Phare Ponleu Selpak Nov 8 - Dec 8

For one month I have been at Phare Ponleu Selpak which is in Battambang, northwest Cambodia.

Phare Ponleu Selpak is a school and art center for disadvantaged children. 'Ponleu' means light and 'selpak' art. It was started in 1994 by eight former refugees who survived the Khmer Rouge as small children and thereafter grew up in a refugee camp on the Thai side of the border. They lived in the camp from 1979 until 1993 when it was finally considered safe to return to Cambodia. In the camp they had met a French woman who taught them art and gave them the chance to express and work through their difficult experiences. Now they wanted to give other children the opportunity to express themselves and overcome the trauma of prolonged war. They based their center outside Battambang town, in a village where many poor live without land and without means.

Today Phare is not only a visual art center but also a music school as well as a circus school. The compound includes a public school -- from primary through high school -- for the disadvantaged kids living at Phare as well as children from the neighborhood community.

The children and youth at Phare come from a variety of backgrounds: extreme poverty, where the family simply can't feed them; domestic violence and abuse, a major issue in poverty-stricken Cambodia; children living on the streets with or without parents; and trafficking, where the children have been sold by their parents to Thailand to work as beggars, domestic slaves or in brothels.

One youngster told me one evening how he used to live in Bangkok (how come?, I asked, not thinking). He had been sent there as a child and had been forced to beg on the streets from 4pm until 4am. If he did not return with a certain amount of money he would get beaten. When he was 10 he was picked up by police, put in jail and then sent back to Cambodia, and eventually came to Phare. He is now 19, a talented and promising visual artist.

The trafficked children are occasionally caught by Thai police, or some finally have the gumption to walk into a police station, and they are then sent back to the Cambodian border where Unicef or another rescue organization takes care of the kids and places them at, for example, Phare. These children live at Phare. Others live in the surrounding community with their families but get fed at Phare, and some others just come for school. All who want to take part are welcome and all study for free.