Heroes in Kep Gardens, Cambodia: with help from Bowie, Play For Change and Musicians in Angkor Wat!
Date posted: Saturday 20th December 2014
Have you ever been in a class with young children and suddenly a fly enters the room? All hell breaks loose as the children shout, ‘Miss, there’s a fly in the room!’ You just have to tut and roll your eyes in response and say, ‘It won’t hurt you. Haven’t you seen a fly before? Just ignore it and it will go away…’
School run, Cambodia style
As a child and teenager I was a voracious reader. I loved books, and I would even say some of them were my friends (or at least I imagined the characters were): Atticus from To Kill a Mockingbird, Anne from Anne of Green Gables (perhaps not), Tess from Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Pippi Longstocking (when I was about six and was dying for a girlfriend to have adventures with), Pinocchio even. There’s nothing special about that: you might even have said the same about yourself when you were growing up.
On April 17th 1975 I was 17, and celebrating my girlfriend’s 18th birthday. We had planned to visit France for the day, but in the end travelled up to London and watched Ken Russell’s awful film version of Tommy, had a meal in Jimmy’s Greek restaurant in Frith Street in Soho (moussaka, chips and salad and a glass of retsina for £1.00, and the manageress danced on the table to celebrate my girlfriend’s birthday. Awesome.)
That was also the day that the soldiers of the ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge ‘liberated’ the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh. This involved every single resident of the city being forcibly evacuated and marched hundreds of miles into the countryside, where they spent the next four years living (and rapidly dying) on collective farms. All schools were banned, and anyone who could read, speak a foreign language or had travelled abroad was executed. 80% of teachers and 70% of doctors were murdered. An estimated two million Cambodians- a quarter of the population- died from starvation disease, torture and summary execution.
The Khmer Rouge, whose leaders were all highly-educated (‘Brother Number One’, Pol Pot studied in France) were in power for four years. In 1979 I was studying to be a speech and language therapist, and like most people in the world was stunned by John Pilger’s accounts in the Daily Mirror of what he had found, as one of the first Western journalists allowed into the country after ‘liberation’ by Vietnamese troops.
I guess many of us we have become used to the regular images we see on TV of the effects of war and famine across the world. Yet we still give generously to organisations that support famine relief and activities that we hope will help people climb out of poverty. In 1979, John Pilger’s ITV Documentary, Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia, showed pitiful sights, such as a grandmother trying to feed three starving children with soup she had made from leaves and twigs, in a pot that was heated by heaps of bank notes she had found in the ruined national bank. She was one of the few people Pilger saw in the capital, which had been largely deserted throughout the Khmer Rouge’s reign. 40 sacks of mail arrived at the ATV studios in Birmingham, in the days that followed the airing of the documentary, including £1 million in donations in the first few days. “This is for Cambodia,” wrote an anonymous Bristol bus driver, enclosing his week’s wage. A single parent sent her savings of £50. And neither The Daily Mirror nor ITV had asked for any money.
Vietnam took control of Cambodia for 10 years, until the UN worked hard to create stability and democratic elections. But how long does it take a country to recover when most of its parents have been killed, where children have been brought up to believe that they must mistrust and inform on their parents, where family life was actively destroyed, where everyone is ordered to wear black pyjamas, where wearing any kind of colourful clothing is banned, as is showing signs of emotion (including crying when your child has just died or your wife has been executed) and where reading, speaking another language, having visited a foreign country or showing any signs of education were punishable by horrific torture or summary execution? (Every one of us reading this post would have been murdered.)
I visited Cambodia recently as a tourist, and met Europeans and Australians who live and work in the country. Some comment that most Cambodians who can read don’t read stories or read for pleasure. I guess if your parents were unable to read because they had survived the Khmer Rouge due to illiteracy, then it could take several generations before reading for pleasure can be a reality.
Level crossing
We were staying in Kep, which in French colonial times was a luxurious resort. Since the Khmer Rouge regime, all the large fancy villas in the area have been left in ruins. We were staying in one of the new resort complexes and by chance read about a project nearby, where an Australian couple are working with local children. We arranged to go and visit, and after a bone-shattering trip into the countryside arrived at Kep Gardens. Andrew and Janine Judd, two very down-to-earth Aussies, (that’s a total compliment, by the way), have set up a centre where local children, teens and adults can learn to read, write and speak English. They also teach construction, agricultural and horticultural skills and have sponsored several local young adults to attend colleges to study Nursing, Engineering and Hospitality and Tourism.
Children in the area go to school for half a day, where they have to pay their teachers to allow them to enter the school (parking your bike in the school grounds incurs another fee). It’s not the teachers’ fault: they are paid a tiny wage to do their best in overcrowded classes. Every morning and midday you can see hundreds of children cycling to school in immaculate white shirts, which seem just as immaculate on the way home, despite the incredible red dust thrown up as they ride along the road.
Musicians who have been maimed by landmines play by the lake near Angkor Wat: ‘All we want to do is live with dignity.’
