This is one of two wells dug by Cambodian Child's Dream Organization with donations from Airline Ambassadors. CCDO supports clean water to poor families by building hand pump water wells at a rate of 8-10 wells monthly. Concentration of water wells in the rural surrounding area of Siem Reap Province, comprising 10 different villages and districts. The placement of the water wells is suggested by the evaluation of CCDO staff, each well providing safe drinking water for one to three families.
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(Dr Daniel Susott, AAI Medical Director)
Airline Ambassadors International was represented at the ribbon-cutting ceremony of the new Bakong Technical College which is an undertaking of Project Enlighten.
Photo shows me with Bill and Jill Morse of the Landmine Museum, and Lisa McCoy and Asad Rahman of Project Enlighten (see more links at the very bottom of this page).
The school is designed to be socially and environmentally responsible, devoted to the development and preservation of rural Cambodia in the field of green design and environmental conservation, along with cultural and ecological tourism. It is located 16km east of the world’s renowned Angkor World Heritage Site in the Bakong District of Siem Reap.
Lisa McCoy has also donated 30 bicycles for the children in Kep at Cambodia World Family's school there, where she will volunteer for 6 weeks in December and January.
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(Dr Daniel Susott, AAI Medical Director)
We spent all day getting to the fabulous cliff-top temples of Preah Vihear, a UNESCO World-Heritage site that the Thais and Cambodians have been fighting over recently...
Now that Cambodian Pime Minister Hun Sen's daughter has built a road up the hill from Cambodia, you can finally access the temples from the Cambodian side. I was the only Westerner there. The views were phenomenal, with Cambodia stretched out below. It was special to be there with By (photo, standing to the right - the woman on the left without the hat is Phirom, an accountant and house mother with the Santhepheap Orphanage or "Children's House of Peace" in Siem Reap), who was one of 30,000 Cambodian refugees trying to escape the Khmer Rouge into Thailand who were forced over these cliffs by Thai troops 30 years ago when they drove the refugees back into Cambodia. More than 10,000 died in the awful melée that ensued. I was just across the border in Thailand working as a young doctor in a refugee camp and remember the terrible stories recounted by desperate Cambodian refugees who had made it across the border.
We met a Lt. Colonel who, as an orphan, joined the miltary at age 17. Now in charge of the Cambodian troops guarding Preah Vihear, he has formed a classical orchestra of young soldiers, having them make music instead of war. When he helped the U.S. Amassador to Cambodia after an accident leaving the temples, they wanted to give him money but he asked for instruments instead.
It added a lot to have the traditional music permeating the setting, perched on the cliffs affected by the beauty of the temples and the view, yet with room to remember the suffering of so many Cambodians at that very spot over 30 years ago...
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(Dr Daniel Susott, AAI Medical Director)
Today, Kmao arrived from the northern Cambodian town of Battambang with his mother and baby sister in tow. As a child he had left home unable to bear the poverty and hardship, and took up with a troupe of military police in Phnom Penh. They were deployed to the beach at Sihanoukville, where their commander brought Kmao to our orphan beach-house and, impressed that we had TV, determined that our house was a more suitable place for this "orphan" than a spartan soldier's camp.
Now college-educated and engaged to be married, Kmao a couple days ago returned to Battambang to find the mother circumstances had forced him to keep secret all these years, and the baby sister he had never met. His mother, a divorced farmer with 5 children, will travel with Kmao to Phnom Penh tomorrow to meet his fiancee and Naly, the orphanage director who adopted Kmao when the beach-house closed down and has lovingly raised him since.
In the blue shirt is Va Morgan, another former beach-house resident, now married with 2 sons and the Director of Bio-Technology at the Angkor Hospital for Children, Siem Reap's best pediatric hospital. The previous director of this hospital was Jon Morgan, a very accomplished nurse from Hawaii who came to Cambodia in the 90's to help me take Cambodia World Family into a leader in adult literacy in Cambodia (work which Airline Ambassadors International will help continue). He now directs The Lake Clinic, a floating health center in the Tonle Sap, Cambodia's huge central lake. Kmao took the opportunity to reconnect with 2 college friends, now lawyers. Sokha Sen, nephew of Chanthy Yi, is shown next to Va, with his wife. Harold and Christy are the other "barang", or foreigners, in the photo.
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(Dr Daniel Susott, AAI Medical Director)
At the newly relocated Nutrition Center (the first orphanage set up by Mme Chan Haran Vaddey after the Khmer Rouge were driven out of Cambodia leaving a legacy of thousands upon thousands of orphans), the staff produced the "big book" for us to read. We found the entry for Mardya, showing that she was born in a local hospital on 28 December, 1986. She was taken 2 days later to the Nutrition Center where she lived until she was adopted by her US mother, Joanne, in 1990. Another very emotional moment shared...
