by Tara Winkler
In Mondulkiri, with a rescued elephant, 2009
Downtown Battambang
Farming in Battambang
Stung Sangker riverside
Battambang’s green oranges
Pagoda in Battambang
Rush hour, Battambang
Mondulkiri elephant
CCT orphanage, 2009
Fun times
Battambang kids
Cambodian petrol station
Sinet graduating, 2012
Ruby, Rosie, me, Franky and Sinet, 2008
Max, Noni, me and Franky at home in Battambang, 2015
With Leangcheang (youth centre teacher), Kan (social worker), Sokunthea (preschool teacher) and kids at CCT’s community youth centre no. 2
Literacy classes in action at CCT’s community youth centre no. 1
Meal time at CCT’s community youth centre no. 1
CCT nurses doing home visits to check up on a family
A family supported by CCT
CCT social workers visiting a foster care family
CCT’s informational technology literacy classes in action
Peter, Sinet and me at the CCT Benefit Concert at the Enmore Theatre, Sydney, 2014
Carolyn and me at the launch of Carolyn’s book, Single White Female in Hanoi, in 2011, while she was battling through chemotherapy
Battambang rooftops
CCT’s restaurant, Battambang
Home with Franky, 2015
Storm clouds, Battambang
Psar Nat Market, Battambang
Sinet, BBC producer
Cancer fails to get the last laugh
Written by Carolyn Shine in the days before her death on 10 March 2012
Beings who practise unconditional love are mythical—in my background anyway. It comes from a template not available in the vicinity where I grew up, and I never cease to be dumbstruck by it.
If I hadn’t come to know Tara every bit as well as I have, I’d have been suspicious of any thorough description of her personality. Certainly I would have considered it to be lacking in nuance. Where’s the shadow? I would ask.
Thrust as she has been, prematurely into a role with enormous responsibilities, I’ve seen more evidence than I thought amassable that Tara will hang on to someone she cares about with ferocious tenacity, risking her own physical and mental wellbeing if needed, to get them to a safe patch. And bad patches, there have been too many to name.
Like a superhero, she’ll be there to help carry me to the toilet in the middle of the night, make a hot drink if she hears an ill dry mouth, a hotpack, if she’s heard the tiny restive sound of me rubbing my tummy. With her soothing matter-of-fact voice, she deconstructs the innately terrifying and turns in into almost another step in an adventure.
She’s been there for me without fail over the last nine months every time I’ve grown fearful about having cancer. She does this with an empiric double-pronged approach: unwavering optimism, and plan-building. She made me not only feel sure I would survive my disease, but built glistening edifices in the air that held me in an almost permanent state of thrall. We would travel down the coast to see the horses, we would travel up to Port Douglas, we would see Europe, then we could settle in Cambodia and have a wonderful life there. She talked about the plants I might like to source to make a beautiful tropical garden. Tara leaves no stone unturned in painting a happy picture for someone in need. And she’ll follow through, if she can. And while I realise these things won’t happen now, for me, because the cancer has won, I still treasure the memories and feel the same frisson of joy when I think of them.
No one can laugh like we can. We managed to turn a year that should be anybody’s worst—massive abdominal cancer surgery and loss of many organs, followed by twelve long cycles of chemotherapy, into our greatest year of laughter. How did we do this? I’m not sure. Maybe by sharing a predilection for dark and irreverent humour? By channelling our fear into laughter? Or by laughing in the face of politeness.
My attitude, like Tara’s, is that life contains the best and worst of all things, in random parts. I have seen so many of these best parts, and bemoan especially greatly, that my death will preclude me from keeping up to date on science through journals, TED Talks, and podcasts.
That is, unless Tara’s pulled strings and exercised her incomparable chutzpah to secure me a spot up the back corner of heaven where all the back copies of New Scientist and Skeptical Inquirer live and smoking is permitted.
CCT today
We regard our supporters as team-members who deserve to fully understand the complexity of our work. So, when we’re explaining our current model to new supporters, we give them a comprehensive presentation that explains all the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of our work, so they have a genuine understanding of what they’re supporting and the impact of their contributions. An early 2016 summary looks like this:
PROGRAMS AND SERVICES CREATING IMPACT
The Problem
In order to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty, it’s important to understand what drives it.
The poverty trap is created by a tangled web of complex social issues. A lack of access to basic needs such as food, water, shelter and healthcare creates a high-risk environment in which children are prone to illness and malnourishment, and are often forced to spend their days on the streets, begging or working to support themselves and their families. This means many children are only able to attend school intermittently or not at all, and those who are able to attend find it difficult to concentrate due to malnourishment and illness. This leads to poor educational outcomes that result in a low earning capacity in adulthood. Therefore, children who are born into poverty are more likely to grow into adults who are unable to provide for their children’s basic needs—perpetuating the intergenerational cycle of poverty.
