'Saving' children in Asia

The other day, I watched a boy, maybe three years old, standing barefoot in the middle of a major intersection in Phnom Penh. He kicked around a small, blue plastic bag as his sister, holding an infant, begged tuk tuk passengers for change.

Childhood is a luxury afforded only to some. Me, for example. Last week, I spent my first day at “Save Children in Asia Organization,” a tall order for a one-room orphanage about 20 minutes outside the Phnom Penh city center. A German man at an Internet café had told me about the place and encouraged me to volunteer. I envisioned a respite where children’s youths are preserved from the horrors of living without a mother in a Third World country.

The day began when I hired a motodup to take me out of town. The driver, who looked like the Cambodian Morgan Freeman, spoke no English whatsoever, and responded to my instructions with a bellowing, nervous laugh. Since my Khmer vocabulary includes the words for yes, no, left, right, and thank you, jointly navigating our way to the tiny orphanage on a hidden path off a no-name dirt road required stopping to ask for directions at nearly every intersection.

When we finally pulled up, a herd of children ran over and began grabbing at my hands and introducing themselves. Ma, Ly, Svay Lin, and about a dozen others. They must be incredibly used to scrungy-looking barangs people dropping by, looking for a good story to tell friends back home, I thought. Or else, they’re starved for adult interaction. I decided it was probably some combination of the two.

Two other white people sat on benches inside the one-room schoolhouse. Walker, a short, 20-something American guy with a lisp (who, back in Phnom Penh later that night, I saw fly past me on the back of a pickup truck, horsing around with a bunch of drunken friends). And Chris, a 50ish Englishman with brown teeth and weathered skin. The only other adult there was Sambeth, the orphanage’s founder, a wiry Cambodian with a wide smile and perfect teeth. He explained the organization’s history to me. He collected homeless children from various provinces during the past three years and officially opened the facility’s doors in April. He offered me a large plate of rice with a bowl of broth filled with leafy greens and animal bones.

Soon, neighborhood children arrived to participate in the afternoon class, about 30 kids who would return home to their mother and father afterward, leaving the remaining dozen behind. After the adults and children finished eating, class began. Walker, a TESOL-certified instructor, taught with the school’s main teacher—a 16-year-old Cambodian girl. Chris wrote on the dry erase board. I observed.

Walker struggled to teach pronunciation. “One, two, three, four, five, thix, theven, eight,” he said. The children repeated. When it came time to practice months of the year, Chris misspelled February. Twice.

The class exhibited why Cambodia’s president, Hun Sen, criticized NGO work in his marathon four-and-a-half hour speech last week. It seems that with foreigners trying their best to make a difference here, earnestness comes first, competence second. As a journalist who hopes to write about a country she entered two weeks ago, I am conscience of the problem every day.