Mme Vaddey (pictured above, center, in 1990 with the first 10 children to be adopted from the Nutrition Center - Mardya is the child seated on the steps turning toward her) is now an Under Secretary of State in the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans, and Youth Rehabilitation in Phnom Penh. After so many years of dedicated service to the children of Cambodia, she nonetheless still works to improve the lives of her nation's disadvantaged children. She remembered Mardya from 1990 and from her subsequent visit to the USA in 1991 when she was part of the first official delegation from the new Cambodia to visit the USA. Together we traveled around the States visiting the families who had adopted her children - some 57 in all.
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(Dr Daniel Susott, AAI Medical Director)
Daniel and Mardya Millay in front of Cambodia World Family's school in Kep, Cambodia. Chris Grace in the background. His aunt Wendy built the original school 12 years earlier.
Cambodia World Family, which provides food and shelter to Cambodian orphans as well as promoting adult literacy, was begun back in 1989 with funds donated by my parents. The program is still going strong. This photo shows a young grandmother in her 40's expressing how grateful she is that she has been taught to read and write so that she can now help her grandchildren with their lessons. She said she was too poor to go to school as a girl, but thanks to Cambodia World Family, she's literate now. It was a moving moment for me, especially as my mother, who did so much to empower disadvantaged women, recently died. Airline Ambassadors International is continuing her work.
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(Dr Daniel Susott, AAI Medical Director)
Our plane lands in Phnom Penh in 3 hours ... how many times have I made this journey over the past 19 years? In all its forms: by air, by land, even by sea... going back to the vortex, back to the "Heart of Darkness" where so many have struggled and died in a vast karmic swirling over millennia of human history along the banks of the mighty Mekong River. Where cultures have met and clashed and mingled, where "elephants have fought and trampled the grass" of the common people over untold generations.
This trip coincides with the annual Water Festival and Boat Races which I helped re-start in 1990, after a 17-year hiatus due to the war in Southeast Asia.
I’m accompanied by Dawn Mardya Millay (photo) who was born in Cambodia with a cleft face which required numerous surgeries. Raised in Maine by a single mom in a household of adopted siblings, several of them blind or with even more serious challenges, she is now a graduate of the prestigious New England School of Photography, a world-class photographer who has already journeyed to Greece and Guatemala, documenting masterfully with compelling visuals (for a treat, visit www.mmillayphotography.com).
"Mardy" was one of the first 10 children to be adopted from Cambodia in early 1990. When I arrived in January 1990, the Viet Namese had just exited the country after a 10-year occupation (having liberated it from the Khmer-Rouge rein of horror 1975-1979 when up to 3 million of Cambodia's 8 million people perished through execution, forced labor, starvation and disease).
Meeting me at the airport today will be one of my all-time best friends, "Lady By", Mme. Eng By Pheng. She was one of half a million Khmer refugees who in 1979 massed at the Thai-Cambodian border seeking food and medicine, and to be reunited with family after the horror of the Khmer Rouge years. Of these, Thai soldiers forced 30,000 at gunpoint over remote jungle cliffs back into Cambodia. "Lady By", with a baby on her back and another in her belly, was one of the survivors. We met in the Khao I-Dang Holding Center for Illegal Aliens, at the time the largest refugee camp (125,000 souls) in the world. Working together in pubic health in this huge camp we became fast friends forever. After raising her daughters in the USA and having a successful career in research, she has returned to Cambodia to make a life and to teach.
Lim Huy (Bou Ming Ty), a young man I met first in 1979 when he was an orphan starving on the border, will also join us. He grew up in Paris, became an optician, and married a lovely Khmer woman whose family he has set up in an auto-repair business in Cambodia.
We’re also joined by Christy and Harold, young retirees seeking to make a difference and coming to check things out in Cambodia in case it "captures" them as it has so many.
My godson Chris Grace and his friend, newly graduated from college, will be with us on their adventure through Asia.
I first came to Cambodia to help alleviate the misery, illness and trauma - and I stayed for the beauty, the joy and the HOPE... Now, all these years later, my refugee friends are returning, the adoptees are returning, and I can savor the sweet rewards that come of seeing people regain their lives and grow into people who now want to help with the work Airline Ambassadors International does so well.
So it looks as though I’ll hit the ground running - going straight to the river for a pass or two in the canoe as they paddle upstream past the two million spectators jamming the riverbanks between racing heats to reprise my favorite role, the "neak raum kandal tuk!" (“the person who dances in the middle of the boat"), clowning for the spectators who throw fruit and cheers to encourage the paddlers.
We're landing! Let's go! Welcome back to Cambodia!
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(Dr Daniel Susott, AAI Medical Director)
This is one of two wells dug by Cambodian Child's Dream Organization with donations from Airline Ambassadors. CCDO supports clean water to poor families by building hand pump water wells at a rate of 8-10 wells monthly. Concentration of water wells in the rural surrounding area of Siem Reap Province, comprising 10 different villages and districts. The placement of the water wells is suggested by the evaluation of CCDO staff, each well providing safe drinking water for one to three families.
