Girl Scout Gold and Silver Awards

(photo above, Sofie Gmerek at the organic demonstration garden she created with our gardener)


Five San Jose Girl Scouts earned their Gold and Silver awards by working many hours over many months to complete projects that have enriched the lives of our students and their families. Their work has left an invaluable and lasting legacy:Read about their work below:

Sofie Gmerek: Gold Award

  • Sofie Gmerek earned her Gold Award, the highest award in Girl Scouts, for creating a garden, funding the gardener's salary, teaching CPR to over 200 students and teachers, creating Science and health lessons and supplies.

Sofie’s work created an organic demonstration garden and gardening education program. She hired and funded a salary for our gardener who teaches students how to raise various vegetables and fruits. This project critically mitherates families from a single crop dependency on rice. The garden has expanded each year since 2017 and now students can learn how to raise morning glory for salads, peas, corn, long beans, squash, wax melon, sponge gourd, peanuts, papaya, and mango. Students share the harvest with their families and teach them ways of using their land to grow these crops.

Sofie raised funds for and assembled first aid kits for all students and hand-carried them to our school during her volunteer trip. She funded purchase of adult and infant inflatable CPR dummies and taught CPR in classes to both students and our staff. She purchased Germ Glow for teaching proper hand washing techniques and disclosing tablets to teach proper toothbrushing techniques and taught these techniques to all students and staff, leaving support;ies behind for teachers to use in future school years. She created and taught nutrition, girls’ health, and first aid courses, e.g., how to treat a burn victim.

Top Row: Sofie prepares first aid kits at home. Girl performs CPR on adult dummy. Sofie puts Germ Glow on girls’ hands for hand washing lesson. Girl uses Sofie’s blacklight to sees areas not cleaned by her hand washing. Girl chews disclosing tablet before brushing teeth (red areas show places where cleaning is needed). Girl shows her teeth after a successful brushing (minimal red areas left). Bottom row: First two photos: Sofie’s health lessons—her writing in English and Khmer translation. Student performing the Heimlich maneuver on CPR dummy.


Mira Karthik: Gold Award

  • Mira Karthik earned her Gold Award for creating a Girl Empowerment program, a much needed curriculum to reshape traditional village culture which tends to prioritize boys’ upbringing over girls. She also raised funds to purchase 13 ukuleles to donate to students, creating ukulele lessons using original methodology for beginners to quickly learn songs, teaching and supervising volunteers teaching ukelele lessons to students, and and orchestrating students’ ukulele performance before the whole school at the end of her volunteer trip.

Top Row: Mira and a class of girls in her Girl Empowerment class (She taught the rallying cry in English: “I am a girl. I am Strong!”). Two girls practice a conversation from in Khmer from Mira’s curriculum that is self-affirming. Pia, a young Cambodian woman volunteer (in red sweatshirt facing away) oversees the lesson. Some of the 13 ukuleles Mira funded purchase of at arriving at our school after she coordinated hand-carrying on flights by volunteers. Our computer and English teacher Saveng uses Mira’s lesson plan and translates it from English into Khmer for students. Bottom Row: Volunteer Chloe teaches two girls chords from Mira’s lesson book. Volunteer Bita and two girls smile after learning “You Are My Sunshine”, Doris Dillon’s favorite song. Mira and students getting ready to perform three songs they’ve learned for the whole school. Mira and students celebrate their performance in front of the mural that her sister Megha designed and supervision student creation of for her own Gold Award. They were being filmed by filmmaker Julian Poulson of Kampot.


Megha Karthik: Gold Award

  • Megha Karthik earned her Gold Award for creating an art program incorporating basics such as color theory and perspective. She designed and oversaw the volunteer and student creation of an inspirational mural for the school. She came up with a brilliant idea to compose a rainbow from students’ handprints. And, to represent Doris Dillon’s passion to enkindle a lifelong passion for reading in her elementary school students, she designed an open book with the words “Learn more, know more’ in English and Khmer.

Top Row: Megha looks over the binders of art lessons she created for each student to keep. Students work on a color theory exercise. A student sketches a portrait of a woman using Megha’s lesson on proportion. Megha (in red) shows a girl how to apply her handprint, painted yellow, to the mural. Megha guides the girl as she adds her handprint to the mural. Megha and a student smile as they finish adding a green handprint. Parent volunteer Kim Moore, high school senior Corey’s mom (he taught robotics), adds a finishing touch. Volunteers Chloe, Megha, and Eulikya pose before the finished mural.

Allyson and Carolyn: Silver Awards

Last December, Girl Scouts Caroline and Allyson from Girl Scout Troop 61229 in San Jose, CA received the Girl Scout Silver Award for creating projects to support our middle school students. They began their work when they were 8th graders. The Silver Award is the highest honor that middle school Girl Scouts can earn, requiring a minimum of 50 hours of volunteer work per girl to complete. Special thanks also to Lydia Gmerek and our In-Country Director Sokna Chhin, based in Phnom Penh, for their guidance and help.

Here are Caroline and Allyson’s words about their work:

“Our project was helping children learn English and developing skills they could use later in life. We chose this because learning English is so important for children in low income areas, or who attend English speaking schools. Khmer is the national language of Cambodia, but college classes are taught in English.  Education is something we are passionate about. Giving girls the same chances to learn as boys is extremely important. 

We created a Girl’s Leadership Club at the Doris Dillon School in Cambodia to help girls feel more empowered in leadership roles. We created a template for the club and gave autonomy for the girls involved to choose various activities. These activities include listening to and reading children’s books in English, reading English/Khmer bilingual books, learning about science from videos and hands on science activities as well as suggested art, music, sports and other activities.

Together, we made videos of how to assemble the RAFT (Resource Area for Teachers) science hands-on activity kits that are at the Doris Dillon School but had not been translated into Khmer. We downloaded our videos onto flash drives so girls could watch them and learn how to complete the science learning activities. 

Many US children’s books, such as the Magic Treehouse series and Island of the Blue Dolphins, had been donated to the Doris Dillon School library. We downloaded audio recordings of these books being read in English and put them onto flash drives so that students could practice reading and hearing spoken English. We also provided recordings in English of how to use donated learning materials, such as Goldieblox kits. 

Doris Dillon wrote many articles for Scholastic Magazine and enjoyed a close relationship with the editorial staff at Scholastic. When they heard about our library they donated almost 100 books. When Carolyn and Allyson found out about this donation, they raised funds to provide a bookcase and shelves for these books (see photos below). Thank you so much Carolyn and Allyson, for your dedication, hard work, and support!