This week while on-route to NatGeo television meetings in Singapore, I took a detour to visit our charity in Cambodia: New Hope, and Wheel2Wheel colleague Jodi Pritchard who is working there as a volunteer.
The trip really hit home the point to me what a difference Wheel2Wheel is going to make as we interact more closely with our charities. Thanks to Jodi, Wheel2Wheel is already making a difference to New Hope. Below is an overview of what I did, learnt and what we have already committed to.
Along with Kemsour (founder), Kerry (director) and Jodi, we started off touring a number of slums that New Hope have recently discovered and are planning various rescue missions to help. Some of these village slums comprise up to 15-20 families (about 100 people) and have actually sprung up within the town limits of Siem Reap; mainly on unused swamp land between residential developments. The slums are basically humpies built of disposed timber, trees, old iron, cardboard and plastic. They are often perched precarelessly on stilts over swamps that have been swollen with the recent monsoonal flooding. So basically a 2m x 2m platform for a family of up to 6 suspended over dengue and malaria infested water.
Usually these families are not legitimate in the authority’s eyes because they have no paperwork, the kids don’t go to school and quite often are running around without clothes. The father or mother might try to collect rubbish (cardboard or plastic) to sell for a few cents at a time or work as concrete labourers when they can. Food comes in the form of rice when they can afford it, supplemented with dodgy looking three-eyed fish and slug-looking things that come out of the swamp. Children are left to fend for themselves as their parents try to eke out a living. However there appears to be a sense of community, where many slums have a village chief and it’s common for family units to include orphans, somebody else’s grandmother, brain damaged cousins, displaced brothers and sisters etc. It seems every family has been effected by the early death of children and babies, fathers and brothers killed on the border looking for work (the border dispute between Vietnam and Cambodia still rages on), HIV-infected mothers and daughters who have had to resort to prostitution for the $2.50 (unprotected) sex will earn you … yet we are met with smiles not suspicion, a sense of self-respect from an ancient tribe the world is willing to pass by on the way to see the temples their forefathers built … enter New Hope!!
Kemsour is a gentle saint of a man. In his early 30’s, although he looks 15, he won’t rest … he won’t stop … until he has done all he can to help. Supported by his young wife and two beautiful boys, he often starts his day at 4am by studying for his Project Managament Degree (… and god know he’s going to need it!) … then by 7:30am he’s on the road … visiting the slums, identifying families in crisis, checking on the school they have developed – attended by about 100 kids, ensuring the medical clinic is running at full capacity, checking in with the farm workers to ensure they have done the list of jobs he gave them yesterday, working on behalf of slum families to organise papers for the authorities, getting New Hope teachers into Government programs to learn more, picking up slum families in his care and taking them to new homes New Hope is providing, taking children to hospital, rescuing orphaned children and putting them in the New Hope foster home, greeting every volunteer so he can encourage more donations, organizing a local tour company to bring “new blood” to the New Hope restaurant … next to the school … where a traditional lunch is served by New Hope-trained slum families … while they sit and watch all the slum children at school through the window. No one leaves without making a donation (a genius idea from Kemsour). Oh yeah and in his spare time he is personally overseeing the building of the new New Hope foster home that he has roped his brother into project managing. This next fact sums this man up … He pays himself a small sum each month from New Hope to support his family. He finds it such an embarrassment, he wants to get a job outside of New Hope so this money can go to slum families. I guess this will put his sleeping time to better use!! Kemsour does all this perfectly calmly, smiling, dressed immaculately in freshly ironed shirts, trousers with crisp ceases, clean black loafers amd with a gentle determination that I have rarely witnessed. As I sit here in the comfort of Singapore’s air-conditioning, Kemsour is currently inducting 50 new slum kids into the New Hope school we visited yesterday. This will be their first day at school ever … the first day of perhaps a new start in life that might lead to their family being sponsored by supporters of New Hope … today might be the break in that vicious circle we all hear about … a break for 50 of the world’s poorest kids … a break pretty much created by one man: Kemsour … an absolute saint of a man in every respect.
Following Kemsour wherever he goes … referring to him as the “boss” is Kerry Huntly. She arrived here three years ago to help Kemsour for a few weeks … she hasn’t stopped talking, hugging, laughing, crying, helping, organizing since. She is the conduit to the volunteers and money from westerners that helps make Kemsour’s plans come to life. Yin and Yang doesn’t quite describe this odd couple. Kerry seems to make it her business to know the business of every slum family … oh yeah and by the way … the slum families they support through their feeding program, school, foster home, medical clinic, farm, restaurant and crisis program includes about 1,200 people. Kerry moves from humpy to humpy knowing the story of this family and that, hugging the children, a soft embrace for the elderly, a look of respect for the mothers who are struggling against all odds to keep their family together and a look of disdain for anyone who is lazy, violent or a drunk. Kerry does not suffer fools lightly. She’ll have your measure in a moment and her decisive action can change a family’s life in a heart beat. Like Kemsour, Kerry is everywhere. She has dragged her own daughter and son from Brisbane to help, what a wonderful role model they have in their mother. In much the same way as Kemsour, Kerry is working flat out but also spends a lot of time connecting to the outside world to sustain the revenue and manpower for New Hope … and then when she goes home … she goes home to be foster mum to 13 children she now calls her own. The baby abandoned on a rubbish tip, the girls whose families, in absolute desperation, were about to be sold as sex slaves for life for US$1,000, the catatonic three year old that was just plain lost and now, thanks to Kerry’s love, is a typical four year old terror who is actually ruling the house!! These children are clean, healthy, happy, going to school and have a future … they were saved because they fell across the path of Kerry Huntly … and this women does not know how to say ‘no’.
