“Going into the water, there are crocodiles,

Going up on land, there are tigers”

 Homeless children run away from poverty only to try to survive

the urban Big Brother’s exploitation

by Tum Chita, Kiss Magazine

            When a 13-year old teenage boy called Kea deserted his mother and relatives in Prasith village, north of Phnom Penh, to live in the city as a homeless beggar, he hoped that he would free himself from his rural poverty, but he was absolutely wrong.

            Life as a homeless boy in the city not only does not relieve him of poverty, but also causes him to confront exploitation from big Brothers and use of drugs. Continue reading →

Two Teenage Sisters Recollect Their Lives As Child Servants

By Chea Kimsan and Chin Sopheak

             Under the heat from the sun in a vast paddy field, Reaksmei and her younger sister, Somaly, wearing red and white scarves around their heads and holding sickles in their hands, are harvesting rice, sweating profusely, behind their house in Leak Anloung village, Rolaing Chak commune, Somraong Torng district, Kompong Speu province. But they do not complain about this tiring work if compared to the hard work they used to do during their childhood.

            Sixteen-year-old Reaksmei, whose complexion is as slightly dark yellow as her younger sister, said she and her younger sister had been sent to work as child servants for many years by her mother during which she and her younger sister had also been tortured. Reaksmei said she had 6 brothers and sisters, but she and her younger sister were not lucky to warmly live with their parents, grandparents and other brothers and sisters as her mother sent her and her younger sister to work as child servants successively. Continue reading →

Opinion

Buddhism is the basis of the rule of law

by Moeun Chhean Nariddh

The Phnom Penh Post, Tuesday, 07 October, 2008

s Cambodian people are returning from P’Chum Ben, they might have fulfilled their traditional obligation to appease the ghosts of their ancestors who have been roaming different pagodas in search of food offered by their living relatives during the two-week-long festival.

However, probably very few people apart from the Buddhist monks and lay people have been able to please the gods by fully following the panca-sila, or the Five Precepts, they have repeatedly chanted during the ceremonies. Continue reading →

Comment

Gods go hungry

The Phnom Penh Post, Friday, 27 June 2008

couple of nights ago, I had a nightmare that my house was on fire and everything was burned to ashes. I woke up in the middle of the night and told my wife my strange dream.

Deemed a bad omen for the family, my wife spontaneously warned me not to forget to light three incense sticks and throw away a handful of rice in the morning. As believed by many Cambodians, people think that this practice will get rid of bad luck after a nightmare.

With a lackadaisical belief in superstitions, I told my wife that I was not going to throw away more rice just because of a nightmare anymore. Continue reading →

Dith Pran, survivor of Cambodian horror, faces cancer with serenity

BY JUDY PEET Star-Ledger Staff (New Jersey, USA), Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The world knows him as a powerful voice for the ghosts of the Cambodian Killing Fields, but Dith Pran speaks barely above a whisper now.

The man who survived starvation, torture and Pol Pot’s murderous children’s brigade is now fighting a new war from a hospital bed in New Jersey. This time the enemy is even more relentless: pancreatic cancer.

Friends and family say that if anyone can win this battle, it is Pran, 65, once described as a survivor “in the Darwinian sense,” whose story was the basis for the Academy Award-winning 1984 movie, “The Killing Fields.” Continue reading →

Mud houses give shelter
to Svay Rieng’s poor

By Moeun Chhean Nariddh

            Banteay Kraing, Svay Rieng: In 1936, Pailin’s heart of love was revealed when Cambodian writer Nhok Them published his novel The Rose of Pailin that tells the story of two lovers: Chao Cheth and Khun Neary.

In the then gem-rich town on the Thai border, an impoverished young man, Chao Cheth, was lucky enough to marry Khun Neary, the daughter of a millionaire, despite the fact that they were from different social classes.

Five hundred kilometers away on the Vietnamese border, the residents of Banteay Kraing village say Chao Cheth would not have been so lucky had he been born here. His advances might well have been rejected had he lived in a mud house and wanted to marry a girl from a large wooden house with a tiled roof. Continue reading →

UNDERSTANDING TRAUMA IN CAMBODIA
by Matthias WITZEL
CSD-DED consultant, Psycho-therapist, clinical psychologist

Fear stems from lack of information During our outreach activities and research, we quickly realized that fear is one of the most evident symptoms in Cambodia today, blocking a creative, engaged and healthy life of many people.

Fear is a lack of information (or knowledge, understanding).

In response to fear, the first step is to get control and ownership of one’s own life in or after threatening situations, to get knowledge about the structure and content of the destructive circumstances. The second step is to seek new skills, and/or to reactivate earlier developed skills in order to cope and to reorganize life in a healthy way.

Step one is only a precondition; it does not give enough skills to deal with damaged self esteem, destructive behavior, lack of trust, or lack of ownership according to a self-actualized, creative, robust living.

For example, if family members do not understand that trauma can lead to an outburst of anger, panic or sudden grief (common symptoms) or that traumatized people change their communication pattern, are more suspicious and afraid, and tend to withdraw from society, how can they understand their suffering relatives, how can they appreciate them in their life struggle. Instead, oftentimes, they are labeled as “ch’kuet”, crazy. Continue reading →

In Memory of Chea-Sor Phanachonon

(15 Nov 2006-19 Nov 2007)

Internews staff and IMMF family would like to extend our condolences to journalist Chea Kimsan and his family for the loss of their beloved baby son, Chea-Sor Phanachonon, and a 4-year-old niece, Deth Yariza, to a recent traffic accident in Kompong Cham province, Cambodia. We pray that Phanachonon and Yariza be reborn in a happy world.

Opinion

The Nation, Thailand

Thailand should give migrant labourers a break once in a while

Re: “Illegal Cambodian immigrant miscarries inside cell”, News, November 28.

Published on November 29, 2007

        It’s sad to hear that a fellow Khmer woman miscarried in a Pattaya Police Station detention room after she was arrested along with 21 other Cambodians.

        This might be seen as a tragedy in the civilised world. But such a sad thing is just one of a million miseries found in the resource-rich but impoverished nation of Cambodia. Decades of civil war, genocide, foreign occupation, land grabbing by rich and powerful people, rampant corruption and mismanagement of the country’s resources have left the poorest Cambodians with few options and means to survive.

        Like their Burmese brothers and sisters, many Cambodians have decided to leave the country for Thailand in the hope that they can make some money as a labourer or even a beggar. Continue reading →