FORMER teacher Dianne Ashman has jetted out to Cambodia in her role as education advisor.

Every year since early retirement in 2008 Ms Ashman has been taking on voluntary projects with the charity People and Places.

It soon became clear to her that while the short-term placements were excellently run, the charity’s expertise was not in education.

She said: “I really like the charity as they take mostly professional people for four to six-week placements which means you are working on a project being run by people in whichever country you are going to, rather than us going out and running a project for them.

“I persuaded the charity that they could do with an education advisor. Before I went I had a lot of questions as an ex-teacher which they didn’t know the answers to but quite a lot of their projects are education based.”

Last year the former Colfox teacher taught children in rural Rajasthan in India. She returned from Morocco in March where she helped with a project to educate girls from the Berber tribe in the Atlas mountains.

She said: “When you go to secondary school there you have to board and people were sending their sons but not their daughters.

“The charity has built three boarding houses just for girls.”

The education project was to help those girls catch up.

Now she is in Cambodia working on two new projects – a community centre for people below the poverty line linking with local schools and teaching them ways to help them make a living and the other called Life Behind Bars, helping the huge child prison population get an education.

Then she will go straight to Thailand to oversee education in an orphanage set up after the 2004 tsunami and to work on an English language project with Burmese refugees.

She said: “They are allowed to stay in the country but are not entitled to education.”

Ms Ashman will be back at the end of May and is hoping to raise money for the charity at a coffee morning in the United Church in Bridport on June 11.