Lumen Education Program

I went to Cambodia in the fall of 2025 because of something I couldn't stop thinking about: in a country visited by millions of tourists every year, there were children growing up without a single book in their own language, and no library within reach.

The gap was hard to miss once you looked. Hotels and tour buses on one side of the street; on the other, classrooms where the only printed material was a shared worksheet. Cambodia's oral storytelling tradition is one of the richest in Southeast Asia, but almost none of it existed in a form a child could hold, open, and read.

Lumen's answer was not to import books, but to make them. Working with Cambodian youth, local educators, and student volunteers abroad, we co-author illustrated children's books in Khmer, English, and Korean, so a child can read the story in their own language and grow into others.

Our first two titles both grew out of stories the community already told. "Amok" follows a girl learning to prepare fish amok with her grandmother, a story about food, memory, and what gets passed down. "Phnom Pros and Phnom Srei" retells the Khmer legend of the two hills, whose lesson is that wisdom can be stronger than strength.

A book means little without a place to read it. In partnership with Angels for the Journey, we established three children's libraries in local churches in Siem Reap, stocked with our own titles and with more than 2,500 donated books gathered from Korea and the United States.

We also donated a collection to the National Library of Cambodia, and now partner with the National Library on free Korean language and cultural exchange programs, so the bridge runs in both directions.

Lumen is the most concrete thing I have ever built: you can walk into a room in Siem Reap and watch a child read a book that did not exist a year ago. It is also the most humbling, because every book we made together was a reminder that the stories were always there. They were just waiting for someone to help print them.