Midlander, foundation work for Cambodian women’s empowerment

Saturday, June 11, 2011
By Theresa Clift
Midland Daily News

Midlander and retired Dow Corning Vice President Marie Eckstein recently spent two weeks in Cambodia working with The Harpswell Foundation.

The politically-neutral Harpswell Foundation’s mission is to empower a new generation of women leaders in Cambodia and the developing world. Eckstein is a new member of its advisory board.

The foundation was created by Alan Lightman, a retired professor at both Harvard and The University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Bijou orchestra’s musical production of Lightman’s best-selling book Einstein’s Dreams, inspired Eckstein to take the trip.

“I wanted to see if there were opportunities where I could help,” Eckstein said. “What I found was just amazing.”

From prostitution to pepper

The former sex workers are taught skills such as sewing at the Daughters of Cambodia workwhop in Phnom Penh. (COURTESY DAUGHTERS OF CAMBODIA)

These small ornaments in the gift shop tell story in two words.

The Daughters of Cambodia now hosts about 55 girls and 15 boys.

Dec. 30, 2010
BY TOM GORDON
THE ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER (California, USA)

EDITOR'S NOTE: Tom Gordon, an editor at The Register, is starting a nonprofit that will sell Cambodian pepper in the United States. The money raised will help a group that works to help retrain former sex workers in Cambodia This is the last of a three-part story.

I'm writing about pepper and Cambodia for several reasons, but to start off I'll share two:

TEE'S STORY: At 15, Tee left her province in rural Cambodia to find a job in Phnom Penh. For four years she worked as a waitress. When the restaurant closed, she went to work as a karaoke girl. She was sold to a brothel by a friend. The friend took the payment and Tee was forced to work it off.

If she complained, she was beaten. If she refused to have sex with the brothel owners, she was beaten. She was forced to stand on the street to attract customers. If she didn't lure enough customers, she was beaten. She finally ran away when the brothel owners were sleeping. But carrying the stigma of having been a sex worker made finding a new job all but impossible, and she ended up back in a karaoke bar.

PERL'S STORY: Perl has no education, but she does have eight siblings. She came to Phnom Penh to help earn money to support a sick father and a disabled sister. Perl got a job in a garment factory but the demands for money continued. She started work in a karaoke bar. Her family wanted more money. Her next step was prostitution.

She serviced men at night and slept during the day. Customers forced her to drink with them. They often cheated her out of money by refusing to pay after sex. Perl was forced into a room with many men and gang raped.

DAUGHTERS OF CAMBODIA

When my wife Cris and I decided to import pepper from Cambodia into the U.S. we had two basic goals: to provide a market for some hard-working farmers and help a deserving charity in one of the poorest nations in the world.

We aren't in it for money; there a lot more effective ways to make money than selling pepper from Kampot, Cambodia.

But we had heard about Daughters of Cambodia on a previous visit. Simply, Daughters takes in former sex workers and teaches them a trade.

The nonprofit organization now has about 55 girls and 15 boys learning to sew, make jewelry and wait tables.

There's a Daughters of Cambodia gift shop and café in Phnom Penh just down the street from the National Museum. Daughters also runs a three-story workshop deep in the alleys of one of Phnom Penh's numerous brothel districts.

Who better to make the packaging for our pepper?

Ruth Elliott is an earnest English lady. She's a psychologist. She has lived in Phnom Penh for seven years, is married to a Cambodian man and has four kids. She started Daughters of Cambodia four years ago.

"I felt God put it in my heart," she says of the organization. "I felt Cambodia needed more help than just about any other place."

Ruth provided a little insight into the Cambodian sex trade:

• An estimated 40 percent of the sex workers are HIV positive.
• The customers break down something like this: 49 percent Cambodian, 42 percent from other Asian nations; 9 percent Westerners.
• Often, the families sell the girls into the sex trade. The causes include broken families, domestic violence, materialism -- the families want a new TV or motorbike -- and alcoholism. "Ninety percent of the girls who are sold are sold by their families," Ruth says.
• The girls typically take a pay cut when they leave the sex trade for Daughters. They likely were earning about $100 a month as a prostitute; they get paid $75-$80 a month at Daughters.

