The chief of Tramung Chrum is a small, white-haired man of about sixty with a crinkled face and a quiet dignity. When my family and I arrived at his remote village last week for the inauguration of  their first brick-and-mortar school, he broke out in a huge grin and said (in Khmer through an interpreter)  "I feel like a hunter who has just captured an elephant."

  Tramung Chrum is a Cambodian village of about five hundred people, forty miles from Phnom Penh. Because the village is far from a good road and made up of Muslim Chams in a largely Buddhist country, the Cambodian government has never built a school there. Generations have passed without reading and writing. The history of the village extends back at least as far as the mid nineteenth century, during the beginnings of the French occupation.

Four years ago, a former resident of the village named Leb Ke rode his moped to the UN office in Phnom Penh and announced that the villagers wanted a school. They had built a roof of palm leaves and now requested the rest of  a school to hold the roof up. A visionary Cambodian UN worker named Veasna Chea eventually relayed Leb Ke's plea to a visionary visitor from Maine named Frederick Lipp. Mr. Lipp in turn funded the building of a temporary school made of sticks and palm leaves. Teachers were trained and the first classes began.

But the school of sticks and leaves leaked during the monsoons and blew down entirely in heavy winds. Two years ago, Lipp told me of his work. I began making trips to the village. Then, with the contributions of other friends, we built the new school for Tramung Chrum.

Cambodia desperately depends on such help to survive. One of the poorest countries in southeast Asia, with an average annual income of only $300 per person, the Cambodia still has not recovered from the devastation of the 1970s. In the early part of that decade, the U.S. dropped 500,000 tons of bombs on Cambodia, the finale of the Vietnam War, and propped up the corrupt dictatorship of Lon Nol. Then came the ruthless Khmer Rouge regime, which sent two million people to their deaths. Among other brutalities, the Khmer Rouge annihilated all of the educated class in Cambodia. Today, at least 30% of the country remains illiterate.

Tramung Chrum, like many rural villages in Cambodia, exists on subsistence farming and menial labor. There is no electricity in Tramung Chrum. There is no running water. The men, women, and children live in huts made of palm leaves and sticks and own little more than the clothes on their backs. They live a stripped down existence. Yet they crave education. Education ranks alongside food and water as a necessity of life.

The school at Tramung Chrum, with its three classrooms and library, took four months to build with a twenty-man crew from Phnom Penh. A camera recorded the excitement and awe of the villagers as they watched this wonder of concrete and steel girders and tiles rising bit by bit from the dirt.

On inauguration day, I was greeted by a gathering of the entire village and a large assortment of officials, including  the vice governor of the province, the district chief of police (with his uniformed entourage), and a representative from the national ministry of education. Colored pennants had been hung from tall sticks and a ceremonial platform built out of bamboo  and twine. All of the children of the village, about one hundred and fifty boys and girls, stood on both sides of the dusty path leading to the platform, waving American and Cambodian flags. In the distance gleamed the new school, its pale yellow walls and red roof shimmering in the fierce heat.

On the ceremonial platform, I found myself seated beside several Muslim Cham clerics, wearing their white robes, and several Buddhist monks in their saffron robes. The monks chanted and tossed a gentle rain of white flower petals onto the heads of the dignitaries.

Then, the speeches began.  As I sweated heavily in my chair, I recalled that my nation's Independence  Day was only one week away. I thought of all that has happened in recent years to tarnish the meaning and honor of that day around the world. Then I looked out at the new school, fifty yards away. I looked at the new flag pole, made of bamboo. I looked at the meandering cows, the principal livelihood of  Tramung Chrum. I looked at the dirt road leading to Phnom Penh, the scattered groups of fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, the one hundred and fifty children squatting in front of the platform, miraculously holding still in the heat, listening to the long speeches. And I looked again at the American and Cambodian flags. I felt proud to be an American.

Concord resident Alan Lightman is the director of the Harpswell Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to providing educational opportunities for disadvantaged children and young people. Focusing its efforts in the Southeast Asian country of Cambodia, the foundation is in the process of building the nation's first female college dormitory.

"It's been the most satisfying thing I've ever done in my life," Lightman said. "I've learned that if you're willing to invest your time, you really can make a difference."

Lightman and his wife started the foundation in 1999 out of a joint desire to give something back to society. The couple had originally planned to pursue the foundation later in life and had expected to work with disadvantaged youth in the Boston area. But their plans changed in 2003 when Lightman was invited to visit Frederick Lipp, a friend who was doing charitable work in Cambodia. Calling it a life-changing experience, Lightman was shocked by what he saw on his trip.

