come through each day. The library was open on Sundays at the start. It now runs every day during school breaks, morning to evening. Six high-school and secondary-school students volunteer regularly. Mornings are reading and games. Afternoons are English lessons, painting, and Khmer poetry. The space has a playground with swings and a slide, and a television where the children can watch cartoons together after study sessions. Bunsorng targets students under eighteen and welcomes their younger siblings, including toddlers, so that the youngest grow up used to the room.
By day Bunsorng works at Phare Ponleu Selpak, the well-known Cambodian arts NGO based in Battambang. His role there is on the social-support side, not the artistic side. He handles child protection, student registration for vocational and leisure programmes, home assessments for the Collective Child Sponsorship programme, and liaison with the district education department. He also serves as Vice Dean of the English Faculty at the University of Management and Economics in Battambang, where he himself studied. The library is a third job he does after the other two.
The room is funded the way village libraries usually are. Bunsorng and the volunteers contribute their own resources. The Rotary Club Sangke Battambang and the Rotaract Club of Battambang Youth come down regularly with school supplies, oral-health kits, and refreshments. Books and small cash gifts come through the library's Facebook page. As of late 2025 he was raising money to replace broken tables and buy storage cabinets. There is no foundation backer.
Highlights
- Founded
- 2021 with a basket of books, in his home village during COVID-19 school closures
- Volunteers
- 6 high-school and secondary-school students, plus the founder
- Partners
- Rotary Club Sangke Battambang, Rotaract Club of Battambang Youth, American Corner UME Battambang
- Founder day jobs
- Student Services Supervisor at Phare Ponleu Selpak, Vice Dean of English Faculty at UME Battambang
Deeper Dive
The day-job and the side-project map onto two different theories of how rural Cambodian children get a future. At Phare Ponleu Selpak, Bunsorng's role is to bring children into one of the country's most respected arts and education institutions, with its sponsored vocational tracks and circus programme in Siem Reap. The Krasaing library does the opposite. It brings the resources to the village, on the children's own ground, in a familiar room, with their own neighbours teaching them. He runs both at the same time, and they feed each other. The Phare role is how he knows what works in formal child-protection and education systems. The library is where he tries those ideas without a budget line.
The peer network around the library is small and named. Sal Vimeas, a teacher in another Battambang village, runs a parallel project called Small Library. The two co-published a January 2026 Facebook statement about modest growth in volunteer-led reading rooms across the province, and a Cambodianess piece in December 2025 put them together on the funding-sustainability question. The framing they use is one village, one library, which is not a programme of the Cambodian Ministry of Education or any NGO. It is a peer-to-peer claim made by two founders in the same province. Most rural-library coverage in Cambodia features either a national network or a Western donor; this one features two Cambodian villagers naming each other.
The Rotary connection is the only piece of the operation that looks institutional, and it is the local Sangke club rather than a foreign chapter. The sponsored Rotaract Club of Battambang Youth has been running activity days at the library since at least 2023: oral-health workshops with toothbrushes and toothpaste delivered to a hundred children, school-supply drops with notebooks and uniforms, singing sessions, and dental hygiene instruction. Rotary Club Sangke describes itself as the library's sponsor on its own Facebook page. None of this routes through Phare Ponleu Selpak. The library is operationally separate from Bunsorng's employer, even though his employer is the most credible institution near him.
The library's footprint is regional Khmer-language press and a Facebook page near the program's follower cap, with no English-language editorial boost. Cambodianess covered the room twice in late 2025, and the Lowell-based diaspora paper Khmer Post USA republished the first piece in Khmer in December 2025. Kiripost mentioned the library in passing in a July 2025 article on art education. The Phare Ponleu Selpak staff profile from February 2024 does not mention the library at all, because it is not a Phare project. The room is held together by the founder's salary, the volunteers' time, the Rotary club's bag of school supplies, and the Facebook page through which the books arrive.
In Their Words
“It's easier to build habits in the young than to change the mindset of adults. When youth become readers, they carry the habit forward.”
“One small library can make a small change, but many can make a big difference.”