It's impossible to imagine selling a child into a brutal sex business. But it's also hard to imagine the poverty of rural Cambodia.

The young women enter the Daughter's program voluntarily but they bring a lot of baggage: alcoholism, no self esteem, depression, victims of domestic abuse.

Recently, Daughters has taken in ladyboys – young transvestites who work the sex trade. Says Ruth: "They are more despised (in Cambodian society) than the girls. They can only come out after midnight because you have people in the streets screaming things at them. We just give work and a purpose. Some want to become boys again and we try to help them."

BACK ALLEYS OF PHNOM PENH

I got a tour of the workshop.

After a winding tuk tuk ride through the alleys of Phnonm Penh we came to a big iron gate.

There are two rules: No photography and men must be accompanied by someone from the organization all times.

The rooms are filled with sewing machines, tables for assembling jewelry and rooms with groups of girls crocheting. Kids were napping on mats in the day-care center. A nurse visits once a week.

It was strangely quiet when I entered the sewing room. The 30 sewing machines were still. But out on the balcony -- where it was a little cooler -- 15 giggling young women were gathered, putting the finishing touches on the pouches we had ordered to hold the pepper.

The traditional Cambodian material had been purchased at a local market. It's a sturdy, checked cloth that local people use as a scarf, a bandana and to carry babies. It's worn by both men and women. You might recall photos of the Cambodian butcher Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge soldiers wearing red and white kramas.

I stuffed 160 pepper pouches into my suitcase along with 30 pounds of pepper.

It was time to go home.

TEE TODAY: She works as a cook at the Daughters of Cambodia café. She is single and lives with her 6-year-old daughter in a rented house. She takes part in child-care and domestic-violence workshops. She boasts that she is one of the fastest cooks at the café.

PERL TODAY: She's learning English so she can better communicate with foreign customers at the Daughters shop. She's a cashier and a management trainee. The increased responsibility means a higher salary. She has regular counseling and has become a Christian.

"In the past people always looked down on me," Perl says. "I now have hope."

Contact the writer: tgordon@ocregister.com or 714-704-3789

AmeriCares, AstraZeneca extend Cambodian agreement

Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Richard Lee, Staff Writer
NewsTimes.com (Danbury, Connecticut, USA)

Before Stamford-based AmeriCares and AstraZeneca Pharmaceuticals arrived three years ago at Sihanouk Hospital Center of Hope in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, women suffering from breast cancer had little chance of survival.

Doctors at the hospital were unfamiliar with breast cancer treatment, and women often arrived at the hospital with advanced stages of the disease, too late for life-saving procedures.

"The hospital was seeing 20 patients a year for breast cancer," said Ella Gudwin, vice president of strategic program development at AmeriCares, noting that for the 12 months ending March 31, the number had increased to 123. "The program has exceeded most of its targets. This is the only successful breast cancer program for poor Cambodian patients. The average patient is earning $2 a day. Chemotherapy would be the equivalent of four years of income."

Based on the results, AmeriCares and AstraZeneca, based in Wilmington, Del., have made a three-year commitment to expand early breast cancer detection and treatment in the Southeast Asian country. The renewed commitment expands a program that provides free cancer screenings, medications, patient education and medical staff training at the charity hospital involving the two partners.

"By expanding the program, we will provide the Sihanouk Hospital Center of Hope with the vital resources necessary to treat women diagnosed with breast cancer who would not otherwise be able to afford treatment. We will also broaden our efforts to reach thousands more with breast cancer education, as studies have shown the importance of education and early detection in increasing survival rates," said Dr. Frank Bia, medical director for AmeriCares.

The program goal is to treat 600 women annually by 2014.

