Preah Vihear: meeting SreyMoch and her friends aux Enfants du Mékong

As we were planning this trip, we were looking for an opportunity to get active in a community as a family. Given the age of the kids, especially the twins, we did not find any such opportunities, especially not over the period of time we were looking for (max a month) – it’s either a full on engagement or just an afternoon here and there to socialise and interact, which is fully understandable, after all social organisations are not entertainment complexes for visitors. Instead we decided to find an organisation which we could support financially and then go visit in person. A friend spoke to us about “Les Enfants du Mékong” in Southeast Asia and after reviewing their work, we decided to sponsor a child in Cambodia. Just upon our departure we received her name and profile: SreyMoch is 12 years old, an excellent and hardworking student and just entered the EdM centre in Preah Vihear where they take children in from age 12 until the end of school. She is the second oldest in a family of 4 children, the only girl, and her family – rice farmers who live about 1h30 drive outside of Preah Vihear – agreed to send SreyMoch to the centre so that she could get access to a good education and as such support her family later on. This might seem like an obvious choice from our viewpoint, but for a family like them, living in the conditions they do, it is quite a short term sacrifice to send away their only daughter who is a key pillar in helping out with the smaller children and house chores. Families who agree to this not only have to commit to this program for all the remaining school years (i.e. 6, in the case of SreyMoch), but they will only see their child once or twice a year unless they live closely enough and have the means to go visit the centre.

Preah Vihear is a dusty, no charm, but busy town ca. 3 hours drive from Siam Reap. We await the van at 8am at the agreed meeting point – he finally shows up at 8h40am. After a quick lunch of stir fried veggies and soup at the popular local snack we go to meet SreyMoch whom we only know, so far, from the profile picture the organisation sent us. We had sent her a couple of postcards from our trip to introduce ourselves but it turns out EdM had an admin glitch and that she hadn’t yet received any. Which means that she really had no clue what to expect, all the more since she herself only arrived in the centre a few months earlier and everything was still quite new to her. After the first shy hellos between all of us, the kids quickly connect, despite the language barriers and, as SreyMoch shows us around the centre – the study rooms, the dormitory which she shares with 12 other girls, the other children start spilling in after school. They are excited to have visitors and so, within minutes, everyone is off and about, playing, and chatting. Paul and Laetitia, the French employees sent here for a year to be in charge of the administration of the centre, are very warm hosts and we enjoy hearing about their days, the challenges and the rewards. We are amazed (if not even a bit shocked) to hear about the intense schedule these children have to follow: morning wake up around 5h30. They each receive some money to buy themselves some breakfast on the go, then they have an hour of private tutoring before class. School from 8am until 4pm, then they come back to the centre and have 2-3 more hours of extra tutoring. Dinner, wash up duties, studying and off to bed, usually around 10pm. That is A LOT of studying for children, no matter what age. But the children here are so motivated, so happy and grateful to be given the opportunity to access more career and life choices that they give it all – in fact, Paul and Laetitia need to reprimand them for continuing to study under their sheets after bedtime. One can probably argue whether this is really an efficient or effective system, but beyond that, what really bugs us, is how deeply engrained corruption is here that even organisations like EdM choose to get on with it rather than fight one more battle on a front that feels unwinnable. It turns out that the teachers at school deliberately only teach 60-70% of the curriculum. They then offer private tutoring outside of school to get access to the missing 30-40%. Needless to say, your chances of passing the exam, let alone getting a good grade are quasi nil if you did not get this extra tutoring. Thus, EdM made a “group deal” with the teachers from school, who come to the centre and teach xx number of hours a day here. It is hard for us to accept that part of our financial aid goes towards contributing to nourish a messed up system. Seeing all the happy, smiling children, giggling with them over dinner and enjoying their warmest of welcomes, we cannot but conclude that this is a comparatively small price to pay for the evident joy.

We head off to our hotel after dinner with the girls from SreyMoch’s dorm and pick her up in the morning to go shopping for her family whom we are going to visit. We buy some essentials like rice, oil, sleeping mats and a new t-shirt for her mother. We then drive the 90min to her family’s home in the deep countryside. Her parents are farmers. Besides the land their house is built on, they do not any more land and they offer up their services for 5USD/day in the rice fields, with all the uncertainties that that brings, i.e. they never really know much in advance whether they will have work or not. Their house is built on stilts, like most places here, protecting the upstairs sleeping area and kitchen from the violent monsoon rains in season. Downstairs, chickens roam freely and we have a seat on the logs which they are collecting to be able to built a small extension to their house. SreyMoch’s family is clearly very moved to see their daughter, but, be it reticence to show emotions in front of strangers or simply their culture, there is no show of physical affection, hugging or the like. There are pictures of SreyMoch’s school diplomas showing her great grades proudly tacked to the walls. A few dozen bags of rice are piled high on the ground, the stock to get through the year. We are happy that we got a glimpse of SreyMoch’s home life before/outside of the centre and to meet her parents. Thereafter it is time for us bid farewell, drop SreyMoch back off at the centre and take on the drive back to Siam Reap. The next morning we are due to take our flight to Mandalay, Myanmar. The children part with warm farewells; in even less than 24h, strong bonds have been formed.

As I write this now, the impact of COVID-19 is fully hitting Southeast Asia, school closures and Laetitia and Paul “evacuated” to Bangkok, we wonder what is happening with the children. We imagine that everyone has been sent back with their families as far as possible. How many of them will still have the commitment of their families to return? We complain or – best case – joke about the madness of the lockdown, but the impact on these, less fortunate communities will be much more far reaching than most of us imagine today, I fear, with the work of NGOs thrown back months, if not years. I applaud all those that will return with enthusiasm and devotion, to pick up and rebuild the pieces.