by Tara Winkler
As the author and leadership expert Simon Sinek once said: ‘We evolved into social animals, where we lived together and worked together in what I call a circle of safety, inside the tribe, where we felt like we belonged. And when we felt safe amongst our own, the natural reaction was trust and cooperation. There are inherent benefits to this. It means I can fall asleep at night and trust that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger. If we don’t trust each other, if I don’t trust you, that means you won’t watch for danger. Bad system of survival.’
I mused on all sorts of theories during this time, but hiding away in Phnom Penh meant there was no way I could follow up on any of them, so they rolled around and around in my head, keeping me up at night.
Other expats listened sympathetically to my story and said things like: ‘Yeah, one of the hardest things about working in Cambodia is working with Cambodian people!’ One Australian running another children’s organisation in Phnom Penh told me he thought Cambodian people were actually incapable of loving their children . . .
Hearing these sorts of negative sentiments about Cambodian people and Khmer culture wasn’t particularly helpful. It only served to justify my feelings of anger, resentment and mistrust. And sometimes these sorts of sweeping generalisations come at you under the banner of sophistication, of ‘cultural edification’.
After everything I’d been through, I wasn’t quite sure what to believe.
The beginning of November 2008 brought with it a three-day public holiday for Bon Om Touk, the Cambodian Water Festival. The festival—which dates back to the twelfth century—celebrates a real wonder of nature: the reversal of the flow of Cambodia’s most important body of water, the Tonlé Sap lake and river system.
For most of the year, the Tonlé Sap River flows towards the Mekong River (which runs through China and much of South-East Asia). But when the monsoon season arrives in June, the Tonlé Sap River actually reverses direction. This is because the Mekong rises, causing tonnes of water to flow back into the Tonlé Sap. The Tonlé Sap River swells by up to ten times its size in this period. All kinds of good things happen from there—fish stocks increase, the fields are watered, and silt deposits fertilise the soil. Phnom Penh is the focus of the festivities, so the city goes absolutely mental for the entire three-day holiday.
I decided to escape the craziness and head back to Battambang to spend Bon Om Touk with the kids.
Being back in Battambang felt like arriving home—I had really grown very fond of the sleepy little town. And after the shitty time I’d been having in Phnom Penh, it was wonderful to see the kids again. We spent the three days playing games, listening to Cambodian music and just hanging out.
When it was time to go back to Phnom Penh, I realised I simply couldn’t. How could I go back to that dark, lonely city? But how could I stay in Battambang?
I decided to take Peter’s advice and move forward. I needed to find a way to let it all go, to forgive, to own up to the role I had played in the problems, to learn my lessons and then continue on with the mission I had taken on the day we rescued the kids.
Fulfilling my responsibilities is important to me. I’m not a martyr, and I believe that everyone’s entitled to the best life they can make for themselves and to seek out the things that bring pleasure and happiness. But responsibilities are responsibilities—kids, family, pets . . . They come first, no matter what. The responsibility I took on the day we rescued the kids was not something I took lightly—I knew it was a lifelong commitment. So I suddenly felt extremely guilty for having left them over a bruised ego.
Jedtha seemed over the moon to hear that I was sticking around. I realised how hard things had been for him in my absence, trying to manage on his own. I didn’t think it was wise to rush back into working at CCT again, so my plan was to find a job and support myself while I continued to manage CCT’s donor relations. It would still be a part-time volunteer role—but much easier to do from Battambang.
With the help of my Aussie friend Terry, I managed to find a job teaching English at the University of Battambang. (Yes, I did find it rather amusing that I’d managed to bypass being a university student and move straight onto being a university teacher. Such is life down the rabbit hole.)
My next task was to find a cheap, safe place for myself and the dogs to live. My salary at the university was only a couple of hundred dollars a month, so I didn’t have much of a budget to play with.
I cycled around the streets of Battambang in search of ‘for rent’ signs in curly Khmer script. Eventually, I found a little attic in this old Khmer guy’s home. He seemed a lovely man—his family had all relocated to America, so he was happy to have some company. The attic was a bit decrepit, with gaps in the walls and floor, but it was cheap, and even had a little bathroom and balcony.
What I hadn’t quite considered was how hot it would be living in an attic in Cambodia. I only had one floor-standing fan that seemed to prefer to look at the floor. I bought a room thermometer from the local bookshop and put it on the wall above my desk. While punching away at my keyboard, I would watch as the mercury rose—often climbing several degrees above the 40°C mark. I had to take regular fan breaks, squatting on the floor in front of my downward-facing fan just to cool down.
But putting aside the heat, I didn’t mind living in the attic. I decorated it with quirky odds and ends I found around Battambang, and cheap, multicoloured fabric that I turned into curtains.
Ruby and Rosie and Franky weren’t thrilled. My landlord had a couple of scruffy little dogs of his own who wouldn’t allow my dogs to enter their territory. So Ruby, Rosie and Franky were mostly confined to the house or my balcony.
