Posted at EARTHtimes.org
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia, May 21, 2007
On the manicured lawn between the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh and the Tonle Sap River, a young couple sitting under a banyan tree offered me their 14-month-old son in exchange for my wrist watch.
"Angelina, yes! Angelina, yes!" they complained when I turned them down. Gustav Auer of Friends restaurant is not surprised. He and others involved in non-governmental organizations locally are waiting to see whether the adoption efforts of Madonna and Angelina Jolie -- who visited Friends when she was in Cambodia recently -- have a positive or an adverse effect.
There is no such thing, says Auer, as a legal adoption policy in Cambodia. It's all about the money. You pay enough, you get the papers. "In my nine years here, I know of only one legal adoption where there was no financial compensation." Crossing the Mekong River by ferry boat on the bus trip from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to the Cambodian capital, hawkers brandished woven circular trays of the sort adored by Western interior decorators. They were piled high with cooked cicadas and shiny black beetles.
These, though, are not the food of the poor, but popular snacks. What the city poor eat in this staggeringly impoverished country is what they can scavenge from garbage dumps, those putrid-smelling piles of rubbish mixed with plastic bags and food scraps piled on every street corner and in every gutter.
The visible city poor are children, as young as 5 years old. Their parents more than likely have HIV/AIDS, or have sent them in from the countryside to support the family.
This is a nation of no contraception. When foreign NGOs distribute birth control methods in the villages, they are seldom used; farmers need workers in the fields.
In the city and towns, children are useful earners as beggars or prostitutes -- for their families if they have one, for themselves if not. So long as tourists support them, there is no incentive to seek out the few opportunities for education.
Look into the face of any Khmer in the streets of Phnom Penh in their mid-thirties and you will be looking into the face of a victim or a perpetrator of Pol Pot's genocide.
At one of the killing fields just outside the capital, in the shadow of a glass-sided temple densely packed over 100 feet high with skulls, the rains sluice at the compacted earth paths between the mass graves. Bundles of clothing, teeth and bones emerge as the soft mud drains away.
Between 1975 and 1979, 3 million men, women and children died or went missing, 1 million of whom starved to death. When it was over, 4 million Cambodians were left.
At Friends, Khmer workers attempt to turn around the horrors now invested upon the young.
To draw street children into a future away from drugs, sex and crime, the not-for-profit runs programs in business, welding, farming, sewing, beautician work and literacy. Aged between 15 and 24, 700 at a time spend up to two years learning a trade taught by local Khmer.
Gustav Auer, a Canadian with a catering business, came in 1998 to visit his girlfriend working at the U.N. Development Bank and volunteered at Friends for six weeks.
In 2000, he gave up his company, returned to Phnom Penh and offered to launch a restaurant to train the children in cooking and hospitality.
Round the corner is Veiyo Tonle, opened by a Khmer, Lay Neth. Another non-profit, the restaurant has the same goals -- to teach cooking and wait-service to keep children off the streets.
As you sit on the sidewalk outside in the steaming Cambodian night, eating the mild local fish curry happily named Fish Amok, children below the age of 7 stagger by barefoot with small babies on their shoulders. Some drag boxes behind them. When they want a break from their begging, they crawl into them for a brief rest and to bottle-feed their tiny charges as the tourists buy a 10 cent shoeshine while sipping their ice-cold beer.
--Fish Amok
--Serves 6-8 with steamed rice
--1 pound white fish fillets
--2 tablespoons curry paste (ready-made from Asian supermarkets)
--2 tablespoons fish sauce (Nam Pla)
--2 teaspoons sugar
--2 large eggs
--3/4 cup coconut milk
--1/2 teaspoon salt
--1/3 teaspoon ground black pepper
--4 Kaffir lime leaves
--Chop fish into 1-inch chunks.
--In a heat-resistant bowl of a size to fit in a covered pan (if you don't own a steamer), beat the coconut milk into the curry paste then add everything but the lime leaves, then fold in the fish.
--Place in steamer above gently boiling water for 15 minutes, carefully stir, then steam another five minutes till fish is opaque. If you haven't got a steamer, put an upturned saucer in a lidded casserole and place the bowl of fish on top.
"Angelina, yes! Angelina, yes!" they complained when I turned them down. Gustav Auer of Friends restaurant is not surprised. He and others involved in non-governmental organizations locally are waiting to see whether the adoption efforts of Madonna and Angelina Jolie -- who visited Friends when she was in Cambodia recently -- have a positive or an adverse effect.