The immense stress and pressure placed on a family trapped in the intergenerational cycle of poverty often results in family breakdowns. With very few options available to them, parents often entrust their children to the care of an orphanage or residential care facility, believing it will lead to a path out of poverty. However, institutionalisation can have long-term and sometimes irreversible effects on a child’s development, resulting in attachment disorders, mental illness, growth and speech delays, and difficulties forming relationships in adulthood. Therefore, growing up in an institution can lead to further incidence of family breakdown in adulthood, as well as an impaired ability to parent their own children—further complicating the intergenerational cycle of poverty.
The Solution
To untangle this complex web of social problems and enable families to break free from intergenerational poverty, it is necessary to recognise and address every one of these problems and provide a holistic solution that is comprehensive, in-depth and tailored to each specific case.
CCT achieves this by delivering a holistic model with a range of programs and services. This solution allows children to remain living with their biological family or, where that’s not possible, to stay in family-based care, such as kinship care, foster care or local adoption. We also assist children who have been placed in institutional care to be safely reintegrated into their families or into family-based care. This is achieved while ensuring children have access to education, good nutrition and healthcare, and that their personal safety and other fundamental human rights are not compromised.
CCT’s Holistic Model of programs and services operates out of our community youth centres, community preschool, foster care homes and social enterprise. These services include the following:
Social support services: We provide these services while working closely with the local government’s Department of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth (DoSVY), the Commune Council for Women and Children (CCWC), village chiefs and commune leaders. Our team of social workers provides social support services that include:
• assessing referrals and requests for assistance from government and other NGOs
• providing counsel
ling and regular home visits
• facilitating family tracing and family reintegration
• reaching out to children and families living on the streets
• obtaining identification documents for children and families
• assisting parents, guardians and foster carers with behaviour management
• empowering parents to be responsible for decision-making in the best interests of their family and their children’s futures
• enabling enrolment in public school.
Crisis intervention: The government child protection system in Cambodia is severely under-resourced. This means there are very few services to support children and families in crisis in Battambang province, where CCT is located. CCT’s social workers are on call 24/7 to respond to crisis situations in order to support children and their families during emergencies and times of heightened risk.
Common crises dealt with by CCT’s social work team include: children in danger on the streets; missing children; children at immediate risk of trafficking; domestic violence; and mental health crises. CCT’s social workers help to develop action plans, source accommodation, liaise with police, de-escalate conflict, provide counselling and, most importantly, ensure the safety of children.
Foster care: CCT’s foster care program provides short- and long-term family-based care and support to children who are unable to live with their parents or other biological family members.
Family reintegration: The family reintegration process is focused on family tracing, risk assessments, case planning, counselling, re-establishing relationships, and supporting children to return happily and safely to the care of their biological family. This process involves resolving the issues that originally caused the child to become separated from their family. This may include empowering parents and guardians with income-generation programs or assisting them to access employment and safe housing, and resolving or managing health-related issues. Once the children are reintegrated into their families, follow up is provided by CCT’s social workers. Children still have the option to stay enrolled in our community youth centre and preschool programs to receive ongoing support from our social workers and nurses, as well as receiving the benefits of our supplementary education programs.
Healthcare: Cambodian children and families often find it difficult to access adequate healthcare due to the lack of services available and the high cost of medical treatment. CCT keeps children healthy in a number of ways:
• CCT’s community youth centres and community preschool provide nutritious meals and clean drinking water as well as preventative healthcare measures, including vaccinations, regular health check-ups and hygiene classes. We also provide treatment for illnesses, injuries and mental health concerns, and support for children and their families living with chronic illnesses such as HIV and hepatitis.
• Hygiene facilities at our community youth centres and preschool include bathroom, shower and laundry facilities, which many children don’t have at home. This enables children to maintain adequate hygiene, and prevents many common health concerns, such as lice, scabies, impetigo and infections.
• Twice a year, we run dental workshops in our community youth centres; at these workshops, all the children in our programs are given check-ups and any other dental treatment required, and receive education about dental hygiene.
Education: Our education programs give children a well-rounded education while enhancing their interest and engagement in our programs, ensuring they stay off the streets and enrolled in school.
