Film to aid Third World

Money raised from a film screening will help kids.

25th April 2012
News Mail (Australia)

A SUNSHINE Coast screening of a film about modern-day slavery tomorrow could make a difference in the lives of someone in a Third World country.

Money raised from the screening of At the End of Slavery: The Battle for Justice in Our Time will go towards charity work in Vietnam and Cambodia.

The screening, at Burnside State High School Conference Centre, has been organised by the Make a Difference project.

The project, which began in Maleny, aims to make a difference in the world through small changes.

Cambodian child-rights NGO pioneers 'voluntourism'

June 16, 2011
ABC Radio Australia

It carries the intials of one of the world's richest companies but the Big Heart Project is anything but.

It was created by a young couple from the Australian city of Melbourne, as a grass roots not for profit organisation with a partial focus on what's now known as "voluntourism" or volunteer vacations.

Two years on, the couple aided by locals and volunteers are caring for orphaned and abused children and are teaching English to more than 400 young Cambodians.

Presenter: Claudette Werden

Speaker: Adrian Trout, Big Heart Project; Cameron Sar, MyCambodiaTV; "Joshua", volunteer

Click here to listen: to the audio program (Windows Media)

WERDEN: It was two years of travelling in southeast Asia , that prompted Adrian Trout to, as he says, open his heart.

TROUT: It was from that experience of travelling and seeing a lot of suffering, just a very different take on the world to what I've been brought up with in Australia and reading a lot of books as well when I was travelling on things like sex slavery and a lot of the horrors that we often don't like to face up to and realising that this is reality for a lot of people and I didn't feel like I could walk away from that reality and go back into my bubble in Australia.

WERDEN: The Big Heart project is run from a modest house in a sleepy rural village in the southern province of Takeo. Cameron Sar, a Cambodian refugee who fled to Australia when he was 7, visited the project earlier this year.

Cambodia visit a life changer for Rotarians

Cambodia calling: Natalie Devenny is asking people to donate for a school.

14 Jun, 2011
Neelima Choahan
Melton Weekly (Australia)

BACCHUS Marsh Rotarians are in a race against time to raise the roof for a Cambodian school before the start of the country's wet season.

The club has raised $7500 for the project and is looking for a matching amount to bring the total to $15,000.

The roofing project will allow the school in Mondul 3 to educate about 400 children in a new facility.

Rotarian Natalie Devenny said she was amazed at the support the club's 'Raise the Roof' fund-raiser received last month.

Help Cambodia's disadvantaged with Food4Everyone

Margarita Parrish on a trip to Cambodia where Food4Everyone assists in building huts and wells

Food4Everyone assists in building huts and wells in Cambodia.

26 Sep 2010
by Omar Hamwi
Penrith Press (Australia)

PENRITH psychologist Margarita Parrish says a lack of fresh food and water has made Cambodia one of the most socio-economically depressed countries in the world.

For four years Mrs Parrish has operated Food4Everyone, a charity that raises money in Australia to build huts and wells there.

She travels to Cambodia twice a year to work with a team to help desperate families.

“Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in the world,” she said.

“Malnutrition is about 50 per cent and lack of water is a huge problem. We do work in Cambodia to help people have their basic right to food.”

Mrs Parrish said since she launched Food4Everyone the organisation had built 110 wells in the country. She added that global deaths due to lack of water equated to 20 jumbo jets falling out of the sky every day.

Homelessness is also a serious problem in Penrith and Mrs Parrish said it needed a solution - but Food4Everyone would not provide assistance here until local problems “remotely resembled” Cambodia’s.

“We have Aboriginal problems and homelessness,” she said.

“If we had (the same problems as Cambodia) here I’d be doing something here.”

The organisation needs 47 house sponsors at $100 each, 19 wall and roof sponsors at $50 each, seven well sponsors at $30 each and 72 mosquito net sponsors at $5 each.

Money raised would ease the suffering of 72 desperate families.

“We have huge plans. We will continue to build basic shelter for people,” Mrs Parrish said.

To donate call 4737 3400, email food4everyone@hotmail.com or go to food4everyone.net

Brisbane charity rescues trafficked children in Cambodia

January 26, 2010
David Barbeler
CourierMail.com.au

A BRISBANE-based organisation that rescues child sex workers in southeast Asia has cracked its first Cambodian syndicate, saving two girls, 10 and 14.

The rescue was carried out by the Brisbane-based charity The Grey Man, comprising former Australian special forces soldiers, former police and civilians.

A spokesman said the group's director of operations - a former Sydney policeman who uses only the name Tony to protect his identity - was in Cambodia on a fact-finding tour when a motorbike driver offered to arrange some young girls for him.

"Tony contacted our partner agency International Justice Mission (IJM) who in turn engaged with the police," the spokesman said.

The motorbike driver took Tony to a hotel late on Monday where a pimp showed him two Vietnamese girls, aged 10 and 14, the spokesman said.

"He (Tony) asked for both girls and on the pretext of going to an ATM to get the $US600 ($A665) to pay for them, he briefed police," he said.