"Everywhere I looked, people were in desperate need," he said. "I felt like I was in a boat in a sea of drowning people and I didn't know who to pull out first."

Cambodia is still recovering from the brutal reign of the radical communist government called the Khmer Rouge. In the late 1970s, the Khmer Rouge killed nearly 2 million people, including virtually all of the country's educated class. Cambodia is also among the poorest countries in the world with an average annual income of just 0. Because the country is so poor, most Cambodians cannot afford an education and only about 1 percent of the population will graduate from college.

After seeing the plight of the Cambodian people first hand, Lightman made a commitment to help and decided to shift the focus of his foundation.

"We were so moved by both the need of the people and their spirit. They really have a great degree of resiliency despite the terrible things that have been done to them," he said.

"It seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity, even though this was not the time in my life that I was planning to do this," he explained. "Sometimes life doesn't go according to your plans, and when an opportunity comes along, you have to take it."

Last January, The Harpswell Foundation began its first project, building a school in the small village of Tramung Chrum. While visiting the village with his daughter, Lightman said all the mothers asked them to help by building a new school for their children. The only existing school in the village was made of bamboo leaves and sticks, which leaked and blew down in heavy rains. Lightman said it was important to him that the villagers asked for the school.

"I didn't want to impose my view of what they needed. When the local people ask you for something, you know it's something they actually need," he explained.

Construction of the school was completed in June. Last month, Lightman returned to Tramung Chrum and visited the school, which had been in operation for six months and now has 150 students.

"It was very exciting to see students in those classrooms," he said.

In December, Lightman's foundation began work on a second project, building a women's dormitory in the capital city of Phnom Penh. The facility is expected to be completed in July and will be the country's first female dormitory. Housing 36 women, the dorm will be available to female students from any university in Phnom Penh.

Lightman said the project was inspired by Veasna Chea, the foundation's principal Cambodian partner, who had spoken to him about the great lack of university housing for women.

"It became evident that not having a place to live was a big obstacle to women pursuing an education," Lightman said.

Universities in Cambodia do not provide housing for their students, Lightman explained. Most men stay at nearby Buddhist temples, but women are not permitted to do so. As a result, unless they live in the city or have family in the city, most women cannot afford to find a place to live while attending college.

Lightman said Chea is a rare example of a Cambodian woman who was able to succeed against all odds. Chea, 31, had had several family members killed by the Khmer Rouge and was determined to get an education so she could help her people. Chea attended college, but due to the lack of housing for women, she had to resort to living beneath the law school building, literally. All of Phnom Penh is built on stilts because of frequent flooding, leaving about five feet of space beneath the buildings, Lightman explained. For four years, Chea shared this space with four other students, and in 1997, she became the fourth Cambodian woman ever to earn a law degree.

Lightman said he hoped Chea's story of personal triumph is not only an inspiration for the dormitory, but also for her people.

"We want to have a much bigger effect than simply giving women a place to live. We want to select women based on their potential to be leaders who will work for change in Cambodia," Lightman explained. "We want each of the women to become Veasna's."

The new three-story Harpswell Foundation Dormitory for University Women is named for a town in Maine. But it's on an unpaved street in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, populated with fried fish vendors, motorbike taxis, and roaming chickens.

The name is a nod to the building's founder and chief supporter, Alan Lightman, the MIT physicist and celebrated author. Lightman, a soft-spoken, deep-thinking Southerner who summers on a quiet island near Harpswell, said he now spends about a third of his time running the dorm for rural women he built in Cambodia. While working on another aid project there in 2003, Lightman learned that a lack of secure housing prevents many village women from going to college. All the schools are in the gritty capital, and few offer dormitories. Lightman saw a clear solution. He raised money, bought a piece of land, hired contractors, and built a dorm.

Now, he is "Dad" to more than 30 women. Until the dorm opened about a year ago, they faced lives as rice farmers, tour guides, or possibly brides in arranged marriages. Now they want to work for the government, earn PhDs, and study overseas.

"As unexpected as it was to find myself on the other side of the planet in the culture I knew nothing about, I felt like I could make a difference," Lightman said. "It wasn't a lost cause. This is something that was not beyond my reach."

Lightman's vision for the dorm goes beyond offering a safe haven and a leg up to young scholars. A brass plaque inside House 50 on Street 508 spells it out in both Khmer and English: "Our mission is to empower a new generation of Cambodian women." A similar bilingual plaque outside the building announced the name of the dorm, but it has disappeared twice. Local kids can get $5 for the brass, Lightman said.

A Memphis native, Lightman is a theoretical physicist by trade. In the 1980s he taught astronomy at Harvard and moved on to MIT, where he is still part of the science writing program. He has two adult daughters, and he and his wife, painter Jean Lightman, split their time between Concord and Maine.

