A ticket to somewhere

Deborah Groves with local Cambodian villagers, outside the temple district of Angkor Wat where Ms Groves has established an aid organisation. Picture supplied.

September 9, 2009
LARISSA HAM
Brisbane Times (Australia)

Four years ago, Australian photographer Deborah Groves walked into a small village in the Cambodian countryside and met a man who would change her life.

Just 25 minutes away was the town of Siem Reap, the stopping-off point to the world famous Angkor Wat temple, a formerly modest town now flourishing with Western-style pubs, designer shops and luxury hotels driven by the influx of tourist money.

But lying in a primitive hut in the outlying village was 52-year-old man Mr Som - skeleton-thin, his ribcage clearly visible and emaciated legs resembling long strands of licorice.

Despite being gravely ill with tuberculosis for more than 18 months, he had not received any medical care mainly due to his family’s poverty Ms Groves was horrified.

"Morally I thought, ‘I have an obligation, this man is going to die, I need to stand up and offer some help’," she said.

Enlisting the help of family and friends, Ms Groves raised the money needed for Mr Som to be carried out on a stretcher to medical care.

But it was too late; Mr Som died 10 days later.

For Ms Groves, a wedding photographer from Queensland, Mr Som’s death was an enormous “wake-up call” that not everything could be fixed easily.

Shaken by the village’s desperate poverty, she vowed to stay on and help.

The result has been Helping Hands Cambodia, an aid organisation formed Ms Groves to support Mr Som’s village and three others near Angkor Wat.

The idea behind Helping Hands is to give the local villagers a 'hand up,' rather than straight charity. For instance, recently when it gave away 1000 bicycles, each recipient agreed to work at least three days to fix local roads.

The organisation, which now has 10 Cambodian staff and up to two volunteers at a time, has also helped build bridges, a school, provided agricultural training and hundreds of free breakfasts.

The latest project will see drop toilets installed in the four villages. Fifty neighbours a day queued up to use the first one when it was installed in March, and another 15 have since been built.

To help fund Helping Hands, Groves sells photographs, magnets and bookmarks at hotels, airports and the night market in Siem Reap.

It is a long way from snapping excited brides on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.

In 2004 Ms Groves fell love with the country following an Intrepid Travel tour, and feeling unfulfilled and burnt out, decided to quit her business and move to Cambodia.

But making the leap to live in one of the world’s least developed countries wasn’t easy, with many friends advising caution about leaving her business and safe life behind. "(But) I thought ‘surely I’m more than just a business’," Ms Groves said.

In the ensuing years, Ms Groves says she has developed a thick skin after four years of dealing with sometimes terrible situations.

One of her worst experiences was a man who received terrible eye injuries after a landmine exploded in his face near the Thai border.

"He was sent back to the village he was originally from without seeing a single eye doctor... I thought it was so unfair that no one cares," she said.

Helping Hands paid for his treatment, although the man’s eyes couldn’t be saved. They were later removed to stop his pain. To Western ears this may sound horrific, but Ms Groves said the man was "unbelievably grateful".

As well as the lows, there have also been incredible highs, such as a man in his 60s, blind since he was 15, regaining his sight in one eye following surgery sponsored by Ms Groves' organisation.

Another woman with cataracts regained her vision after 20 years. Ms Groves says the woman told her the thing she was most excited about was now being able to find the best food at communal dinners.

"I get a big kick out of stories like that, when you’ve had a radical impact," Ms Groves said.

However, the economic crisis has made life harder for everyone this year. Figures from the Cambodia’s Ministry of Tourism say although Vietnamese tourists increased by 40 per cent in the six months to June because of new visa exemptions, Australian, Japanese, Chinese, Thai and South Korean visitors fell sharply.

Cambodia’s two main industries, garment manufacturing and construction, have been crippled as US clothes orders fell and tourists stayed at home.

According to the United Nations Development Program, the garment sector lost 60,000 jobs by April and the construction sector 25,000.

UN resident co-ordinator Douglas Broderick warned: "it’s not just people’s livelihoods at risk – it’s people’s lives".

The effect on Ms Groves’ photography business has also been dramatic.

"Last year was a boom year, then the Australian dollar crashed. It made a big impact because a lot of our customers are Australian,” she said.

In June this year, her photo sales had fallen 50 per cent from the same period in 2008.

Donations to Helping Hands have also dropped, although fundraising efforts such as a US$23,000 (about $27,500) donation raised by a young Irishwoman who rowed 250 kilometres down the Shannon River- Ireland's longest river - have helped.

Ms Groves radical life-change has meant many personal sacrifices, including sleepless nights, long work hours, lack of a social life and being unable to regularly see her family and friends.

She is working towards spending more time in Australia, but continues to manage Helping Hands and run her photo business full-time from wherever she is at any given moment.

Back home, Ms Groves says her standards of living will probably be different to last time she lived there. She believes that might be a good thing.