There is no such thing, says Auer, as a legal adoption policy in Cambodia. It's all about the money. You pay enough, you get the papers. "In my nine years here, I know of only one legal adoption where there was no financial compensation." Crossing the Mekong River by ferry boat on the bus trip from Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam to the Cambodian capital, hawkers brandished woven circular trays of the sort adored by Western interior decorators. They were piled high with cooked cicadas and shiny black beetles.
These, though, are not the food of the poor, but popular snacks. What the city poor eat in this staggeringly impoverished country is what they can scavenge from garbage dumps, those putrid-smelling piles of rubbish mixed with plastic bags and food scraps piled on every street corner and in every gutter.
The visible city poor are children, as young as 5 years old. Their parents more than likely have HIV/AIDS, or have sent them in from the countryside to support the family.
This is a nation of no contraception. When foreign NGOs distribute birth control methods in the villages, they are seldom used; farmers need workers in the fields.
In the city and towns, children are useful earners as beggars or prostitutes -- for their families if they have one, for themselves if not. So long as tourists support them, there is no incentive to seek out the few opportunities for education.
Look into the face of any Khmer in the streets of Phnom Penh in their mid-thirties and you will be looking into the face of a victim or a perpetrator of Pol Pot's genocide.
At one of the killing fields just outside the capital, in the shadow of a glass-sided temple densely packed over 100 feet high with skulls, the rains sluice at the compacted earth paths between the mass graves. Bundles of clothing, teeth and bones emerge as the soft mud drains away.
Between 1975 and 1979, 3 million men, women and children died or went missing, 1 million of whom starved to death. When it was over, 4 million Cambodians were left.
At Friends, Khmer workers attempt to turn around the horrors now invested upon the young.
To draw street children into a future away from drugs, sex and crime, the not-for-profit runs programs in business, welding, farming, sewing, beautician work and literacy. Aged between 15 and 24, 700 at a time spend up to two years learning a trade taught by local Khmer.
Gustav Auer, a Canadian with a catering business, came in 1998 to visit his girlfriend working at the U.N. Development Bank and volunteered at Friends for six weeks.
In 2000, he gave up his company, returned to Phnom Penh and offered to launch a restaurant to train the children in cooking and hospitality.
Round the corner is Veiyo Tonle, opened by a Khmer, Lay Neth. Another non-profit, the restaurant has the same goals -- to teach cooking and wait-service to keep children off the streets.
As you sit on the sidewalk outside in the steaming Cambodian night, eating the mild local fish curry happily named Fish Amok, children below the age of 7 stagger by barefoot with small babies on their shoulders. Some drag boxes behind them. When they want a break from their begging, they crawl into them for a brief rest and to bottle-feed their tiny charges as the tourists buy a 10 cent shoeshine while sipping their ice-cold beer.
--Fish Amok
--Serves 6-8 with steamed rice
--1 pound white fish fillets
--2 tablespoons curry paste (ready-made from Asian supermarkets)
--2 tablespoons fish sauce (Nam Pla)
--2 teaspoons sugar
--2 large eggs
--3/4 cup coconut milk
--1/2 teaspoon salt
--1/3 teaspoon ground black pepper
--4 Kaffir lime leaves
--Chop fish into 1-inch chunks.
--In a heat-resistant bowl of a size to fit in a covered pan (if you don't own a steamer), beat the coconut milk into the curry paste then add everything but the lime leaves, then fold in the fish.
--Place in steamer above gently boiling water for 15 minutes, carefully stir, then steam another five minutes till fish is opaque. If you haven't got a steamer, put an upturned saucer in a lidded casserole and place the bowl of fish on top.
7 comments:
Is this the reality that the great leader Hun Sen invision when he talk about prosperiety?
Hey, everything change slowly in
the real world. If you want the
final result in a flash, then you
have to go to a magical land.
Sounds like Julia has been hitting the rice wine a bit too much. What a load of fiction in the first two paragraphs- does anyone really believe that actually happened? Its too bad she felt she had to put in a pile of crap at the beginning, because the work Friends is doing is great and deserves some press. But seriously Julia if you are going to make up shit, at least make it sound believable.
See Maddox, Brangelina's son, brings Cambodian image up to the World.
True, I have to give the actress
some credits for helping our
tourist industry. I just hope she
won't screw up our culture.
I have been to Cambodia and they do offer you there children like that.. i went to a village to build houses with Tabitha organisation and the one lady tried to give me her baby for the houses.. even though nothing was asked from them.... so its not lies... if you haven't been there and seen ti then you can't understand just how desperate these people really are...
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