"This collaboration with AmeriCares makes it possible for AstraZeneca to get critical medications to the women who need them in Cambodia and helps ensure cancers are detected and treated earlier," said Jennifer McGovern, director of patient assistance programs at AstraZeneca, which began its relationship with AmeriCares in 2005 to support Hurricane Katrina disaster relief.

An alarming number of Cambodian women die every year because of a lack of public awareness, limited cancer screening opportunities and the high cost of treatment. At the Phnom Penh hospital, cancer patients are given anti-hormonal treatment, lab testing and surgery at no cost.

AstraZeneca provides its Arimidex and Faslodex drugs for various treatment programs, some of which take five years. It also gave $105,000 for the first three years of the program and has pledged $276,297 for the ensuing three years.

AstraZeneca also provides AmeriCares with products for its clinics in El Salvador, Tanzania and Haiti, said McGovern.

She added that AstraZeneca started its patient assistance program in the United States 30 years ago, and is extending a similar effort to those in other countries through AmeriCares.

Since it was established in 1982, AmeriCares has distributed more than $9 billion in humanitarian aid to 147 countries. In fiscal year 2010, it delivered more than $850 million in program services and medical assistance to 97 countries.

7-year-old's photos to help develop funds for Cambodia

Kalliyan Srey-Ry Lagger holds one of her photos as mom Deb Lagger and sister Hannah Khim Lagger, 8, lend support. Kalliyan’s photos will be on display at Garden Smiles in Waterville. (THE BLADE/LORI KING )

Tuesday, May 27, 2008
By JC REINDL
BLADE STAFF WRITER
Toledo Blade (Toledo, Ohio, USA)

Seven-year-old Kalliyan Srey-Ry Lagger rifled through a box of photos on the kitchen table, plucking out the most radiant prints of the bunch.

"I like the color on this one. And I like the color on this one too," Kalliyan said, holding the close-up of a pink rose, its shiny petals dotted with beads of water. "I try to get the camera in the right place where I want it to be."

Gathered by the side of the talented young photographer were her adoptive mother, Deb Lagger, and her sister, Hannah Khim Lagger. Hannah is 8 years old and, like Kalliyan, was adopted as a baby from an orphanage in Cambodia by Ms. Lagger and her partner. The family makes its home in Lambertville.

Mother and daughters last week were making preparations to put Kalliyan's photos on display and on sale at the shop of George and Deb Carruth, Garden Smiles, in Waterville. The photos go up today with the plan to send half of the sales' proceeds to a recently opened English language and career-training center in Battambang, Cambodia, that was named for both girls.

The center was the latest result of a partnership involving Ms. Lagger's employer, Goodwill Industries of Northwest Ohio, along with Goodwill Industries International and the Cambodian-based nonprofit, Digital Divide Data. Ms. Lagger is director of work force development.

The rest of the proceeds are to go to Kalliyan's college fund. She and Hannah attend Monroe Road Elementary School, where Betsy Doyle taught them both for second grade.

Mrs. Doyle's class last year decorated water bottles and sold them at school to raise more than $100 that went to building a drinking well for Cambodian villagers. This year her class plans to sell bookmarks to raise funds to buy maps and globes for Cambodians learning English. Ms. Lagger visits the girls' classes to talk about life in Cambodia, a developing Southeast Asian nation of 14 million people where much of the population lives in poverty by Western standards.

"It's really neat to see the kids become aware of something beyond their own little world," Mrs. Doyle said.

Ms. Lagger said her interests in Cambodia grew as she learned about the country's history. She and her partner had been considering adoption, and in 2000 they worked through the World Child International Adoption Agency to adopt Hannah from an orphanage in Phnom Penh, the country's capital and largest city.

The trip to pick up Hannah was Ms. Lagger's first visit to Cambodia. She since has made three additional visits, each leaving indelible impressions.

"It's unimaginable poverty. I mean absolutely unimaginable poverty," Ms. Lagger said. "You know the little scooters we have here? You'll see a family of six or seven on those scooters. It's unbelievable.

"From our first trip there, I committed myself. I was just going to do whatever I could do to give back to the Cambodians for trusting me to take care of one of their children."

