Music Training Therapy Blind Youth Cambodia

Dear Kind Donors,

We Thank you all for your great kindness in supporting and helping our School and in particular our Blind Students.

In this period, we celebrate Khmer New Year and we would like to share with you all many Blessings and Good Wishes.

On the 17th April 2025, we also remembered the 50 years since the Fall of Phnom Penh to the Khmer Rouge and the terrible years of darkness and horror that ensued.

Why do I write of this in our Report? Because everything is inter-connected and is as a thread that weaves everything together. On that fateful day 50 years ago, when Cambodia was already brought to its knees by five years of civil war between Khmer Rouge guerillas and government forces under Lon Nol and the secret mass-bombings of Cambodia by US forces during the spill-over from the Vietnam-American war, the Khmer Rouge won the offensive and took the Capital Phnom Penh.

In three days, the Khmer Rouge led by Pol Pot,  forced a mass exodus from the city, those who were sick or dying, those who resisted were shot. Government soldiers promised armistice were killed enmass, civil servants and Buddhist Monks were executed in the Old Olympic Stadium and in other designated areas.

The entire Population of Phnom Penh, around two million people,  went by foot with little food, many dying on the way. Other cities and towns were also emptied. The people of Cambodia were then forced to live in labour camps and concentration camps, or in malaria-infested jungle, without enough food and no medication. All personal belongings were conficasted. Hospitals, schools,Temples, banks, bridges, even currency, were destroyed. The Year Zero had begun. Anyone with an education, doctors, engineers, teachers, civil servants, even those who wore glasses and Artists, were identified, tortured and exectuted in mass killing-fields, along with them their families. In the beginning, the Khmer Rouge would hold "meetings" where they said they needed such people to build the "new" Cambodia.. People trustingly held up their hand. Only those who had perhaps been warned by others in time, or who listened to their instinct survived. Others, if they had gone back to their relative's rural villages, were betrayed by those who knew their profession. Many younger men were also rounded-up and killed, so that only the elderly, some women and Children survived. So harsh were the conditions, that women stopped have their menstrual cycle.

At the end of the three years of Khmer Rouge rule which ended when Vietnam invaded in January 1979, after Khmer Rouge had massacred Vietnamese on the border, over one third of the Population of Cambodia had died from starvation, disease and execution. Ninety-percent of the inhabitants of Phnom Penh were never to return and when I first came to Cambodia, many appartments were still empty, their shutters banging in the wind. Also, ninety-percent of Artists also perished. Since Cambodia has a thousand-year tradition of passing down Teaching from Master to pupil using memory, with nothing written down, this loss was catastrophic.

In the early days, with only seven great Music Masters left alive and five great Dance Teachers, with little food and no access to proper medical care, those who survived pieced together the Beautiful Music, Dance, Theatre of Cambodia with only their Will and their Memories.

It is in their Honour that I dedicate this Report.

One of those lesser known Mohori Music Masters is our dear Loak Kru Samouen at our School, who has with utmost dedication and humility given his knowledge to the next generation of Cambodians, including our Blind Students.

Recently our Blind Students under the guidance of Loak Kru Samoeun performed their Mohori Music  at three local Pagodas. Afterwards, they expressed to me that moment of Awakening they had, when they realized that they were Ambassadors who would protect and carry forth Loak Kru Samouen's Teaching of ancient Mohori Music on to the next generations of Cambodians. That they too would become Teachers and Guardians of this Music.

Following a centuries-old tradiition, we recently did a Suprech Kru Ceremony - a Ceremony to Honour and express Gratitude to our Teacher, Loak Kru Samouen. The photographs that go with this report show a part of this Ceremony.

We Thank you all for helping the Khmer Soul - Bulung Khmie, to flourish through our Blind Students, by supporting them in their studies and personal growth, as well as their day to day care.

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Links:

• Official website
• Official Facebook