We went to visit Kep Gardens in the morning, and were so bowled over by the project that we volunteered to return in the early evening to ‘hear readers’ and have conversations with the adult students. No one has to pay to enrol in lessons, but they must agree to attend regularly (which everyone does). I had assumed that part of the deal would be that the children get free books and pencils. Not at all. Janine explained that if the families pay for the children’s books and pens, then the children will care for them as if they are prized possessions (which they do).
Why teach English? Kep and the surrounding area is hopefully due to have a massive makeover and re-emerge as a major resort in the region. This will hopefully generate a lot of employment for local people. Being able to speak English will boost their employability, and help boost their families’ incomes. Cambodia is a beautiful country, but still recovering from war. In the countryside there are still millions of landmines scattered around, and healthcare must be paid for. The years of starvation and zero healthcare under the Khmer Rouge has left a legacy of tuberculosis, and corruption is endemic at local and national levels. Janine and Andrew have given up their lives in Adelaide to live in the countryside and do their bit to rebuild the country. They are not from a religious background and are not motivated by politics. They just want to help Cambodians in a very practical way.
So there I was, listening to a little boy read and, of course, chatting to him in English about what the words meant. I was in heaven…until suddenly a massive black beetle fluttered around my head. All hell broke loose as I screamed, ‘There’s a beetle near me!’ I’m not exactly sure what my eight-year old pupil said, but he did tut and roll his eyes, so I reckon it was something like, ‘It won’t hurt you. Haven’t you seen a beetle before? Just ignore it and it will go away…’
Andrew and Janine are heroes in their own way, so for Christmas I couldn’t decide what to play them as a tune to sum up what they do. So it’s a toss-up between
Bowie: Heroes. Live aid 1985
and
Play for Change: Imagine.
Andrew and Janine don’t have many possessions any more, but they do possess huge imaginations, and I shall be supporting Kep Gardens in any way I can. They have just started up a playgroup for local parents and their toddlers, so maybe there’s a role for us there?
Take care out there, and have a happy Christmas holiday and very best wishes for 2015!
Michael
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4xoxFrRA2Q
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Dear Michael, usually I cry with laughter at your blogs but this time I cried with pity, but also with joy that there are people like Andrew and Janine in this world. Elly xx
HI Elly
Yes, I cry too when I think about what people in this country were subjected to. However people are resilient and given the right support can bounce back from the most terrible adversity. I think Janine and Andrew show us that even the smallest pieces of kindness can make a huge difference to people’s lives. They are both very clear that though the education is free, they don’t give the families ‘aid’, like free pens and exercise books. That was very interesting for me to think about, because in the UK we have got used to the idea of giving ‘the poor’ in our country everything they need for free. I’m not sure that works.
Take care out there and thanks for responding to my post.
Love from Michael
Michael,
Thank you for the history lesson and the inspiring story of the couple from Australia.
I was a child during the Vietnam war and was sheltered from the news of the atrocities that occurred in Southeast Asia. I do remember seeing schoolmates wearing bracelets bearing the names of POWs and MIAs. It was such a poignant and controversial time period here in the US.
I work for a not-for-profit community agency that hands out fishing poles instead of buckets of fish in order to empower people to meet their needs rather than expecting handouts. This method is moderately successful.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Julie
Hi Julie!
It’s great to hear from you again! I know what you mean about fishing poles.
Very best wishes
Michael
Hi Michael
I read your blog with interest and couldn’t agree with you more, about the work and contributions of Janine and Andrew in Kep Gardens. We have followed their journey from afar in Adelaide, where they came from. This year we finally had the privilege to visit with them, and we had similar experiences to you. We were not only impressed by their work but also the relationships they have with all members of the community and the commitment and enthusiasm of their students. They are indeed “Heroes”.
Hi Julie!
Wow! That is great that you have visited Kep Gardens too!!
Yes, I think that what struck us is that they are not ‘do-gooders’ (who sometimes have their own ‘agenda’. They are ‘good-doers’ who see that they can offer something very practical and then get on and do it, involving the local community in the project. These are two quite remarkable people. It is only this year that they have finally got round to building themselves a humble home with a shower!
I was very struck that they do not ‘give’ anything to the people who come there (e.g. pencils and pens and books). However, what they do give is time, energy, know-how and a great sense of humour and real purpose. Their work to raise money to put local young adults through college is a tremendous achievement, that will have a sustainable impact for the community.
I have spent many years working with what we would describe as ‘poor’ people in the UK, and our solution is to give poor people lots of things, handouts and money. This has not worked, in many ways, in my opinion. So to hear Janine say that they do not give the children coloured pencils and books to use at home was a bit of a surprise. However, after spending a few hours working at the project, I could see that she was absolutely right.
We had a very interesting experience a few days later, which brought this home to me. We were on a boat near a floating village and a woman approached us in her boat, selling snacks and exercise books and coloured pencils ‘for the poor children to use in school’. A few hours later we visited the village and saw several small children with a pile of coloured pencils and exercise books, playing with them in the dust. The tourists who had bought the pencils and books, offloaded them onto the children as soon as they could, and the children had so many that they had absolutely no value for them.
Thank you for reading my post and taking the time to respond.
Very best wishes
Michael