Refugee Camps in Thailand to 1994

The children have been shoved around from pillar to post from a very early age. It is impossible to know how many times they were forced to leave their homes in Cambodia before reaching their first home, (if you can call it a home) inside Site B Refugee Camp in Thailand. There they were handed over to an orphanage inside the camp after their families had either died from starvation or disease. In some cases the parents deserted their children before leaving the camp to look for better living conditions.

After the repatriation from Thai camps back in Cambodia for the Khmers to take part in the UN sponsored elections in 1993, the children were again trucked to their second location in Ampil, a small poor village in the province of Oddar Meancheay. Here, conditions were almost as bad as the camps and there were no schools in the area. This is where Geraldine first heard about their plight.

It was here, in the village of Ampil, that one of our teenage boys was brutally murdered in front of his brother by Khmer Rouge soldiers. This violence and proximity to the fighting meant we had to move them to their third location outside the large town of Battambang.

Destroying Unexploded Ordnance on the orphanage grounds.

But, once again the fighting was too close and they were finally taken to Phnom Penh in Red Cross buses to a former military barracks, their fifth location 13ks from the capital outside a village called Khmoun. The roads to reach the orphanage had to be traveled on, to believe how bad they were. You definitely needed to wear a sports bra for this trip! In the rainy season the road the children had to walk to get to the village school was muddy halfway up their thighs and contained pig droppings and leeches. Some walk to school! Geraldine had to pick off leeches on more than one occasion when forced to travel in or out of the orphanage this way.

Land mines were also a worry and two exploded just 10 metres from the orphanage gate at the side of the road in 1999. In 1998 an Australian demining company, Minelab, was called in to check (at their own cost) the 6 hectares of land we were on and they detonated 50 UXO's inside the land we walked on every day. Scary stuff. After that, we were relatively settled until 2001.

January 2001 to mid 2002

In January 2001 the owners of the land asked us to move, as they had plans for another project on the site. We left unhappily to our sixth location in Ta Khmao, a small town 12kms outside of Phnom Penh.

Children hard at work in the Sunrise computer school.

The school was too far away for the children to walk and we had to hire local remorques (motorbike driven wooden carts) for the children to get to and from school. These remorques were extremely dangerous and thankfully a new Toyota Minibus was donated. Courtesy of the Westlakes Rotary Club of South Australia.

The small villa had 8 rooms, which we organized into 3 dormitories for the boys and 2 for the girls, 1 room for the computer school and 1 other for the music and dance classes. The last room housed Geraldine or whoever was there at the time.

There were only 2 toilets in the house and nowhere near enough to hygienically cater to over 70 people on some days. So we built another 3 toilets to make the situation bearable. But when we first moved in we had no power or water for 10 days and the river nearby was too dirty for us to bathe in. We were really reeking by the time everything came on!

Everything was concrete with no grassy areas for the children to play. Although we had a small range of playground equipment, the conditions made the children very restless being so confined and brought with it the expected discipline problems that come with this kind of cramped environment.

Below is a series of photos showing a typical day at our former home.

Clothing space comes at a premium at Sunrise.	Hammocks replaced mattresses giving the children more room and dry bedding during the occasional room floodings.
Our cooks prepare another great meal for a hungry crowd.	Children and staff eat 3 times a day. The meals are far healthier and more frequent than those the children had before coming to Sunrise.
Sacks of rice.	A large washing-up pile is inevitable when feeding a hungry crowd.
Some of the children enjoying the new play equipment in the all too cramped concrete grounds.	Donations from generous Sunrise supporters.
Washing day for some of the children.	Water for cleaning up after meals.