Ms. Lagger returned the next year to adopt 14-month-old Kalliyan from a rural Pursat orphanage. All that was known about Kalliyan's biological family was she had been the youngest child of parents who died. The adoption process for both girls involved lots of paperwork and took about five months, she said.

The Cambodian people have only recently begun to recover from decades of violence and unrest. After gaining independence from France in 1953, Cambodia experienced a military coup in 1970 and a period of civil war. The country was bombed and briefly invaded during the Vietnam war by U.S. forces hunting down Viet Cong.

In 1975, communist Khmer Rouge rebels captured Phnom Penh and forced the evacuation of all cities and towns in their attempt to transform Cambodia into an agrarian society.

More than 1.5 million Cambodians eventually would die from starvation, killings, and forced hardships under the regime's Pol Pot leader. These events were depicted in the Academy Award-winning film, The Killing Fields.

A Vietnamese invasion in 1978 then led to occupation and nearly 13 years of civil war. Cambodia has been under a relatively stable constitutional monarchy for the last decade and today has a fast-growing economy.

Ms. Lagger said she did not encounter much anti-American sentiment during her visits. Instead the Cambodians seemed to offer encouragement as they saw her, a white woman, cradling an Asian baby. She recalled a passer-by on the street saying, "Lucky baby. Lucky baby."

"They're grateful to Americans for adopting their children," Ms. Lagger said. "And we kept trying to tell them, 'We're the lucky parents. We're the lucky ones.'•"

Hannah and Kalliyan are aware of the circumstances of their birth.

But while Ms. Lagger makes occasional visits to Cambodia for her job, she isn't sure whether the girls are ready to experience firsthand the rough-and-tumble lives many Cambodians still live and then make the inevitable comparisons to their own lives here in the U.S.

"Maybe when they're teenagers," she said.

Kalliyan will be signing her photos from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at Garden Smiles.

Contact JC Reindl at:
jreindl@theblade.com
or 419-724-6065.

Oregon family aids Cambodian sex slaves

This is a picture of a young girl in peril. Girls working in the brothels are given numbers and displayed to the sexual predators. (Photo: TransitionsCambodia.org)

Sunday, March 16, 2008
By WAYNE HAVRELLY for Kgw.com
KGW (USA)

As the Pond family sits around the dining room table playing trivial pursuit, they appear to be the typical American family. They’re not. Anything that was typical changed forever after watching a Dateline NBC investigation 4 years ago. The story about Cambodian children being sold to sex peddlers touched the family so deeply, this father of three quit his six figure sales job and traveled to Cambodia to see what could be done to help.

“We were seeing pedophiles walking up and down the riverfront purchasing kids, said James Pond. Pond knew he could make a difference, but only if his family wanted the same thing. His wife Athena said, “We were trying to teach our kids you can do more in life and we should all be helping others, but we really didn’t have an outlet for that before this.” It was a unanimous vote so the Ponds sold nearly everything they owned and moved to Cambodia to open a transitional housing center for girls rescued from brothels. 14 year old Srey Neth was sold by her mother for 300 dollars.

“Her virginity was sold a week later for the same 300 dollars she was sold for after that she was forced into a brothel where she saw 10 to 20 men a day, said James Pond. Neth was rescued. After 2 years with the pond family, she's now working for their Oregon based charity called Transitions Cambodia.

“She's not just our voice she's the voice of every girl that’s ever been through something like this,” said Pond.

Transitions Cambodia now provides shelter, support and vocational training to about 20 rescued girls each year.

The Ponds run the charity from their Hillsboro home. They have a staff of ten running the program in Cambodia. They recently moved back to the US to raise awareness about the child sex issue. They hope that will lead to more financial support which will enable them to open even more shelters in Cambodia and other countries around the world.

They said what started out as an idea after watching Dateline NBC has turned into a lifetime commitment. They hope to create awareness on a large scale starting in Portland and spreading all across America.

For more information go to the charities website at
Transitionscambodia.org