We wouldn’t even know about this situation if it wasn’t for one of my best friends in the world Jodi Pritchard. Jodi has always wanted to help. At a time in life when others are basking in their own success and enjoying the spoils … Jodi volunteered to go to New Hope to teach the slum children … lucky kids I say. Over the past 12 months she has nearly spent 2 months working tirelessly as volunteer. First as a teacher but more importantly now applying her legendary organization skills to help Kerry. To keep going back to help is the most admirable thing I have ever seen.
If you are a caring person and then walk into this situation … it emotionally takes your breath away and makes you question just about every single feeling … thought … philosophy you have on life. Siem Reap has a very shallow facade of tourism. Just scratch the surface and the slums will come through. Most tourists bury their heads up their arses, pretend they are Angolina Jolie, then simply go to Angkor Wat. For Jodi and the other volunteers it’s living in a $12 a day guest house, it’s hot, dirty, the food is crap, the roads impossible, there’s trauma all around, it’s frustrating, you don’t understand it, you feel helpless, you cry, you get sick, occasionally you get drunk, you get home sick … yet each day you go back to the coal face and help the best you can. A constantly revolving team of volunteers are the man power that drives New Hope. They are all special people.
So that paints a picture of New Hope. It’s now up to us at Wheel2Wheel to develop a strategy to maximise the use of donations we’ll receive for New Hope, as well as shining a spotlight through our television program. Yesterday we started to help …
Wheel2Wheel is immediately going to do three things: First, after discussing it with Morgan, we are granting US$3,500 to New Hope to specifically finish the new foster home. Thanks to a major donation by Barclay’s Bank, Kemsour was able to acquire land and commence construction of a foster home that will eventually house 20 kids. Thanks to Wheel2Wheel they will now be able to finish it. It will be fully occupied for us to see when we arrive in Siem Reap during our expedition in early 2011.
Secondly, on behalf of Wheel2Wheel, my brother Richard and myself (mainly my generous brother) have just donated another US$2,500 to the New Hope Crisis Fund which was completely depleted. We decided to do this because of what happened to me while I was there …
Perhaps sometimes things are put in front of you for a reason. When I went to the slums I met a young Cambodian women, 20 we think, no parents … all dead … no family … husband who had just been killed in a motor accident with a new born son a few days old. She’s a country girl, who somehow ended up being taken in by another poor single mum who has a few kids of her own, in the slum we visited. She’s living … well not really living … surviving … in a shack over a swamp. When we arrived the single mum brought the baby out to show us … still looking fresh from the womb … but no one could tell for how much longer. The young mother then got off the dirt floor to come and also pay her respects to the New Hope team. She stood there in overwhelming physical and mental agony that showed in every part of her being. Kerry outlined to me her options if New Hope weren’t able to help: give the baby away to whoever will take it, start collecting rubbish to feed herself, recover from child birth and sell her body because she is quite pretty … just lie down and die through the pain of losing a man she loved and the hopelessness of having a baby she can’t help, or let the desease that surrounds both her and her new son just swallow them up. The indignity she experienced in front of us, as blood pooled around her ankles, was impossible for me to bear. I can’t imagine what it was like for her. Knowing she had to go back inside that dump, with no clean water to wash herself or anything else she needs, was just too much … I had to do something on Wheel2Wheel’s behalf … and hopefully … that would be “New Hopefully” … that will now happen.
US$500 is going direct to this young mother immediately. In Siem Reap that is like giving someone an average annual salary in one hit. In the next few weeks Jodi, on Wheel2Wheel’s behalf, is going to figure out the best way to get her out of the swamp to at least give her son and her a shot of becoming strong enough to get through the next stage in their lives. The balance US$2,000 is going to be spent immediately trying to solve the particular slum crisis we came across. Over the next few weeks, Kemsour, Kerry and Jodi will provide food, new homes, schooling and other stuff to some of the poorest people I have ever seen. Thanks brother your generosity is going to make a huge difference.
New Hope has been a wake up call for me. My way of helping this charity and others is through Wheel2Wheel and Im going to try harder.
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