Music Training Therapy Blind Youth Cambodia

Dear Kind Donors,

How grateful we are for your immensely kind and generous help towards supporting our Blind Students living at our School.

Your help matters so much to them and is Life-affirming. 

The other day, I had to be in the capital city Phnom Penh to go to the airport. At a main junction I heard beautiful singng. There sat at the side of the main road, a man in his late thirties, who was blind, singing into a microphone. Another sighted man took a collecting box from car to car.  Often in Cambodia, those people who are blind, who have no proper support but who have musical talent, are used by small gangs to earn money. It is almost impossible to break free and they remain enslaved and in poverty for the rest of their lives.  

This is why your support is so very important.

Since I last wrote, our Blind Students at our School, have performed Mohori Music, Yike Music and Music to accompany the Lakoun Sabaik Touch (Shadow Puppet Theatre) all for our 30th Anniversary Concert on the 3rd August, 2024. All was done to give thanks for the thirty years since our School was founded, surviving civil war and overcoming all the myriad challenges that come with caring for very vulnerable Children in an area of war and danger and even in times of Peace.

Our Blind Students even participated in a Classical Ballet Dance, involving the founder and all our Children resident at our School!   The British Ambassador attended our Concert, together with the Under Secretary of State for Cambodian Culture and Fine Arts. The local military and police attended too and local officials and partner NGOs, as well as many of our former Students from 1994 onwards!

From the 6th to the 9th August, our Blind Students also participated in an Opera Workshop, learning important breathing techniques and body excersises, especially important for them as Singers of Traditional Khmer Music and helping them physically to open up their chest and shoulders, often closed or hunched, because they are blind from birth.

As our Blind Students have their own professional Traditional Khmer Musical Ensemble, "Vichak Santapheap", whilst gradually learning to be independent. Each day our Students improve their skills as Musicians together with their main Teacher, Loak Kru Samouen. Master Samouen miraculously survived the Khmer Rouge genocide and being shackled together with other prisoners in a Khmer Rouge prison in Takeo Province. Master Samouen is our treasure and much loved. It is difficult to explain, but our School is deeply loved and the Heart of our School beats because of each Person who lives and contributes within.

If you can, please share with others and encourage others who are able to kindly donate.  We are facing an urgent funding gap in October. This is especially concerning, because it is no longer "fashionable" amongst large foundations and UN agencies to take full care of very vulnerable Children,. We also take care of Children who have been abandoned, abused, neglected and orphaned, in close cooperation with the local authorities and International Childsafe. We are also vetted by Unicef.  However, without our School, our Children have nowhere else safe and loving to live. There are also those who publicy decry the care of Children, whilst asking us to care for Children found in terrible conditions.  We are also the only such School, providing complete care and scholastic education, from infancy to university, whilst also giving high level tuition in Traditional Cambodian Music and Performing Arts as Conservation for future generations, Vocational Training and Therapy.  Since all our Staff are Cambodian, we do not have any expatriate overheads.

We Thank You All from our Hearts.

n.b.All photographs taken with the permission of Students and Teachers at KCDI. Photographs kind courtesy of Steve Porte

Links:

• Official website
• Official Facebook

Dear Kind Donors,

Today, on this day of writing this report, 17th April, although you will read it a bit later, is the day of Remembrance in Cambodia, Maha Bangskol.

On this day in 1975, Khmer Rouge troops led by Pol Pot and his cadres took over Phnom Penh and there followed the mass forced-exodus of the entire population, including the sick and dying, from the capital city and all towns in Cambodia, into the countryside. From there every man, woman and child was forced into vast concentration camps and made to work from before dawn to dusk and given only rice-gruel. Hospitals, Schools, Banks, Buddhist Pagodas were destroyed and the majority of intellectuals, artists, former-civil servants, Buddhist monks and their families were tortured and then put to death in huge pits, whilst hundreds of thousands died by starvation and disease.

By December 1979, when Vietnam troops invaded Cambodia, one third of Cambodians had perished. Yet still, the Khmer Rouge, though they no longer ran the country, supported by some members of the international community, still wielded power in the Southwest and Northwest of the country and used the Cardamom mountain ranges and jungle to build strongholds from which to attack, terrorise, plant anti-personnel mines and control the local populations. This war of attrition continued until 1998-99.

It is near one of these strongholds (Phnom Voar) in Kampot, that our School was built in 1994, exactly because there was so little assistance reaching the population, as most humanitarian organisations were afraid to go there.

Today, as our Blind Students continue to perfect their skills as Professional Musicans at our School with their Traditional Music Ensemble, "Vichak Santepheap" - "The Way of Peace", we Remember. We remember all those who died, including 90% of Cambodian Artists, and those who survived, but who carry the traumatic scars still and we celebrate that Music triumphed and that the Ancient Traditional Culture of Cambodia of over a millennium, survived and was not lost.
We also celebrate that Vichak Santepheap is one of the only very high calibre ensembles of all-Blind Musicians, both in Cambodia and the World and we Thank our Music Masters, some of whom, like Loak Kru Samouen, actually miraculously survived Khmer Rouge imprisonment, but went on to work tirelessly for the conservation and revival of Traditional Khmer Music and Arts.

We Thank you with all our Hearts, for believing in us and for supporting our work not only for our Blind Students so that they can have a truly good future, but also for the preservation of Traditional Cambodian Music for future generations of Cambodians.

Thank You!

Photographs of our Blind Students at KCDI, Loak Kru Samouen and Catherine L. Geach. Taken with their permission by kind courtesy Steve Porte.

Links:

• Organization Website