But at least they could sun themselves during the day and curl up on my bed at night. It was so good for me to have them around again.
I soon found myself thoroughly enjoying being back in Battambang. It’s such a pretty, friendly, easy little town to live in. Life flows along at a much more relaxed pace than in Phnom Penh, and after everything I’d been through the quiet life felt good.
My job at the uni kind of sucked, though. It reminded me of the stuffy, sterile environment I’d hated so much at school. Also, truth be known, I wasn’t all that good at it. Hardly surprising, really. The education system in Cambodia still relies heavily on rote learning. So while the students couldn’t string a sentence together in English, they were experts on the twelve different grammatical tenses. I appreciate good grammar and spelling, but when the students quizzed me on the difference between past perfect tense and past perfect progressive tense it felt like a big neon sign was flashing above my head saying FRAUD! FRAUD! FRAUD!
That’s probably why, over time, I gradually let myself get pulled back into taking on more work at CCT. This was what I was good at.
At first, I spent the bare minimum amount of time at CCT, just keeping our new donors informed about where their money was going. I took photos, made short videos, wrote up reports and letters of thanks. This meant spending more time with the kids, which was a balm to my sore and bruised soul.
And although Jedtha, Meah and Savenh and I were still coldly professional with each other, I could see that they genuinely did want to mend fences. Especially Jedtha. He clearly felt awful about everything that had happened and wanted to have me back full time. And it wasn’t just the security of funding he was after; he missed having someone to bounce ideas off and share in the decision-making. Until he (in my eyes) threw me to the wolves, Jedtha and I had been good friends and a good team. We worked well together.
One of the most daunting tasks required at CCT was updating (and in some cases creating from scratch) the huge volume of policies, procedures and forms CCT needed in order to comply with government requirements and ensure we were operating in line with best practices. I wasn’t quite ready to come back full time, but I agreed to step up my involvement and help with this task. So we put aside our differences and soon I was working more hours at CCT than I was at the university.
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We had to rework and draft dozens of new policy documents, including guidelines for general operations as well as a child protection policy and a code of conduct, redrafted by-laws, HR policies and finance policies, and updated case files for all the kids. Then we had to actually implement these policies to ensure the whole team understood them—and that there would be zero tolerance for any form of abuse or corruption at CCT. We also had to draft position descriptions for the new roles we needed. Then draft job ads. Then interview and draw up work contracts and ensure new staff were up to speed with all CCT policies, and on and on it went . . .
It was a daunting task, and really, we only made a start. But on the upside, CCT was soon back in full swing. Additions to the team included: a new house mother, an eternally bright and chirpy soul named Rouet; a new house father, Samnang; a new cook, Noit; and a Khmer arts and literature teacher, Journ. Having new people in the mix, untainted by past events, injected a new spirit into CCT. There were no more jokes or chummy little chats between me and the team, but I started enjoying the atmosphere there much more after that.
Around this time, Kanya’s older sister Kolab, who had left SKO before the rescue and who we were helping to support, graduated from beauty school in Phnom Penh and moved back to Battambang.
By now I’d met the girls’ mother. She was a sweet and devoutly Buddhist little lady who was badly crippled after being beaten by the girls’ father. She would almost bowl me over every time I met her, showering me in hugs and lots of Khmer kisses—the ones where they try to inhale you with deep sniffs.
When the kids’ father died, their mother and her three small grandchildren, whom she was supporting, fell into desperate poverty. For a long time, unknown to us, Kanya gave every cent of her pocket money to her mother.
CCT had just made an investment in Kolab’s education so she could become independent, but now she had a mother who was too frail and sick to work and three little nieces and nephews who were really doing it tough. This meant that as soon as Kolab started to earn an income she’d be giving almost all of it to her mum. However, the salary Kolab would earn as an entry-level beautician would not be enough to support herself and four others. So she would have to find a second job, and maybe even a third, as do so many Cambodians who live below the poverty line.
If Kolab was solely responsible for supporting the whole family during this pivotal time at the beginning of her career, she would almost certainly struggle to get ahead in life. One day in the future, when her little sister Kanya has finished school and is earning a decent wage, the burden on Kolab might be a bit less. But even then, things would be hard going for both girls—especially when their own children came along.
In Australia, by paying tax we all financially contribute to supporting disadvantaged communities and people who can’t work. We do this not only out of humanity and to protect the most vulnerable in our society, but because we know that there are dire consequences for entire communities when people with no alternatives are left without any means of survival. An elderly woman with no income and a disability, who was the primary carer for her three grandchildren, would definitely fall into this category. But for now, because social services in Cambodia are so inadequate, it’s predominantly NGOs who fill this gap. I wanted the girls to be free to build a better life for themselves and the families they would have in the future without being held back by having to help their mother raise their nieces and nephews. So we provided a modest living allowance for the girls’ mum that would enable her to support her grandchildren. The girls could then see that their family was okay and focus on building their own futures.
This was the beginning of CCT’s family preservation work—where we finally developed the sibling reunification program into what was actually required in order to keep families together. Today, we have much more structured systems in place, which include a framework to manage the support payments that CCT provides.
