I intentionally kept yesterday's blog relatively light and fluffy following the sombre instalment yesterday when we visited one of the city slums but, after yet another sleepless night, I felt I would be doing readers a disservice by not sharing an important, eye-opening part of our day yesterday.
After two high-energy classes at LRDE, the amazing Mr Chiu suggested we accompany some of the younger children who actually live on the street on their tuk-tuk ride back to where they live - in other words, a step down from the slums we had seen the previous day. If we thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did.
We got off at the Mekong riverside just by the Monivong bridge and, apart from the litter, everything looked relatively normal until the children we were with started pulling us towards the bridge and calling out. Suddenly human beings started to crawl out from under the bridge, under benches and under cardboard boxes to say hello.
Picture if you will the leper scene from Jesus Christ Superstar except that this was real. This was children. Beautiful children and a scrawny woman – their mother, a drug addict – and a very suspicious stranger with make up (who we later discovered nobody actually knows which made the experience even more surreal).
They greeted us in typical Cambodian fashion, bowing to the Great Westerners in gratitude for doing nothing other than standing their like stunned lemons. The children, in the meantime, smiled and laughed as they showed me the headless Playmobil horse that I had given them two days before. Headless because they've given the head to another child to play with, because in their poverty they remain kind and considerate to the younger children.
It is impossible to contain your emotions when faced with such deprivation. We just stood there smiling as tears welled in our eyes.
It is impossible to contain your emotions when faced with such deprivation. We just stood there smiling as tears welled in our eyes. Gaby broke down and had to turn and walk away.
The prospects for these children are not very good. Yes, there are organisations such as LRDE that will do what it can with very limited resources - such as pay for a tuk-tuk to bring these children in for their one meal of the day. But it's not enough by a long shot. The cycle will continue unless we intervene in which ever tiny way we can.
Education is of course one way to go. Parents here, many of them single, see their children as a source of revenue, and would rather they work scavenging through garbage and begging in order to provide rice for the family back home, rather than waste their time getting going to school. However if we were to provide the rice for them, that may possibly solve part of the problem and free the child to get an education.
Another way is, of course, adoption. Anyone out there thinking of adopting a child should do so for all of the reasons they are already thinking about, and more. And if you just allow me a little shallowness, the children here are beautiful - I mean really beautiful – but not just that - they are inherently happy children who I am sure will adapt to life in Malta very quickly. There are organisations in Malta that can help facilitate the process and if you want more info please contact me and I will put you in touch with them.
Also worth mentioning is that some people are getting in touch with our team here in Phnom Penh wanting to help and perhaps sponsor a child or two. I can assure them that this will be greatly appreciated and we will be getting information to see how best to organise this in a safe and reliable way
On a totally different note, we experienced one hell of a monsoon shower this afternoon. An overcast sky let down buckets of rain as the wind whirled into a frenzy and reached something like gale force 9 in a matter of seconds. It was quite something… and then, 15 minutes later, it stopped and calmed down as quickly as it started… and we just got on with our lessons as planned.
Tomorrow we will be working as usual during the day but will be heading out on a seven-hour bus trip to Seam Reap where we will visit one of the 7 wonders of the world: Angkor Wat.
We’ll keep you posted.
Alan and the team