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Cambodia and Thailand with the Entrust Foundation
For 8 days in March, I travelled with Richard Beaumont, CEO of the Entrust Foundation, filming enabling projects in the slums and border communities of Cambodia and Thailand. This is a pro-bono project for Redgum Communications which will be the subject of further posts, as the work being done by Richard and Entrust is making huge changes to the lives of some of the world’s poorest people.
We visited the ‘Genocide Centre’ near Phnom Penh - original site of Pol Pot’s ‘Killing Fields’, and gained a sense of the pain of the people who lost a generation of educated, intelligent humans to brutal, mindless inhumanity.
On the up side, we visited the ‘school on the mat’, where teachers take a tarpaulin to a village, put it on the ground and teach whichever children are there. We saw children rescued from trafficking, boys learning to repair motor-bikes so that they can start their own businesses with a microfinance loan provided. We met Graham Taylor, a New Zealander who decided he needed to go from being ‘successful’ at home in NZ to being ‘significant’ in Cambodia. Graham’s mission is to create sustainable employment, improve the health of Cambodians and support local farmers; and he’s achieving all of the above with his ‘So! Nutritious’ fortified soy milk, fortified corn snacks, powdered spirulina (an amazingly nutritious blue-green algae) and ‘So! Borbor Plus’ soy-rice blend porridge for children. Graham’s employing 35 local people, training them, providing free childcare for all employees and creating a self-supporting business that enriches the community in many ways. Graham’s contactable ongraham.taylor55@gmail.com or +855 12 798 290, and is always happy for a chat.
We dined on deep-fried Tarantulas (yes, the very big spiders) and red fire ants at ‘Friends’, a restaurant staffed entirely by former street youth and their teachers (most of whom are former street youth as well).
At Poipet we saw the ‘no man’s land’ of 9 casinos between the borders of Thailand and Cambodia, and the merciless commerce that surrounds it. A vivid memory there is of a child-height, toy-like, fully functioning electronic gambling table for children. We saw young children hauling heavy wooden carts laden with goods for a few cents per 12-14 hour day.
In Bangkok we visited Poo’s Cooking School in the Klong Toey community - a shanty slum built on an open sewer near the centre of town. With seed funding from Entrust, and the inspiration of Australian woman Anji Barker - who with her husband Ash and two children have lived there (yes, in the slum) for 9 years - Poo has created a market-to-kitchen cooking experience for which tourists pay good US$, about which they rave, and which brings cultural awareness and relative prosperity to Klong Toey.
Great news! Entrust has committed to funding for an editor - Tony Dean - to help me put together a half-hour documentary from the footage I shot on this eye-opening journey. It will be a Redgum Communications production to highlight the work of this small but dynamic foundation that directs more than 100% of every dollar from its corporate partners to on-the-ground projects that empower local people.