Police and an IJM investigator then accompanied The Grey Man director back to the room to arrest the pimp and the motorbike driver.

The girls, who'd been trafficked from Vietnam, have been placed in the care of a British aid agency. The Grey Man will assist in supporting the children.

It's understood The Grey Man representatives are working with Cambodian police to arrest others involved.

The Grey Man's president, a former special forces soldier who uses the pseudonym John Curtis, said it was the organisation's first official operation in Cambodia, having previously rescued more than 100 children and women in Thailand and Laos.

"Without our intervention these girls would have been tossed onto the street in a few short years with AIDS," he said.

"I commend the Cambodian Police and IJM for their assistance.

"It is particularly apt that on Australia Day, Australians from The Grey Man charity are putting themselves in harm's way to rescue children in southeast Asia."

Young Cambodians in fear of sexual slavery

6 June 2008
By Nicola Kerkenezov
Sunshine Coast Daily (Australia)

Every day, girls as young as 18 months are being sold into the sex trade in Cambodia.

The shocking news has touched Noosa hairdresser Leanne Naylor and artist Lyne Redfern so deeply they are focusing all their energy, and large portions of their personal money, into the She Rescue Home to help stop the suffering.

The pair are asking residents to support the cause by attending a fundraising garage sale tomorrow.

The She Rescue Home is a Citipointe Church Brisbane initiative started by senior pastor Leigh Ramsey.

Leigh and husband Mark founded Noosa Christian Outreach Centre in 1987, then moved to the US to pioneer the Christian Outreach Centre movement, before returning to Brisbane in 2000.

Two years ago, Leigh visited Cambodia and saw how young girls were trafficked into prostitution.

“Girls as young as five-years-old are working in brothels, servicing as many as 30 men a day,” she said.

“On my last night in Phnom Penh, my final meal was spent with a 12-year-old girl telling me: ‘My friend. She is 10. Two men tonight. Mother, father sell. You come, you help. Please?’

“For this girl, a rescue home may be her only hope.”

Lyne said the She Home project aimed to help children who were victims of a culture that encouraged women to have extra babies to sell off just to make enough money for their families to survive.

To date, four homes have been established, each caring for about eight girls. At the shelters they receive education, counselling, health care and training for a long-term job.

With running costs for each shelter about $4000 a month, Lyne said it was “not okay for us to ignore this worthwhile charity”.

She encouraged people to give generously to collection tins at businesses around town and attend a garage sale tomorrow at 17 Wyandra Street, Noosa Heads, from 7am-12 noon. A raffle will be held outside The Warehouse at Noosaville next Saturday, a Art in Park expo at the Noosa gallery on July 13, and a high tea is planned for July 26.

To make a donation or assist with the fundraising and raffle, call Lyne Redfern on 0405 434 655 or email: lovely_ lyne@hotkey.net.au. For more information, visit: www.sherescuehome.org

$8 and three chooks

Children begging in Siem Reap (Photo: Nepcam Trust)

19 April 2008
The Manly Daily (Cumberland, Australia)

TEN minutes in a tuk-tuk along a straight, flat, very dusty and very bumpy road and I reached the home of Khem Set's family.

Mother and a crowd of about 30 assorted women and children had assembled to meet the invited Australian guest, surely a rarity in these poorer parts of Siem Reap, Cambodia's third-largest city.

Khem Set's family of seven comprises a hearty, strong and hard-working mother, a weakening, non-working father and five children from seven to 16. I have known them for three years.

On some days they are hungry. Shortly after I arrived I asked if the mother was still earning $1.50 per day as a builder's labourer and did they need a little extra support. The answer was "no'', because the total current cash situation was adequate ... $8 in the mother's pocket and 25 cents with the eldest sister.

People in this area do not have bank accounts, of course. To put this money in perspective, the seven family members exist each day on about one quarter of my daily expenditure for coffee and a muffin at my local cafe.

Three years ago a sponsor bought them five chickens, which in good times they breed up and in bad times they eat. The current stock of three chooks was scratching underneath the grass house raised seemingly precariously on flimsy poles.

Tonight, especially for me, they had roasted one. I had arrived at 5:30pm and Mother had already prepared what was described by Set's sister, Sour, with the widest grin, as "best ever!'' dinner. There were in total 10 plates of assorted Cambodian fare.

Now, I am very careful not to eat anything that has not been peeled or boiled. I do not eat anything simply washed in the local water such as green-leaf vegetables. But what could I do? As I write this days later, there were no problems.

I was dreading the prospect of sleeping on the hard wooden floor (they do not have one stick of furniture in their single-room grass house), but the thoughtful Mother had arranged for a foam mattress for me worry number one solved. When we all lay down just after nightfall, there was little floor space left.

Then worry number two was also solved ... I am paranoid about mosquitoes, but Mother had already hung a huge net that Khem Set fastidiously tucked under the mattress. They couldn't do much to alleviate worry number three: it is not uncommon, while sleeping on wooden floors, for tiny ants to crawl into an ear but "no worries ... to get it out, just block the other ear with a thumb, put a finger in your navel and then spit''. (I kid you not!)

