1. CHARITY
167May15
Hope
W
hen nurse Marie Cammal
left Paris in 1981 and
headed to a Laotian
refugee camp in Thailand,
she could never have imagined that
three decades later she would be
spearheading two projects to help
vulnerablegirlscompletetheirsecondary
schooling in the remote north of Laos. In
theinterveningyears,thiscompassionate
and gutsy Frenchwoman worked in
refugee camps across Thailand, Hong
Kong, Singapore and Cambodia, before
settling in Phnom Penh in the early 90s.
There she established a private shelter
for desperately poor and defenceless
children in need of healthcare, education
and tender loving care.
Louang Nantha, Laos
While Cambodia’s grinding poverty
is well documented, the situation is
different in Laos, and so the country
lags even further behind. A third of the
population of the landlocked country
lives below the poverty line, according
to the United Nations Development
Program, while UNICEF estimates that
over a third of women aged 20 to 24
were first married (or in union) by the
age of 18.
Marie is painfully aware of these
gloomy statistics, and through her
work hopes to improve the lives of girls
– indeed, of entire communities – in
remote areas of Laos.In 2014, 33 female
students of the Akha indigenous hill
tribe in the mountainous northwestern
Long district received scholarships in
partnership with Norway Church Aid
(NCA) to attend secondary school
from Grade 6 to 12. It was a first for
the minority group. Marie says: “In very
poor families only the boys are sent to
school. Girls become child labourers
for their parents, carrying loads of
wood for distances as long as 30km, or
rising at 5am to look after crops, often
on an empty stomach and in freezing
temperatures. They are susceptible to
abuse, violence and exploitation.”
Ray ofIt’s a rare opportunity to meet someone as courageous as MARIE
CAMMAL, founder of the Sok Sabay Organisation, whose deeds
shine as beacons of optimism in the face of mankind’s violence
and abject suffering. Marie travelled to Singapore from her home in
Cambodia recently, and along the way inspired Katie Roberts with
her confidence for the future of the Cambodian and Laotian children
she has spent years caring for.
imagesbyMarieCammal
Marie in Laos nursing
a Khmong baby

2. LIFE&FAMILY
168 May15
“The area is just 30km from China,
and 50km from Thailand and the
Myanmar border,” adds Marie, “so
there’s a real risk that young girls may
walk to the bridge crossings and sell
themselves.”
Ascholarshipprovidestheopportunity
for them to go instead to a bigger town
and get an education, while their family
receives support. As Marie says, this
slows down the cycle of poverty. “For
me, the exciting prospect is to make a
house inside the children’s brain, not
only above their head.”
But how do the children sign up?
Marie doesn’t choose the girls; that is
done by partner organisation, NCA, with
permission from the village officials. “It
takes a lot of time, as there is almost no
precedent of sending Akha girls to study
here. Once the family consents, the
children are interviewed to assess their
willingness to attend full-time study. They
also give a commitment not to marry for
seven years – in these villages, some
girls marry at 12 or 13 years of age.”
The project is changing the attitude of
the villagers, and this has flow-on effects
on other communities too.
With the scholarships established,
Marie is now engrossed in a partnership
with NCA and an established NGO to
build a 60- to 90-bed secondary school
dormitory for ethnic male and female
Akha, Hmong and Khmu students, about
two hours outside of Luang Prabang.
“It will be a secure place to stay and
study, rather than a flimsy bamboo hut
that can be washed away in heavy rain,
destroyed in one of the frequent seismic
tremors or easily accessed by passing
men, making the girls vulnerable to
rape.” A safe dormitory is essential to
the girls’ completing their studies in
the nearby secondary school. If this is
successful, Marie has her sights set on
building a secondary school for 200
kids, within five years. In Laos, the Akha
and Hmong are minority ethnic groups,
dominated by the 60 percent Laotian
majority. Marie admires the strength
and courage of both these tribes, and
says that they are often overlooked in
the provision of services. But Marie is
resolute, and education is her highest
priority for young female ethnic students.
“It can give these kids a better world.
This concept is so well known in the
Western world: for women, education is
a passport to have a better life through
more options, and access to a job.”
Students and families
in Laos

