I went to Phnom Penh for a couple of days in May. This trip, I went with my older son, Binh, and we stayed at the RiverKids house, camping out on mats in the main room upstairs. I caved and got a foam mattress after the first night of trying to squish myself flat.

RiverKids House

PIX Street lighting is erratic at best in Phnom Penh, and we went up and down several small lanes, squinting in the dusk at the little name plates outside the gates until we found a red gate with “#4” on it.

The house is huge. We were in such a tiny little place and to move to here is just amazing. We’re right round the corner from the Genocide Museum, about ten minutes from the Russian market, so it’s a good location for getting to other places, but at the same time it’s a relatively quiet working neighbourhood - there’s a fruit wholesaler and something involving welding, plus a church next to us.

The kids can run around and play and inside the house, there’s a big hall for meals, three rooms for classes and big kitchen space and bathrooms and just - it’s fantastic, like it was made for us.
The house is mostly concrete downstairs, painted pale cream with pink stripes (not as loud as it sounds - it’s all surprisingly subduded for a Cambodian house), with dark wood upstairs.

The big courtyard is where the kids run around and play. There are two benches and a table and bench in the shade to sit under. The kids aren’t supposed to climb the trees, so instead they devise new ways to knock the fruit off - wobbling sticks tied together, shoes flung up or just shaking it like crazy.

Then there’s the shallow front porch which leads into the big hallway where lunch is eaten. Toothbrushes and cups in a rack down the end. A small open room for one classroom, another room with a bathroom for the other class.

The indoor kitchen for some of the cooking (and probably the giant water filters) and then the long backyard kitchen, newly roofed by the landlord, for the big charcoal burners, with a tap for the washing up and another bathroom. The other side - a small room for the girls’ naps, and the toys. Another room, also with another bathroom, for the housemother.

Up the stairs - no kids allowed! - to the big wooden hall with the meeting table and the guest chairs and coffee table. Deep balcony. Lyna’s apartment, the big long room with another bathroom. Another bathroom for the office, next to the kitchen. A little snug counselling room, and the office itself. A long balcony. Another set of stairs to the roof - uncovered now, just a terrace, for laundry and later we’ll see about roofing it or fencing it for something.

PIX Lyna’s dog and kitten. The dog did not like me very much, but adores all the children.

Updates on children
The little girl who went for brain surgery is now wearing a bright pink hat. Her hair’s been cut short and she has a long scar on her head, but her smile is even bigger. Her next surgery is in November.

The little girl who is our first weekly boarder, stays with her uncle as her parents have left the city for the nearby province to work. The uncle is a motodop (motorbike driver - like a taxi service) and where he lives and works is pretty far from the school and RiverKids house.

PIX The driver’s little daughter started kindergarten for the first time, along with the other two weekly boarders her age.

We worked out how much a second group of fifty children would be. Logistically possible, financially not yet. Time is running short as by July, those kids will be struggling to catch up for school in September, but we can’t commit without the funding.

Running around
The next morning, Lyna and I had a meeting with Phy Sophon, our new project director. My son’s older sister arrived and he went off with her for a bit, then hitched a ride in the truck to collect the children from school and bring them to the house for lunch and elssons.

Controlled chaos this time - running in and out, but then splitting up, some to arrange the tables and chairs for lunch, some to help dish out good, everyone to get a shower and change clothes, then after lunch - they’ve been split into three groups for chore duties - cleaning up, playing, brushing teeth. The teachers arrived and lessons started.

Chab Dai, the christian anti-trafficking coalition, has a fantastic library and there’s a report on domestic trafficking of ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia coming out soon. Next trip, I forsee a lot of photocopying!

Traditional toys and games work best
I was able to visit the small orphanage where the trafficked baby was taken by the police (April trip). The baby has gained weight and looks healthy and lovely, animated and sweet with tiny elf ears. She has one main caretaker, and the orphanage itself was like a big house with lots of aunts. The kids had good reactions - not affectionate to visitors but polite, casual affection among them and to their caretakers and lots of co-operative playing. They’re also looking for toys, and as they have a lot of children younger than our school-age kids, we’ll be able to give them all the baby toys from our Toy Drive.