“Most of my staff have never had a hot shower, most of the people in the village don’t even have a shower, they use a bucket. Hot water now I consider a luxury,” she says.

“Even the poorest in Australia are still better off than the people here.”

To help, go to www.grovesphotography.com

Building new lives

Deborah Groves is happiest helping the Cambodian people, particularly the local children of Prasat Char village.

14 January 2008
By Angie Kay
The Daily (Queensland, Australia)

Deborah Groves sat down with a magazine recently and read about how some in our western society are now bleaching their eyeballs to match their sparkling whitened teeth.

Surrounded by extreme poverty in the Cambodian home she has lived in since 2005, the Coast photographer was at a loss to reconcile the two realities.

“I couldn’t understand it,” Deborah, 42, said. “I just couldn’t believe it. I rarely get to see a women’s magazine and someone had brought a couple over for me to Cambodia.

“In the past I had always enjoyed reading magazines but I just put that one down and went back to work.”

Work for Deborah now focuses on helping to empower her new neighbours in the Prasat Char village in Siem Reap province in the mid-north-west of Cambodia with her charity Helping Hands Cambodia.

In less than two years she has helped them to build a bridge, which improves work opportunities for the villagers; build a school, which gives 300 children a rudimentary education and which features the only toilet in the village; as well as constructing water pumps to provide clean drinking water.

Much of the last 12 months has been focussed on establishing a new eye treatment program which has saved the sight of numerous villagers, a “full bellies” breakfast program for students at the school and the “work for a bicycle” program.

“Every household in the village has now earned a bike,” Deborah says, brimming with pride.

“We don’t just give them a bike; they have to work for it. It costs them $5 and they have to work for Helping Hands for a day doing things in the village. If they can’t afford the $5 they can earn the bike by working for four days.

“The effect of a program like this is not only that they get a bike which they can use to go to work or high school in Siem Reap, but it also enhances their dignity and I am proud of that.

“We are not turning them into beggars. We want to facilitate them helping themselves. We want to help train up the younger people so they can become leaders in their village, because they are the hope for the future of the country.

“It would be so easy to just go in there and see a family needs some new clothes and give them to them, but that doesn’t give them dignity because they then come to feel they have to rely on other people.”

Bringing about such extraordinary transformation was the last thing Deborah expected when she went on a tour to Cambodia in 2004.

At the time she was running a successful wedding photography business in Currimundi, but “I felt I needed to make some sort of change”.

“I went for a two-week tour, saying I could settle back into life as a wedding photographer or I would come back more disgruntled. I came back more disgruntled.

“Everyone thought I was crazy but I kept thinking that I was more than just a business. The poverty impacted me the most and I felt I could do something about it. The way they live was just so primitive.”

So Deborah now combines her passion for photography, her driving need to bring about lasting, positive change and her rather extraordinary people skills to make the difference.

She still takes her photos but now they are of the sights and people of Cambodia and they are sold to tourists in hotel souvenir shops, book shops, galleries and airport galleries, with the money going back into her Helping Hands charity, which last year became a registered non-gov-ernment organisation in Cambodia.

“The photos help to raise money but they also help to raise awareness of the issues,” Deborah said.

“There was one tourist who bought some of my photos and then when they got back home, they sent me a $500 donation, which goes a very long way here. It costs us $5 for a consultation as part of the eye treatment program.”

As well as large-scale projects, Helping Hands has helped to set up a number of villagers in their own small business, supported families with sick relatives, paid for surgery for a burns victim and funeral costs for another villager, as well as setting up a seed bank to allow all villagers to have access to vegetable seeds.

In a country besieged by poverty, frequently inept government and still wavering under the shadow of thousands of unmapped landmines scattered through the countryside, it can be dangerous.

“It is very different to the lifestyle we have here,” Deborah said during a recent visit with family on the Coast.

“You have to be sensible because stuff does happen but as a westerner you are less likely to be robbed at gunpoint because they know if they are caught the punishment will be much worse.

“And because of the landmines you do have to be careful where you walk. There are still people in Cambodia being blown up by the landmines.”

But Deborah is not one to focus on the negatives, instead steering the conversation back to the positive work being done in Prasat Char.

In the last 12 months, Helping Hands has increased its staff from just Deborah and a villager Chanti, who has become her invaluable offsider, to now include four staff at the school, two staff in a shop selling the photos to tourists and an American volunteer.

And there are plenty more plans to expand the work done by the organisation with stated aims which include finding more ways for villagers to earn an income including making crafts to sell, having all children in the village attend school and educate the adults on issues from health to agricultural practices.

“In other words our aim is to get them to become more self-reliant and look after themselves instead of being recipients of charity,” Deborah said.

For more details on the Helping Hands organisation check out
www.grovesphotography.com.

Donations can be made at the St George Bank: The details are: account name:
Helping Hands Cambodia;
account number: 419 526 714;
BSB: 114 879.