In mid-November, the prosecutor at the Battambang court called and asked Sinet to attend a meeting with Rath at the courthouse.
It was quite a scary time for both of us.
We hired an extra daytime security guard so that the CCT staff and kids would be protected at all times. The guard helped to escort Sinet and the other kids to and from school throughout this period. I didn’t feel particularly safe in my attic at night, but at least I had the dogs.
Jedtha found out that Rath had recruited another dozen or so children into SKO to make up the numbers he’d lost. I could hardly sleep at night thinking about those poor kids used as commodities to raise funds. It was incredibly frustrating that over the past eighteen months we hadn’t been able to get his operation shut down. All of our hopes hung on getting a successful prosecution, but we still had a long way to go. We hoped this meeting with the prosecutor would be the final step towards getting a fair trial.
On the day of the meeting, Sinet remained very calm and resolute, even though the imposing courthouse and uniformed officials were incredibly intimidating for her. But Rath didn’t even turn up. Jedtha told me he heard that Rath had gone to the border, ready to escape to Thailand if the court issued a warrant for his arrest.
The prosecutor quizzed Sinet on the details surrounding the evidence she had provided about each of the times Rath had raped her. She answered everything clearly and accurately, as she had every time before. Her story didn’t waver and she never hesitated or flinched as the prosecutor pried into the painful details. I watched her with a sense of mounting horror at what they were putting her through, but I was also in awe of her courage and strength.
But we never did get a trial.
Maybe this was due to corruption. Or maybe the evidence really was just insufficient.
We continued to live under a dark cloud, constantly worrying about what Rath or his people might do to us.
We were all terribly disappointed.
I very much wish we’d been able to see justice served for Sinet. It definitely would have been better for her if we had. She struggled with it for a long time. It was hard for her to feel safe in Battambang, knowing that Rath was still out there, and still running SKO.
In time I came to learn that the corruption at SKO was not an isolated or even uncommon occurrence.
But in the days before I understood this, before government and independent reports revealed some shocking truths about orphanages in Cambodia, we just continued on, doing our best to connect the kids with siblings and family where we could, but ultimately believing we were still doing a good thing by running a ‘good orphanage’.
We had a lot to learn.
Not long after Sinet’s case was closed, one of CCT’s most dedicated supporters asked me to bring a few of the kids to a fundraiser for CCT that she was putting on in Singapore. It would be our biggest fundraiser to date and she would be taking care of all the logistics and organisation of the event, so all we had to do was turn up! It was an enormously generous offer that would bring a huge injection of funding, our biggest to date. We agreed without hesitation.
However, ‘just turning up’ would still be quite a big undertaking. We’d have to get passports issued and book flights and inform Social Affairs and pull the kids out of school for a few days . . . But if the event was successful, we figured it would be worth it, and it would be such an exciting experience for the kids.
I was pretty insistent that Rouet, our house mother, would have to come, too. If taking kids to Phnom Penh by myself had been an issue, I would certainly not be taking them out of the country on my own. We decided to choose five kids who had been putting in the most effort at school, and who we thought would be best equipped to handle the trip. That turned out to be Makara, Tula, Mao, Rithy and Sinet.
Rouet and the kids had a ball in Singapore—Rouet’s mind was blown by all the big buildings and her enjoyment of the adventure was contagious. The fundraiser, too, was a huge success. Having those adorable, polite, charismatic little children up on stage performing ‘You Are My S
unshine’ definitely won over many hearts that night.
But taking the kids to help me raise funds isn’t something I would do today. Even at that time, I remember looking at the kids onstage and feeling slightly uncomfortable about it. Even though they had agreed to do the fundraiser and were excited about it, they were clearly nervous and a little bewildered by all the attention. I wondered if they actually did want to be there, up on the stage with all eyes on them. Had they agreed just to please me? How could they have known in advance what that was going to be like?
Eventually, I came to understand that there are some important ethical questions to be posed around using children in this way to incite people to give money. Kids in some orphanages perform like dancing bears night after night for tourists and supporters. For these visitors, the experience doesn’t feel harmful because the kids look like they’re enjoying themselves—indeed, some of them genuinely do enjoy it; a lot of kids actually volunteer to perform.
Similarly, when NGOs get kids to speak to the public about their histories of poverty and abuse, it can be a powerful experience for the audience, and many children volunteer to take part. But using kids to raise money for an organisation that they are supposed to be a beneficiary of is a big burden to place on their small shoulders. Especially when the subtext is clearly: ‘Look at how poverty hasn’t crushed their sweet little spirits thanks to the wonderful NGO supporting them!’
The problem is that it is almost impossible to use beneficiaries to raise money without perpetuating ‘poor third-world people saved by a Western NGO’ stereotypes. And stereotyping can do terrible harm to people’s confidence and sense of themselves. Becoming poster children for the issue of poverty can also harm their reputation in the community they live in and impact on their future employment prospects.