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Cambodia, the Children's Place |
 
| Confident smiles, eyes that light up spontaneously, games played without toys, but also small vendors and tiny working hands, children immediately capture the attention of those who arrive in Cambodia. According to UNICEF’s data, fifty percent of the population is under sixteen years.
In a country still overwhelmed by the damage of the regime that thirty years ago wiped out the school and health systems and all forms of economy, children are the only resource. Here, where the politics of terror has forced their minds to forget and remove any previously acquired knowledge, where fear still prevents many of them to learn or even to express an opinion, the children are the only ones able to look with confidence to the future . They will need to rebuild the country. They are the ones who convinced us to commit all our energies to help them.
Like all children, the children of Cambodia are readily available to meet, they are curious and confident; they are eager to learn and absorb everything that is offered to them. They grew up without grandparents, a generation without memory is a blank page on which you can write anything. Their receptivity makes it particularly important what we plan to seed. Everything that comes from the West, may it be bearer of money and modernity, tends to be accepted uncritically. This factor invests us with a huge responsibility.
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In Cambodia, children are always welcome. In the East, every new child is an addition to the working hands, each family member is legitimized through its contribution to the group and, in the absence of a social security system, the parents rely on their children in old age.
The child is an economic potential in different ways, depending on the social level of the family. Families better off invest in the child’s education, because in the future the child may have a well-paid job and support parents in old age. Children who are born in the poorest families instead, start work immediately. The young children as soon as they walk follow their mothers in the rice fields and the older children often do not go to school because they must care for younger siblings or try to earn something: in the city they collect cans in the bins or on rubbish tips, in tourist areas they sell fruits or shells with a smiling face.
Many factors have contributed to changing the family today. The period of the Khmer Rouge has divided families and forced to denounce friends and relatives to save their lives. The new models brought by the Western media and tourism, have placed money on top of the scale of values in a simple population that the regime of Khmer Rouge cleared all past references. Today, thanks to the Eastern conception of the family in which every member has to make a contribution, one could even sell a child to keep the others. |
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