Herman Grech witnessed the terrible conditions of Cambodian children living in slums, the homeless and orphans, some of whom have been given a lifeline by Maltese NGOs and donors.

A naked child plays with a toxic battery lying on a dirt track sinking under tens of thousands of discarded sea shells.

He rummages through animal carcasses and dumped household goods, and beams widely when he notices a stranger in the area.

The unbearable stench permeates the cesspit that serves as a base for hundreds of ramshackle wooden huts covered with corrugated iron.

Welcome to one of several of Phnom Penh’s slums, the standard residence of tens of thousands of Cambodians still reeling from the devastation of the brutal Khmer Rouge.

“Come let me show you my house,” says Chen Srey Mech, a 17-year-old orphan who dreams of becoming a doctor.

Chen Srey’s ‘house’ is a dull, tiny duplex, a rickety wooden structure perched on stilts above a stream of sewage... and shared with another family.

The ceiling is so low that you have to crouch before you mount a ladder leading to her family’s room, a welcome reprieve from the wall of humidity as you step outdoors.

There is no furniture, save for a bed and a wooden frame of the beloved king and queen of Cambodia.

The ‘house’ is a dull, tiny duplex, a rickety wooden structure perched on stilts above a stream of sewage

Chen Srey has lived with her grandmother, sister and brother since her parents died of HIV within a year of each other. Her brother, 11, also contracted HIV, but unlike her parents, he received treatment before it was too late.

“I like the friendly neighbours but I need to leave and take my family with me. It’s not good. When the rain seeps in, everything is broken,” she says. In Cambodia it rains… almost every day.

The stench of misery permeates the $30-a-month rented shacks, but it is hard to see it reflected on the 5,000 slum residents.

The sight of a Westerner elicits a procession of beaming children, waving. It is rare to hear any child crying. One man offers me a piece of his leftover chicken.

The slum also provides a curious example of contradictions. A middle-aged man and his cat sleep on the floor in the morning heat. His wife sits at the entrance to the hut typing on her smartphone. Misery and disease permeate the air, but the couple appear immune, in splendid isolation.

Houses range from tiny, wooden cubicles covered in plastic sheeting to homes that incorporate corrugated iron roofs and concrete walls.

The story of the slums started after the Pol Pot regime fell in 1979, by which time the damage had been done. The Khmer Rouge had decimated almost two million people in a purge of the educated, the commoners and anyone who stood in their warped sights.

Villagers from rural areas started moving to Phnom Penh, took over the land and built the shacks. It temporarily provided shelter for hundreds of survivors, but along the years it has served as a recipe for failure.

Tens of thousands of other children remain homeless, living by the roadsides, often forced by their parents to beg for money.

But some NGOs on the ground are serving as a lifeline for children, fulfilling their needs: food, shelter and a basic education.

A sea of young, smiling faces welcomes anybody walking through the gates of Les Restaurants des Enfants (LRDE), a kind of victory kitchen for the young living off the streets. Around 500 children visit daily, 300 regularly.

Some 25 per cent of the children end up begging by the evening, 30 per cent are scavengers, and the rest will try to sell something by the roadside. In the evening, the children are seen trawling the markets, trying to charm foreigners into giving them money before returning to sleep in tents infested with rats.

LRDE founder Chhiv Ngauv says one of the aims of his organisation is to convince parents to move away from living on the streets and to stop encouraging their children to beg. The least they could do is move to a slum.

The NGO wants the children to sustain themselves, so much so that Mr Chhiv insists to volunteers that at no point should they give money to the children.

On the other side of the Cambodian capital, you can hear the sound of laughter as you are driven through the extremely bumpy road leading to an orphanage.

The Sfoda orphanage provides a refuge for some 50 children. Half the children have no parents, the rest are abandoned.

Embraced by the graffiti-strewn walls and shacks, children aged one to 17 years play and welcome any volunteers with a high-five like long-lost friends.

One-year-old Samnang (Lucky) was put in a plastic bag and deposited underneath a bench five days after his birth, the umbilical cord still attached

The smiling faces hide a chronicle of personal problems.

Sang, 10, laughs out loud as she plays passju with the Maltese volunteers on the rough terrain. Sang is receiving treatment for HIV, having been diagnosed shortly after her mother died.

A 14-year-old with the first signs of mental problems is believed to have been lured into prostitution.

One-year-old Samnang (Lucky) was put in a plastic bag and deposited underneath a bench five days after his birth, the umbilical cord still attached. On the verge of death, the baby was rushed to hospital and somehow nursed back to health. He has been nicknamed Baby Do, after the Maltese NGO DO Cambodia, which helped sponsor him.

Around 30 children have, in fact, been sponsored via DO Cambodia, which also re-routes donations towards food and clothes.

The children play with not a care in world.

A four-year-old smacks his head against a pole as he tries to head a ball. Long having understood that nobody would fuss about it, he lets out a laugh and continues playing. A boy bounces off a trampoline, landing on a rock. He doesn’t cry.

The unsung heroes

NGOs like Les Restaurants des Enfants and Sfoda are giving hope to a lost generation, thanks to the generosity of Maltese donors.

They are run by people like Sothy Prak, an orphan herself, and Mr Chhiv, a gentle old man who survived working in the fields under Pol Pot.