3. CHARITY
169May15
Sok Sabay, Cambodia
Nine of the first group of Cambodian
children Marie rescued 15 years ago
graduated from university in Phnom
Penh in the past year, she tells me
with an enormous smile and obvious
pride. She recalls the mother of a girl,
just graduated as a pharmacist, who,
when questioned by Marie about her
daughter’s future, suggested she would
sell her to feed her younger son. To which
Marie emphatically replied, “Maybe there
is something else you can do instead.”
Marie dates her soft spot for the
Cambodian people back to 1981, when
she nursed at a UN refugee camp on the
Thai-Kampuchea border. “Of course,”
she says, “the Vietnamese people were
struggling in the 1980s, but for the
Cambodians it was even more terrible,
under the brutal communist regime of
the Khmer Rouge where deportation
and starvation were common.
“In 1983 I jumped at the chance to
enterCambodiawithaGermanjournalist
to film Kampuchea the Third Liberation,
the only documentary in existence
which covers this period. Naturally, I was
scared – the country was still closed at
that time, I had no ambassador, and
it was only a few years after the fall of
the Khmer Rouge, who controlled the
country from 1975 to 1979. But what we
saw was extraordinary.”
She returned in 1987 to work with the
Japan International Volunteer Centre,
and by the mid-90s had decided to
build her own independent project, with
support from generous international
benefactors.
She opened the door of Sok Sabay
Organisation firstly to young prostituted
children, later expanding to help as many
neglected children as possible. “We take
the worst cases of child abuse: victims
of torture, enslavement, abandonment,
starvation – mostly at the hands of their
ownparents.Asthesecondgenerationof
Khmer Rouge genocide survivors, their
parents are lost to the brutality, slavery
and anger with which they were raised.”
Marie works one-on-one to rehabilitate
the children, instilling resilience to
help them overcome their traumatic
pasts. “It can take six or seven years to
communicate with a child, for them to
accept themselves, even to look in the
mirror. When they come to the shelter,
some are mentally dying because of
what they have seen and experienced.”
Fun at Sok Sabay in Phnom Penh

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170 May15
Bachelor degree
students at work in
InterContinentalHotel
in Phnom Penh
A celebration to mark 20 years of Sok Sabay will be held on 30 May 2015
at The British Club in Singapore. Marie Cammal and graduate students of
Sok Sabay will be there to tell their stories. Contact.soksabay@gmail.com
for details.
The immediate effect on joining Sok
Sabay is incredible. “I see kids eating
out of rubbish piles, and a day later they
are at Sok Sabay playing a violin. After
a few days they’re smiling and eating
like the other kids because they’re in
a supportive community that quickly
becomes their home.” The children’s
families are not forgotten: they receive
food, and visit their kids every month.
Art, sport, music, and full-time private
education are all provided at Sok Sabay,
andbothKhmerandEnglishareavailable.
Internationalvolunteers,includingchildren
from Singapore’s international schools,
visit on a regular basis.
In Singapore, a team of generous
people supports Sok Sabay, for example
Irish expatriate Liza Rowan and her
family, who sponsor two children and
donate to the Laos project. Liza has
taken her own two boys to Phnom
Penh to see the slums and the shelter
first-hand, and has hosted trips to raise
corporate awareness, including with
long-term supporter, the Denis Freyes
Ayam Group. More trips are planned
for the future.
Does Marie see a bright future? “Only
10percentofthepopulationofCambodia
is educated; to make a difference to the
‘mute’ nature of Cambodian society, this
must increase to at least 60 percent.
When the children from Sok Sabay and
other NGOs can stand on their feet
and find jobs to help their families, the
country will change and the endemic
poverty cycle will be beaten. When you
give education, you give a passport to
a better life, and a choice to improve
and become a responsible citizen in a
community. My graduates have degrees.
They can decide their future. They can fly
and be free.”
2014 university
students celebrate