In Cambodian children's early years, mothers are very strict and I see many whacks on the behind. Probably this, plus a lack of toys and having only a few material possessions, leads to people-focused children who respect their elders.

So, typically, Khem Set's mother is very much the one to set the children's targets and priorities, and in most fine families such as this one the children study hard.

They start school at 7am and, each afternoon after coming home from a government school (six days a week), do their homework on the floor. It looks so uncomfortable, but for them it's just routine.

Then, for one extra hour between 6pm and 7pm, a sponsor has made it possible for the children to take extra classes in English at Siem Reap's private Best Future Centre. The childrenare very well-mannered and are perpetually cheerful, finding many opportunities for laughing. This, in my opinion, is a class family.

The downside for me was the pervasive dust. Their house is right on the roadside and in peak times it is choking. The family probably doesn't notice it. And there was no toilet other than a group of banana palms over the back fence.AFTER the first half-hour by bus from Nepal's capital, Kathmandu a stop-start, depressing experience in traffic jams on the heavily potholed main arterial road the environment changes instantly, dramatically and wonderfully as we crest through the rim of mountains circling the valley into awesome scenic vistas.

Traditional mud and stone family homes cling precipitously to the sides of dramatically steep mountains. These houses, except for the rare cluster that forms a mountain village, are quite well separated by luxuriously green plenty to smile about

forest growth interspersed with each family's tiny, clearly hard-won fields for growing rice, cereal and vegetable crops. The truly majestic snow-capped Himalayan peaks stand proud as final backdrops.

Surely the lives in the traditional homes in this paradise could only be tranquil and contented? I was about to find out.

The invitation for me to sleep over with Samjhana's family was eagerly accepted, being my first opportunity to experience a traditional Nepali family's mountain lifestyle. Samjhana is a 17-year-old girl whose education is being ensured by one of Nepcam's sponsors. She and another sponsored child, Ashmita, who is 11 years old, met me at the bus stop.

"What can I buy for your family?'' I asked.

"Fruit and cookies if you want.''

The girls led me 4km up a side road to the start of a very narrow path that struck off towards the sky. After about an hour we reached the delightful mud-and-stone home in the most idyllic location I have ever seen, or could even imagine ... noiseless, crisp clean air, and nestled on a cliff edge amongst very thick forest.

The girls had been very sure-footed and had made light of the treacherous path, but I had been super-careful and puffingly slow. We were regularly being overtaken by groups of children heading home from school, and they had obviously forewarned a large section of the mountainside of this strange visitor coming because upon arrival there were 24 people of all sizes clustered around Samjhana's home to greet me.

Soon the group dispersed, leaving just the family: Mother widowed for 10 years and three daughters, 11, 13 and 17. They are an exceptionally good-looking family and the children are very intelligent. I know this because I get the school reports for all Nepcam's sponsored children every six months.

We immediately sat down beside their cooking fire while Nepali tea was prepared. I asked the mother directly: ``You have three fine daughters living with you in this traditional home, in such a beautiful environment, you surely must be so happy?'' To this she replied: ``Life is difficult.''

It was revealed that their total wealth that evening was $3.50, with little prospect of income until next season's rice, maize and grain crops were harvested from their tiny fields (which produce mostly for home consumption).

Their cow was not giving milk, normally a stable daily source of at least some income by providing milk for the calf ``and a little for us''; and the two goats had just produced a boy and girl the previous day, so they had to grow somewhat before being ready for sale. So, no livestock or livestock products for sale. The mother was about to add to her borrowings (at 20 per cent interest).

Their daily menu is unchanging black tea for breakfast, no lunch and a dhal bhat dinner (rice with greens chopped up and spiced).

I asked if they had local people who would help with some money or food. ``My mother will not ask,'' replied Samjhana.

``Well, what will you do then?'' I followed.

``Mother will provide,'' she said.

They had last eaten meat (goat) about two months ago, and since then they had no change whatsoever to their most economical of diets. Needless to say, Ashmita, at a later time, told me the family were frequently without food and ``a little'' hungry.

I would like to emphasise that this family, like so many Nepali, are some of the most humble, uncomplaining and gentle people that one could ever meet.

Dinner was simple, but very tasty with quite a few added spices. Nothing at all was left in the cooking pot or on the plates as, eating with their right hands, the family swooped up every last grain of rice. Sitting around the fire, eating and drinking Nepali sweet tea, the family engaged in continuous chit-chat and laughter, and at 8.30pm we bedded down on the floor in their one room on the first floor above the goats.

As I fall asleep back home in Sydney, there are many nights when I think of the families I know wonderful families such as Khem Set's and Samjhana's whose hospitality has given me an insight into the local customs and culture. The experience has been far more absorbing, rewarding and enriching than seeing yet another pagoda or wat. And much more humbling.

Can you spare $24 per month to help another family? Every cent goes to provide a child's education because other sponsors pay Nepcam Trust's administration expenses. Six-monthly feedback (letter, photo, school report) is provided on each sponsored child. Email: colin@mensa.org.au or see nepcam.org.au for more detailed information.