In the South West of Cambodia, there is a seaside city with beaches, fishermen’s villages and… lots of casinos that have emerged in the past few years. Indeed, the ideal location and the growing potential of Sihanoukville have attracted a lot of chinese investors whose aim is to make Sihanoukville the new Macau. In this way, these investors have exploited all the potential of the city, building casinos and luxury hotels. Although they created jobs for local people, the managing positions remained in the hands of the Chinese businessmen who moved in Sihanoukville. These changes had a significant impact on people’s lives, the atmosphere of the city and therefore on the children’s everyday life. More than ever, the summer program is essential for the children of the city who not only need to be taken out of misery but also to have the opportunity to enjoy their childhood for a few hours everyday.
In a city where so many jobs have been created so quickly, most of the people found one and now earn some money that should allow them to eat and live decently. Yet, following the classic supply and demand law, the prices have increased a lot and Sihanoukville has become more and more expensive to live. The prices got adapted to the Chinese population and if almost all the Cambodian families now get a salary, they still don’t earn enough to live in good conditions. Two phenomena are happening in Sihanoukville: families are leaving the city because it’s becoming too expensive for them; others are coming for a few years to make money and then move somewhere else to live more comfortably.
The large leaves of palm trees pretend to protect a bit the monitors from the continuous rain.
In the middle of all of that, children are almost forgotten by everyone. The luckiest go to school half of the day and then often work during the other half. In Sihanouk central, the monitors welcome these kids the whole day long in August so they can be kids for a month, and play like it should always be.
Behind the typical blue portal of PSE, the Welcome Center of Sihanoukville is a set of traditional houses in the middle of a small green park where the large leaves of palm trees pretend to protect a bit the monitors from the continuous rain. Indeed, Sihanoukville is also known to be particularly humid during the monsoon season and this summer, after having spent an entire week under an unstoppable rain, the monitors are no longer singing “Beach day everyday, beach day everyday!” – which yet was an ironic shout in a first place, but “Rain day everyday, rain day everyday!”.
This particularly rainy weather doesn’t make things easy for the monitors, especially knowing that the indoor spaces are not big enough to properly welcome the about two hundred kids coming everyday, so that the monitors have to try setting up most of the activities outside. To do so, all the monitors can count on Rotha, the Khmer coordinator who is currently in Sihanoukville for the 6th time. She knows the place, the kids, the weather and the city better than anyone else and comes to give her very best to the children every summer: “I love Sihanoukville and I feel like here the kids really need me and they need everyone to come here to give them education. So Sihanoukville will always be my first choice. I made it a point to come here every year, because I can check after the kids”.
“Here in Sihanoukville are the poorest kids I have ever seen in Cambodia”, Bea.
The children coming to Sihanoukville Central are organized in two groups, the morning and the afternoon one. Indeed, if a few years ago public schools were closing on the 31st of July (as PSE School still does) for the summer break, they now close on the 31st of August and as there is no PSE School in Sihanoukville – only families which are helped by PSE to send their children to public schools so they can get education, almost all the children attend school half of the day even during the Summer Program. A few of them come walking everyday to the center, however most of them take PSE’s bus that come and pick them in the villages they live in. Every single time a bus leaves PSE to pick up or bring back the children, there’s a monitor in it, going with a member of the Social Team. That definitely participates a lot in creating a special relationship between the kids and their monitors as the latter know exactly where the kids come from, in which conditions they live in.
According to Maxime, European monitor for the 2nd time, “I feel like these kids are even more neglected and abandoned, they live in terrible conditions as on this muddy road along the railway”. An observation, Bea, the European coordinator of the program agrees with: “Here in Sihanoukville are the poorest kids I have ever seen in Cambodia”. The children can be tough to deal with as they grow up in extremely poor environments, where older people don’t pay attention to them and the main model they can find in town nowadays are the Chinese people involved in gambling, or any other troubled environment.
With the emotional intelligence project implemented this summer, it gave the opportunity to the kids to talk about what their dreams and their doubts, to organize workshops about respect, how to live in community. “These kids are more violent and aggressive, so we try to spend a lot of time talking with them and doing workshops about violence, respect, relationships and education” explains Bea, and Rotha confirms “Here we have to start from the beginning, to teach them ‘thank you’, ‘sorry’, ‘chuchua’, ‘goodbye’, ‘hello’. Because they forget things, they don’t want to be bad kids but with the environment they grow up in they cannot be really good kids”. The sweet and super organized Bea, combined to the tough but loving Rotha, with the help of their highly cohesive team, are making miracles in educating and entertaining children.
Here, Khmer and European monitors are continuously inspiring and teaching each others.
From 3 to more or less 17 years old, all of the children participate the same way to the activities and workshop that both Khmer and European monitors imagine for them. Indeed, they not only work hand in hand as in any other project, they also live together, which helps building trust and strong friendships. Every night, they cook together their dinner – that they choose ahead so the logistic can go and buy everything they need to the market, and the Spanish monitors make the Khmer ones try the tortilla de patatas for example: here, Khmer and European monitors are continuously inspiring and teaching each others and form one big tight team. And it is even more obvious when it starts raining, all of them are just forgetting about the extra difficulty it brings and as said Bea, very proud of her monitors, “they just continue to smile, to play, to teach and to give love to the kids”.
This very special cohesion the monitors created allows them to cohabit for a month of course, but also to make things bigger with the kids. When the weather gets better, the proximity of both Central Sihanoukville and the Paillote of Sihanoukville with the beach gets fully exploited and they enjoy it as much as they can, allowing this way the kids to swim and play in the sea which they barely do in their daily life. Usually the two projects are not going at the same time to the beach because it requires a very tight and complicated logistic to set up. However, starting from the third week, with the help of Laura, the supervisor of both Siem Reap and Sihanoukville projects, the cohesion between monitors and their experience, they can bring to the beach a bit less than three hundred children at the same time.
250 kilometers far from Phnom Penh, (…) is beating a part of PSE’s heart.
About 250 kilometers far from PSE Central in Phnom Penh, Sihanoukville Central reminds us why PSE has been created: to provide education and take children out of miserables life conditions. It also reminds us why the Summer Program is working so well for more than 15 years: Khmer and European monitors’ curiosity about each other and their willingness to work together to imagine a better life for the children. 250 kilometers far from Phnom Penh, hidden behind a big blue portal, is beating a part of PSE’s heart.
PSE would like to thank KPMG for their economic support to this project.
