WHO WE ARE	Home

WE are young people of Khmer background who have a strong desire to see the quality of life for Khmer children and youth improve. Many of us were born before, during, or just after the terrible Khmer Rouge Genocide that took place between 1975-1979, in the Kingdom of Kampuchea. Although a small number of us were able to find new lives in a second or third country such as the United States, a couple of million of our people perished because of execution, starvation, and overwork. The remainder, dubbed as survivors of the genocide, went on to try to live as ordinary people. But with so much trauma and pain in our parents and grandparents, trying to live an ordinary life was by no means an ordinary task.

Children: Survivors of Genocide

For those who were children during the genocide, coming to a third country proved difficult as by the time they were put into an elementary, junior, or even high school, most had been much older than their peers in school. For those who were born during and just after the regime, they had not been subjected to the horrors of the genocide, but also had to assimilate to the environment they were in, which included learning how to balance two cultures and deal with certain expectations and norms. Adjustment to the new language and culture was definitely a chore for the parents and grandparents, who for the most part did not receive much schooling back at home, for many who had survived were from an agrarian background. Therefore the children could not get much help from their parents and had to deal with all the tortures and torments by their American classmates who had dubbed them as strangers and called them chinks and gooks. For the children who lived as orphans, put into adoptive families, life was even more difficult as they did not have anyone to relate to, or had anyone to provide them with the food they had been used to eating back home. Yet they all had to fit in and learn to eat, dress, and behave in the same manner as the Americans, the French, the Canadians, and the Australians in a short amount of time. For those who were born in the third country, there are a variety of experiences that was determined by the age, occupation, and mentality of their parents. What we all had in common was that we struggled to fit in, to dress right, to behave accordingly, to strive for our education and, if lucky, for a career. We were all either survivors or children of survivors of a horrendous crime against humanity. For those of us who managed to do well in school and went on to obtain higher education degrees, we are saddened to see that an alarming number of us, our youth and children are continuing to struggle. We are saddened to see that parents who had been heroes for keeping us alive become dependent on federal, state, and disability monies and that their children also learn to be dependent on the systems. We are saddened to see premature teens turning into very young parents and thus throwing their lives away because they did not get their years of living as youth. We are saddened to see youth dropping out of school left and right because they lack motivation, encouragement, and confidence in themselves. We are saddened because many of us do not have a focus or goal in life, but rather have learned to just live life day by day and work from one job to the next just to survive each day.

Children in Cambodia

And then, there are the children and youth in our mother country who did not get the opportunity to escape after the genocide and be sponsored to a third country. For years now, we are inundated by news of tragedy. Whether it be by word of mouth from those who had gone back to visit, by the media, or by personal visits, stories consist of corruption, landmine accidents, slave labor sweat shops, child kidnapping and prostitution, unexplainable deaths and murders, rampant homelessness and poverty. We are even more saddened by such news. Dealing With Issues But how do we deal with all of these issues? They are all so crucial to the well-being of the people. But we can't possibly tackle every single issue at hand. That would take the muscle power of the entire country, the entire government. That is nearly impossible for such a small group of people to do anything about. Therefore we have to prioritize. We have to do research on what organizations are doing to try to alleviate some of these problems. We have to come together and brainstorm with as many interested people as possible about what we can really do to make a difference in any of these issues. As a result of our interests and passions, we have a number of programs and projects that are ongoing. But we also need to be flexible and adaptive to the current needs because if we are fixated on an issue that was prevalent a decade ago and not focus on what's going on today, we will never progress. We will never learn to advance.

This content was written by Sophy Theam.

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