Change within reach

A phone call from a stranger started Lightman's journey to Cambodia. Frederick Lipp, a Unitarian minister in Portland, Maine, wanted to use Lightman's book "Einstein's Dreams" in a sermon. The two men became friends, and eventually Lightman joined Lipp's effort to help a small, Spartan Cambodian village about 50 hard miles from Phnom Penh.

Lightman recalled the day he and his daughter Elyse first went to Tramung Chrum to meet the villagers. He was thinking he might want to join Lipp's effort, but he was unprepared for the emotions that hit him.

"The women started coming up to us, holding their babies, and said, 'Please help us build a school,' " he said. "I was just amazed that in this remote village with no electricity, no plumbing, no toilets, they were talking about education. . . . I was overwhelmed by their courage and their ability to think in the long term."

So Lightman - a serious and unflashy person - did something he finds extremely difficult. He asked family and friends for money. He talked about Cambodia's painful recent history, which remains defined by memories of the 1970s, when the United States bombed provinces at the Vietnam border and the Maoist Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh. The Khmer Rouge emptied the cities and sent everyone to virtual prison farms. Almost four years later, the Vietnamese invaded, but not before about 1.7 million people were summarily executed or died of disease or starvation. In 1994, the Vietnamese left, and the United Nations sponsored elections, but the country still suffers from years of isolation, decay, poverty, and corruption.

What this meant for Tramung Chrum is that no one ever remembers having a "concrete" school, Lightman told potential donors. Instead, they hold classes in a makeshift palm-leaf shelter. The 50 or so contributors who stepped up became the core supporters of the Harpswell Foundation.

In the process, Lightman met Chea Veasna, a Cambodian lawyer working on the Tramung Chrum school project. She told him that she lived in an unfinished space underneath the law school building while studying there. There were no college dorms in the city then, and there are few now. Male students can bunk in the city's many temples, but Buddhist rules bar women, she explained.

"Veasna convinced me that this was a critical problem, and she and I together hatched the idea of building the dormitory," Lightman said. The dollar goes a long way in Cambodia; they were able to do it for $150,000.

Lightman travels to Cambodia several times a year. Even when the family retreats to the quiet of their purposely unwired house in Maine, Elyse Lightman said, her father often slips into town to check dorm-related e-mail.

"It's like anything else in his life; he puts a lot of his own care and time into," she said. "He is very passionate about it."

Lipp called the dorm project " 'Einstein's Dreams' live." "In Alan's book, you're captured by something that you have never thought before," Lipp said. "You dream yourself into a new reality where the world has changed. . . . That's what happened here."

The smartest and bravest

Cambodia, "new reality" might be an understatement. So's parents are farmers, and both are Khmer Rouge survivors. She wanted to go to college, she said, but her parents were afraid to send her to the city.

One day, dorm manager Peou Vanna appeared at her school, asking for the smartest, "bravest" girls in her class, she said. After a series of interviews and tests, So was chosen.

"If I did not have the opportunity to get a college education, I would end up being a market seller in my village," she said in Khmer.

Instead, she and the inaugural group of about 30 women - also plucked out of their villages - moved into the pinkish, cement building about 15 minutes from the city center. By habit, they head out to school on their bicycles wearing the traditional white shirt and pleated skirt uniforms. But unlike the generation before them, they tend toward jeans instead of sarongs.

In the dry season, Street 508 is dusty; during the rains, it is flooded. The air smells of cooking fires, roasted fish, or whatever street-food vendors have to offer. The dorm is set back a bit but stands out among the vegetable shops and run-down villas for its newness and for the large, medallion-like facade vents on each floor sculpted into the shape of Cambodian dancers.

Inside, some of the residents listen intently as an American volunteer teaches computer skills, in English. In addition to room and board, life in the dorm includes English classes, access to Internet-equipped computers, and weekly discussion of the news in The Cambodia Daily. They also have 24-hour security.

Back home in leafy Concord, Lightman tries to manage problems like sleeping guards via e-mail. He has other things to worry about - like reviews of his new book, "Ghost." But the dorm is now a part of each day. When he talks of what drew him so deeply into the project, he always goes back to that first day at Tramung Chrum. The well-traveled Lightman said he is sure he wasn't reacting to the shock of seeing desperate poverty firsthand.

"I was reacting to something that rose above the poverty," he said. "I guess hope is what really got under my skin. I found there was hope there."

Tinker Ready spent 1996 working with The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. Lor Chandara, a senior writer at the paper, contributed to this report.

(c) Copyright 2007 Globe Newspaper Company.