Shopping!
Went to the markets to cross off a long long shopping list. What was fantastic was having our kids’ older sister pitch in with bargaining, then a friend who’s lived there a while came to help and - I’m a hopeless shopper in that I will just pay sticker. They were haggling and walking away and pitching back in and it was hot sweaty work but wooh. We got almost everything on the list, ended up back at the stationary store where in December we bought all those first grade stationary kits and was remembered! Came back to show my purchases to Lyna’s eagle eye and I hadn’t been too badly ripped off, which was a relief.

We bought furniture for the counselling room and the very next day, it was in use. It’s a great room - small and quiet and informal.
Lyna bought fans and lights for the house, sorely needed. The wooden walls upstairs makes it stifling hot and the fans the landlord had left pretty much re-arranged the dust only. I was overruled on fluerescent tubes which are apparently preferred to the standard lightbulbs, but I have to admit it was nice to see what you were working on, however romantic the dusky lighting had been.

Stocked up on stationary and files - every kid has their own file, and every family has a file, and now we have paperwork for things from medical visits (needed that the same day - boys chasing each other on a just-mopped floor, one fell and cut his forehead and needed two stitches, poor little man. Might stop them from turning the bathroom into a slip n’ slide every time…. for oh, a week.) to counselling sessions to purchase forms and attendence forms.
Another friend donated three huge water filters that were delivered the day after I left. With three of them, we won’t need to buy filtered water every month!
Reaching the lost kids
We went over the children absent from afterschool class or having known problems. One was withdrawn to work as a shoe shine boy and is in a bad way. Another two are still attending state school, but there are abuse issues. Four of them were about to be evicted, and probably have been, from Bassac, another four had already been evicted and were on the street.
Bassac is a hot situation politically as there were journalists covering it and different political parties intervening. Basically, a lot of poor families living near the river, mostly in rented slums, were evicted with very little compensation. I have no idea how legal or whatever it was, although it was interesting to see so many different statistics and descriptions of Bassac.
Sophoun and MY when to Bassac to look for the families with the missing kids. They managed to contact most of them and ask them down. The next day, none of them showed up, so another trip had to be made to ask them and finally they did. The relocation has hit them hard - two were already homeless, and the rest were going to either move to the new place or look around for somewhere. They were all hesitant about boarding their children which is probably a good sign, in that they don’t want to have to live apart.
One family on the streets decided to try, and their older daughter and two older boys (in kindergarten) came over with a change of clothes that evening.
Weekly boarding is only for the most vulnerable children. Those who otherwise would have to miss school or be exposed to abuse. We put the boarding fees below-cost for the week and very high for the weekend so that families will have to take their children home on weekends, in order to keep the family emotionally close to their children.

PIX Laundry line of school uniforms and changes of clothes

Of course, having those kids come in meant we had to scramble for staff. Fortunately, the church next door had two people, one who came with a personal recommendation from someone I knew, and we had a housekeeper and a housemother in record time.

The weekly boarders stay when the other kids go home. They play for a while, do their homework and get ready for bed. In the mornings, the little ones for kindergarten go by tuk-tuk to the kindercare center nearby.

What do we do?
A big thing we settled is that RiverKids is not for poor kids or sick kids or even abused kids - it’s for kids who are at risk of being trafficked. That means a loved child from a single-parent poverty-stricken family in a known trafficking community, a child who has been sold as a domestic servant already (brothel-trafficked children need specialized care that we can’t provide and other NGOs are doing really well already), a child from a working class family where a sibling has already been sold.

PIX Working together starts young

Trafficking feeds the child labour and child sex industries. It has multiple causes and like a hydra, you have to fight all of them at the same time. But much of  it starts when a family sells a child. We’re now trying to sort out which families are abusive and which ones are vulnerable because the families need different approaches then. With an abusive family, you try to protect the child, make it clear they’re being monitored and offer counselling help. With an intact family struggling, you can push for long term change and help them improve their situation.