“We are doing our best to give hope to the many children here, but without funds the children have to be turned away,” Mr Chivv told The Sunday Times of Malta.

Anybody can sponsor a child for just $30 a month. That means children are guaranteed education and food every day. The sponsorships normally last until the children find a job.

Maltese families sponsor more than 180 children at LRDE, and some 30 at Sfoda, among the most generous per capita, according to the Cambodian NGOs.

Most of the sponsorships have been channelled in the last three years through Maltese NGO DO Cambodia, though Maltese NGO Reaching Cambodia has also helped raise thousands.

Meanwhile, too many children in Cambodia are desperately seeking help. Sixty children at LRDE need to find a sponsor by September, 10 others at Sfoda.

“The children who are sponsored will get an education, hope. Sadly, their families don’t care about their education. But equally important, sponsorship gives them the feeling that they have a family in faraway Malta,” Mr Chivv said.

Donations may be made via NGOs like Do Cambodia (https://www.facebook.com/dra maoutreachproject/) or Reaching Cambodia (http://reaching-cambodia.com/).

‘They put salt water on my back as it bled’

Bou Meng produces a charming smile but in reality he remains shackled to the memories of the Khmer Rouge.

Sitting outside S-21, the prison which killed tens of thousands of Cambodians between 1975 and 1979, the 75-year-old points towards an illustration he drew of his wife, Ma Yoeun.

In the picture, she is seen screaming, stooped over a mass grave, and her throat has been cut.

The couple were separated on arrival at S-21 in August 1977, after Bou Meng was accused of association with the CIA and KGB, an accusation merely fuelled by the paranoia of the Khmer Rouge.

Relentlessly questioned, Bou Meng was dragged and beaten by five guards, torture that to this day has left him deaf in one ear. They put an iron rod across his legs and hit him viciously. In an attempt to force him to make a false confession, they poured salt on his bleeding back.

I survived, but they all died… and I lived to tell the tale simply because I could paint

Pointing to his biography, he tells The Sunday Times of Malta about the oppressive stench in the air. “I had never smelt rotting human flesh before.”

After several months of interrogation, he had no choice but to give a false confession, but his trade as an artist gave him a lifeline. When Duch, a former maths teacher who became the architect of the torture and executions, found out he was an artist, he told him to reproduce a painting of Pol Pot.

It came with a warning: if it was not lifelike he’d be killed.

Pleased with Bou Meng’s work, Duch later requested large portraits of Karl Marx, Lenin and Mao Zedong.

Bou Meng was spared the so-called Killing Fields, but his two young children were among those who died from disease. It was only during the 2009 war crimes tribunal that he learned his wife had probably ended up in a mass grave.

Meanwhile, a group of tourists ask to take pictures with Bou Meng – he is after all one of just seven of the 14,000 captives who walked out alive from S-21.

The ground-floor classrooms have been left to appear as they were in 1977, converted into interrogation rooms with only a school desk and chair facing a steel bed frame with shackles at each end. The stained floor tiles underneath each of the beds are a gruesome reminder of the sea of blood from the chained victims.

The photographs on one of the walls show grisly, decomposing bodies. Dozens of others show innocent, confused citizens staring into the camera with a blank look, the photos collected to prove to Khmer Rouge leaders that their orders had been carried out. Each of the almost 6,000 recovered S-21 portraits tells a story of pain, defiance and horror.

Most inmates were eventually ferried by night to the Killing Fields, where a team of teenage executioners would order them to dig their own graves before they were told to kneel down, to be clubbed on the neck until they died .

In a corner of the Killing Fields, one tree stands tall, bearing a placard which screams out: ‘Killing tree against which executioners beat children’.

“I survived, but they all died… and I lived to tell the tale simply because I could paint,” Bou Meng says, clearly not freed from his relentless ghosts.

He offers a weak handshake just metres from one of the interrogation rooms, a testimony to a chapter of savagery where the protagonist survived against all odds.

Pictures of the tortured victims at S-21.

The killing machine

1968: Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge launches an insurgency aiming to return Cambodia to ‘Year Zero’ and build a classless, agrarian utopia.

1973-1974: Khmer Rouge controls most of Cambodia – city-dwellers are forcibly moved to the countryside.

1975: Khmer Rouge captures the capital, Phnom Penh. Doctors are killed, as are most people with skills and education that threaten the regime.

1976: The regime divides citizens into three categories, which determine their food rations. Urban residents, land owners, former army officers, bureaucrats and merchants fall into the “undeserved” category and face execution, starvation and hard labour. All religion and money is banned.

January 1979: Vietnamese armed forces and the Kampuchean United Front for National Salvation capture Phnom Penh. Pol Pot flees. By this time an estimated 90 per cent of artists, intellectuals and teachers have been killed. About two million people – a quarter of the population – have been murdered, starved or struck down by disease.

1998: Pol Pot dies in Cambodia on the day it is announced he will face an international tribunal.

2009: Kaing Guek Eav, known as Comrade Duch, is sentenced to life in a UN-backed tribunal. Bou Meng testifies against Duch.

2014: Two more Khmer Rouge leaders are sentenced to life in prison.