Disability Rights Cambodia Project #13106

Music Training Therapy Blind Youth Cambodia

by Khmer Cultural Development Institute

Project Report | Mar 11, 2016
Changing Hearts and Minds about Girl's Education

By Catherine Louise Geach | Founder

Proud to be a Cambodian girl! Photo by Steve Porte

Dear friends of Kampot Traditional Music School,

Thank you so much for your fantastic support. Here is our latest report and appeal for you to read and share.

We have been running our school for twenty-two years and have worked for a long time with girls and boys who have lost their parents, or who live in vulnerable circumstances and who come from rural Southwestern Cambodia. How many battles we have fought to protect our girls in the face of ignorance and discrimination.

This is one of our stories, but it reflects so many girls who have been at our school and everywhere in this part of Cambodia. Ani* came to our school as a little girl. Her father had disappeared and her mother suffered from a serious mental illness making it too dangerous for her to stay in the little hut together with her mother and grandmother. Despite medical treatment her mother has not been able to improve much and for Ani's safety she cannot spend long periods with her mother, although she visits her and has regular news of her. The situation for Ani is very distressing, because of the nature of her mother's illness and the unpredictability and violence involved.

Nobody wanted Ani in her village when she was little and her grandmother unable to cope asked local authorities to help her grandaughter and that is how we began caring for Ani. Today Ani is a beautiful fourteen year old girl doing very well both with her scholastic education, but also a wonderful classical Cambodian ballet dancer. She has danced at important national festivals and competitions and her dance teacher has said that if she wants she can to ballet school (university level) at the Royal University of Fine Arts when she has finished her Baccalareuate final scholastic exams in a few years. Ani is still a young girl, has a large teddy on her bed and likes drawing, reading and being with her friends. She has her whole future before her and we really want to protect her.

Suddenly pressured by people in their village, Ani's grandmother wanted her back again. Not in order to send her to school in her village or for the company, no, to marry early and to work. Ani said "No" and together with local authorities so did we say "No".

This is typical of remoter rural village attitudes where girls are destined for child marriages, labour in factories and tragically, sexual slavery. Higher education has no place in the minds of many village people, for them a girl must be used while she is young and still attractive. Southwestern Cambodia, especially Kampot was a Khmer Rouge stronghold until the early 2000's. The Khmer Rouge exterminated over two million people, a third of the population. They were particularly barbaric in Kampot under the leadership of "Ta Mok", known as the "Butcher of Cambodia". Extraordinarily uncivilised thinking; the abolition of doctors, schools, engineers, teachers, artists and all known infrastructure brought Cambodia to primative levels and the genocide of Cambodia was also known as "Year Zero". So imagine what the mentality is like of many people in rural areas once controlled by or loyal to Khmer Rouge guerillas!?

Just think what we have faced all these years, especially in the early days when there was still a civil war going on and when we found children in need of protection, we had to make sure to be out of villages and off the main road by three in the afternoon, otherwise we risked being captured and killed by the Khmer Rouge.

How to address such closure and rigidity of thinking? How to move forward in a peaceful, enlightened way?

Well we thought we would create a special Shadow Puppet Theatre to tell the story of the importance of girl's education. Shadow Puppet Theatre is a much loved art in Cambodia and was wiped out in Kampot during the Khmer Rouge regime. We have now revived it at our school and we will use it to promote education and tolerance. Please help us make this dream a reality by funding our project.

It will cost a little over $650 to make the leather puppets ourselves, make special portable lighting, hire a van to take us to rural areas and feed our children and staff when they perform in the late evening.

How and when to help? Please join our special March 16th Bonus Day on Global Giving donating to this project at 09:00 Washington DC time using either Credit card or Paypal.

Remember to give early on the 16th, the more donors we have, the more possibility there is to win a Bonus. Here's our link

www.globalgiving.org/projects/free-arts-training-for-400-children-in-cambodia

If you have any doubts or questions you can contact Global Giving and their wonderful team will help you.

Let's celebrate the girls from our school who did make it and who have become doctors, economists, professional musicians, dancers, business leaders and wonderful mothers!

Thank You for your Support.

*Ani is not her real name. To protect her identity we have not revealed her true name.

Making shadow puppets

Relax and Painting time

Shadow puppet performance

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Jan 28, 2016
A new hope

By Catherine Louise Geach | Founder

Learning the Takhe and the Skor

Dear friends and supporters of our school,

Thank you so much for your wonderful support and continued kindness and generosity towards us. We would like to share our latest news to keep you in touch with how our school is developing.

As you know we have four hundred local children who come for free music, dance and Yike lessons during the week. Being so many, their classes are divided into different times, so that all can get a chance to learn about their cultural heritage. For those children who are extremely talented and have an interest beyond an extra-currcular art activity, we help them on our Scholarship Program. These students come from very difficult backgrounds and need extra support in the way of food, medical care and sometimes to be able to sleep at our school. There are many social problems in poorer areas associated with alcohol, gambling and substance abuse due to post-traumatic stress in adults from the genocide and war era.