I wrote up a lot of forms and they are being translated into Vietnamese and Khmer for use. One set of forms was for registering children, for the project and then for weekly boarding if needed. I drew up a ‘parent contract’ - legally meaningless, but psychologically, we hope it will carry some weight. Things like ‘I will not sell my child, I will help my child with homework’. The weekly boarder families were the first to sign, along with the rest of the forms.

Managing growth and staff
We switched some staff duties around and adjusted salaries. A big part has been working out what’s fair for Phnom Penh cost of living and expected salaries. For instance, lunch is two hours and that seems pretty universal - people go home for meals from the office, wheras in Singapore, that would just be an hour at a nearby food court. What we’re trying to aim for is fair wages, fair hours - but really hard work during that time and all focussed on the kids and the families.

I had an interesting breakfast meeting with a person who works on management issues for a large NGO there, and it was almost scary to hear the problems we’re facing as common and answerable. When we’re in them, they seem so personal and unique, but they are such ordinary growing organisation problems. Some of the advice we could implement straight away, some of it will take longer.

PIX The kids nicked the camera and took shots one evening

A lot of our issues right now over who, ultimately, is in charge. The pat answer is “the clients”, as in the kids and families, but even that’s not right (and not useful, either). We’re trying to stop child trafficking at the individual and family level through support and intervention. Who’s keeping an eye on the big picture? Who’s in charge of what? Who, when staff disagree, gets the final vote?

So, we sorted out individual role responsibilities - I’m in charge of fundraising and public relations. Lyna is in chrage of finances and NGO relations. Phy Sophon is in charge of operations. The three of us then report to the board of directors, and we worked out the level at which we would need board approval and decisions. It’s really, really important that RiverKids not be a one-man/woman show. It should exist of itself and be rooted in the local community. That stops Kurtz-esque leanings, but then you have to worry about picking the right people.

Changes to the organisation
We learnt a lot more from some other NGO people about the registration process, and it seems to boil down to getting registered in Singapore first, with the rest looking straightforward. We will probably not be tax-deductible, but with a trust or society registration, we should be able to apply for the registry of charities as an anti-child trafficking NGO. So now I’m talking to the lawyer about setting up a trust, and also to some people who I hope will be on the board of directors. We need three directors to read the monthly reports and once a year, oversee our financials and so on. I really want them to be people who know Cambodia, but at the same time, aren’t involved in the daily RiverKids stuff, so they have some distance.

Really sad and glad news is that three of our staff are moving on in June. Two of them got scholarships for a bible college, something very important to them, and another has been rehired by her previous emplyer and won’t be able to make the hours with us. Two are teachers, one is our social worker, so we’re scrambling to interview and replace them in time.

Soon, we’ll need to get broadband put in. It costs about the same as installing a regular phone line and will work out, monthly fees and all, about the same given Skype as an option.

Last evening was going over receipts and invoices and paying for everything. We agreed - and I’ve just found out we can by the skin of our teeth - to put a nearly-one-month buffer in for May/June. At the moment Lyna or I am dipping into our own money for immediate charges and then getting paid back later, which is alright for small things but now we have much more regular costs, not necessary or practical.

On the way to the airport, we stopped at a traffic light and heard something familiar - children singing at the top of their voices. We turned around and there was the truck! Heading back to drop the kids off home. The children spotted us and waved as much as they could through the mesh (otherwise they’d have been dancing on the truck roof) and Binh bellowed goodbye as loud as he could until we went down the airport road.

Last of all
From a letter during the trip:

PIX One neat image to leave you with: It’s hot, I’ve been writing forms and doing spreadsheets and then I walk out to the balcony to hear what the fuss is. Two girls are dispatched to sweep up the leaves knocked down by throwing their slippers at the mango tree to get some fruit, while another nine girls take turns at an elastic band skipping rope, giggling and calling to each other. The oldest is maybe fourteen, the youngest is about eight. They’re all pretty and perfectly traffickable and they’re safe.

Thank you
to all the donors and supporters who give these kids a chance

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