As well as supporting children to attend public school, we provide comprehensive supplementary education classes to help bridge the gaps in the overcrowded public education system. Children attend academic classes that are aligned to the public school curriculum to help them catch up with their peers, as well as extra-curricular classes in life skills, physical education, self-directed learning such as School in the Cloud and Information Communication (ICT) literacy. To help instil cultural pride and retain ancient art forms, children engage in activities such as Apsara dancing and Lakhon masked theatre.
Many of the children who attend our community youth centres were once at risk of dropping out of CCT’s program. Because they were required to stay home and care for their younger siblings, they couldn’t attend school. To address this issue, CCT established a community preschool that operates during school hours. This means that children who attend our community youth centres are able to stay in school, and their younger siblings are provided with a safe and nurturing early childhood education. Our preschool program is focused on game-based learning, healthcare, fostering good nutrition, and the development of social and emotional skills in early childhood.
Dependency reduction and income generation: As there is no functioning social welfare system in Cambodia, it is sometimes necessary to provide support to families so that they can cover their basic costs and stay together—for example, elderly grandparents caring for grandchildren, or parents struggling with a disability, which means they aren’t able to earn a living to support their children. We believe it is vital that we don’t foster welfare dependency, so we have created a model to calculate support payments that is aligned to the realistic cost of living in Cambodia and changes with the family’s circumstances. We do this to reduce dependency on support payments and to encourage families to generate their own income wherever possible.
Our social work team assists school-leavers and parents to help them to find safe and non-exploitative employment so that they can support their own families. We achieve this by organising and supporting tertiary education and vocational training, as well as assisting with income-generating activities and access to apprenticeships and employment.
In November 2013, CCT’s first social enterprise, Jaan Bai restaurant, opened its doors. Today Jaan Bai provides training and employment for young adults in our programs and is consistently ranked number one on TripAdvisor in Battambang.
The Impact
CCT’s Holistic Model achieves positive outcomes for children, families and the wider community:
Health: Over the past five years, the health of children supported by CCT’s Holistic Model has greatly improved, resulting in a 40 per cent reduction in the costs of our healthcare program—proving that prevention and early intervention is key.
Retention: We require children enrolled in our community youth centres and preschool to attend daily. This enables our social workers to respond quickly in crisis situations; if children don’t turn up to our programs, CCT’s social workers will follow up with the family to find out why. Early intervention is vital in crises, such as domestic violence or child trafficking, and our social workers liaise with the family to help resolve the problems or, if necessary, provide short-term crisis care in a foster family. This crisis-response system, combined with our engaging supplementary educational programs, results in very low drop-out rates and ensures the safety of children who are supported by CCT’s Holistic Model. Over the past five years we’ve had an ongoing retention rate of more than 90 per cent at our community youth centres and preschool.
100 per cent family-based care: We believe that every child deserves and has a right to a family. CCT’s Holistic Model successfully keeps children with their families or cared for in family-based care, and addresses the primary causes that result in children being trafficked or ending up in orphanages. Our model also means that when children are reintegrated from alternative care (short-term foster care) back into their families, they still have access to vital services such as education and healthcare.
Decrease in street children: The local community in Battambang has reported a significant drop in the numbers of street children begging or trash collecting. Children enrolled in CCT’s Holistic Model have access to comprehensive and tailored support services, so they no longer engage in a high-risk lifestyle on the streets.
Scalability: We believe we’ve developed a scalable alternative to the harmful orphanage/instituti
onal care model prevalent in Cambodia. CCT’s Holistic Model can easily be adapted for delivery in other provinces, resulting in more children and families being able to escape the intergenerational cycle of poverty, while ensuring all Cambodian children are able to grow up in a family.
Questions to ask before you support a children’s organisation
1. Do you have residential care? (Tip: you know it’s a residential care facility if the children have rotating carers, if there are lots of children under one roof—more than is common to see in a family setting—and if most of the children are unrelated.)
Best answer is: NO.
If the answer is YES, ask the following questions:
• Why are the children living in residential care rather than with their family? (Tip: poverty or providing access to education is not a good answer.)
• Have you conducted family tracing and family assessments to find out if the children have family or relatives who could be caring for them?
• Do you have a plan in place for all the children in your care to be reintegrated into family-based care, i.e. back to their immediate or extended family, into foster care or local adoption?
• Have you successfully completed reintegration? Do you provide follow-up assistance to the family after the children have returned to family-based care?
• Are you registered and licensed with the appropriate government ministries? (Remember: many unregistered homes are operating and being funded by overseas donors.)
2. Do you allow visits to places where children live? i.e. dormitories, family homes etc. (Remember: all people have a right to privacy at home and should never be made to feel like they are tourist attractions.)