Last year as you know, we opened our doors to providing free Mohori music lessons to blind children. This quickly developed and as their shelter closed down, these children with the consent of their parents, local authorities and the children themselves, came to live at our school. We now employ Braille teachers and the children have a special housemother to care for their needs. Now that local authorities know we have a program for blind children, they have begun identifying other children in need and bringing them to our school. We would like to share with you a true story of one of our most recent arrivals, so that you can understand how it really is in rural Cambodia.

A representative from the Department of Social Affairs asked us last November whether we could assist a little boy. His mother was blind. Whilst working at a rehabilitation centre she had an affair with a blind man and became pregnant. After the birth of her son, her companion denied all responsibility and negated paternity of the baby. A few years passed and she then went to work at an NGO in Sihnoukville (Southern Cambodia).

One day late last year, a young boy of five was found in the Kampot taxi rank, covered in sores, starving and filthy. He also had been born without eyes. He said his mother had put him in a taxi from Sihanoukville and sent him over a hundred kilometres way to Kampot by himself. He knew no one in Kampot and being blind was unable to to see where he was going or locate food. Fortunately the Kampot Department of Social Affairs was alerted to his presence and tried to track his mother done. They found her, but her reply was "If I am blind how can I know this is really my son" and she refused any contact with the little boy. The local authorities therefore put him in a temporary shelter for orphaned children and it is then they came to us asking for our help.

Today he goes to school and is learning how to read and write using Braille, he lives with children his own age and is specially cared for by our second housemother. He has begun learning Mohori music and is for the first time leading a normal, healthy life surrounded by loving people.

In November both our resident children and some of our scholarship students, as well as our blind students took part in the Opening Ceremony of the first ever International Writers and Readers Festival. The opening ceremony was held at our school and later during the festival we did our first première performance of our newly learned Shadow Puppet Theatre (Lakoun Sabaik Toch) to much acclaim. We are now preparing new performances to take to remote and rural areas of Kampot, where Cambodians have no access to their cultural heritage, but this is another story...and will be told in our next report! First however, we are going to perform at the National Cultural Competition in Phnom Penh by invitation of the Ministry of Culture and we will perform the ancient Yike with special songs written for our blind children to perform, as they have the most beautiful voices....Look out in mid-February on our Facebook page for a recording of these songs!

Wishing you all a most Happy and Peaceful 2016!

All photographs were taken with the full permission and knowledge of our students! We have avoided using names for the sake of their privacy.

Using Braille to learn our school lessons

A Mohori lesson

Representing Cambodia at the THAI ASEAN festival

Making things from play dough during fun time

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Oct 27, 2015
Singing all the way from Cambodia to Thailand

By Catherine Louise Geach | Founder

In the garden

Background

We have a lot of news to fill in these last three months.

Perhaps the most beautiful story is that of Tai who has been blind since early childhood and is part of a group of blind children who firstly came to study Mohori music at our school and who now live at our school as their permanent shelter.

Tai aged 15 has a wonderful singing voice and is also a talented musician. He comes from a remote village in Kampot. As with so many blind people in Cambodia, he had no chance of any kind of education or training in his birthplace, because there simply are not enough Braille teachers in Cambodia and none ever come to such isolated places as Tais' and of most rural Cambodians. Blind people are left to struggle alone, often ending up as beggars or living appalling lives. Some are regarded with shame by their families and hidden from sight. The Cambodian Ministry of Culture invited our school to participate in the ASEAN Conference "Art for All" in Thailand. Together with our Pin Peat music master and a representative from the Ministry, Thai went to Thailand and performed Mohori music and joined in the workshops for people from all over Southeast Asia. This was a very special moment, not only for our school, but for Tai and for the rights and recognition of blind people in Cambodia and everywhere.

Our school has had to develop and adjust in order to help this group of blind students. We wanted them to be near their families and avoid them being sent to an institution or NGO in another province, not because the NGO's are not good, for they are excellent, but because the children very much need frequent contact with their families and to remain in a place that is familiar to them. We now have a special housemother to care for their needs, who works in coordination with the rest of our staff and Braille teachers.

It has been truly beautiful to see our blind children so happy and to see our sighted children who already live at the school, take care of them and lead them by the hand around the school. Their presence enriches our lives and helps us to remember those who are hidden and forgotten by society.

Partnering to help the disabled

In these last two months we have also been partnering with Epic Arts in Kampot. They specialise in contemporary dance for disabled people, to promote their different abilities and to raise awareness and tolerance in Cambodia. They also wanted to do a traditional arts program for both disabled and non-disabled young people, but having no teacher specialists in this area, asked us to assist. We now teach their students at our school both traditional Mohori and Pin Peat music. We are very happy to be able to partner and to reach out to as many young people as possible.

Shadow Puppet Theatre Première

Do read on our Facebook page about our Shadow Puppet theatre program....we are doing our second workshop, this time about the art of performing shadow puppets, learning how to move the puppets, interpret voices and musical interludes as well as lighting techniques to create eery shadows. Find out when our première performance is on our Facebook page.

Thank you for your generous help

On behalf of all our staff and children at our school, we thank you for your belief in our work and your constant support and generosity. Please help our project for blind children, as well as all those children who receive free arts training and scholarships, to continue benefiting from our school programs. Thank You!

A Mohori ensemble

A music lesson

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