Be the Change Network

Phnom Penh, Cambodia. This is weird. The city is completely quiet. I mean quiet, no traffic and all the storefronts shuttered, it’s eerie and peaceful and beautiful. It’s P’Chum Ben, the festival of the dead, a deeply spiritual holiday. For 4 days the city is vacated, everyone traveling to the countryside to visit relatives in their “home village” and pay respects to the ancestors. I decided to stay in town to catch up on jet lag before traveling to Kampong Speu province for the first day of school, which no one seems sure will start October 1st or 2nd.

To see the city empty like this gives me a glimpse of where the Khmer Rouge leaders got the idea to empty the city on April 17, 1975, in a forced evacuation that began their 4-year reign of nightmares from which Cambodia is still recovering. The order was based in tradition, a mass migration of city dwellers to their roots in the country, so it actually seems like a sensible place to start if your motivation was to bring peasants to power in an agrarian utopia.

Umm yeah…well that didn’t work out so well…seems you do need educated people, even in utopia.

Thus we find ourselves here in 2008 trying to figure out the best way to help a rural Cambodian village support it’s own school and provide their children with an education that is relevant and accessible. Over the years, I’ve learned that they have as much to teach us as we have to offer them. Over the next week I am going introduce you to the people of Chrauk Tiek, the condition of their lives and their hopes for the future. Our mission is not easy, we need your ideas and support.

But it is P’Chum Ben, no work can be done so I spent the afternoon with one of the most remarkable woman I have ever met. Her name is Kerri Evans and I delivered her a package from friends in the US, along with a box of cocoa and a bottle of acidophiles. She hasn’t been home for 3 years, since the day she met her adopted daughter Chenda, now age 12. Kerri is a 43-year-old American women with 5 kids she’s raising in Cambodia, one grown and off to college in the US, and another who passed away at age 10 from heart dysfunction. To say the woman has tenacity is an understatement. She picks me up in a long school bus yellow tuk-tuk with all 5 kids in tow, and she is driving! This is the family wagon.

Three years ago, Kerri, her husband and 4 kids came to Cambodia in hopes of finding their youngest son Kameron’s birthfamily. They discovered his older sister, Chenda, living in horrific conditions. The birthmother had died and Chenda was essentially a domestic slave to extended family members with multiple diseases racking her body and a head full of lice. She was a sweet, unloved 7-year-old at the time, and Kerri felt sure that she was months away from either dying or being sold. So Kerri and her husband decided to do what any loving parent would do, they adopted her. Chenda was their son’s biological sibling, they could not walk away, instead they brought her into their safe and loving family. This should be a happy ending, but is was the beginning of an immigration nightmare.

The US Embassy will not issue the Evan’s family a visa for Chenda because of the US moratorium on adoptions from Cambodia, even though Kerri has full and legal custody of Chenda from the Cambodian court. The US Embassy refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the adoption. Kerri is unwilling to pay the bribes necessary to smooth the paperwork problems, conscious that she would be putting all her children’s futures at risk, so for 3 years she has been fighting the US Embassy for a visa. Under US law, after 2 years of custody the parents should have legal status and the child a right to US citizenship, but the US is unwilling to follow its own law in this case. In the meantime, Kerri has taken in and adopted another child, Noah, who was living on the street in front of their home. He is a sweet boy, hard to believe that someone could just leave him on a box in front of their home to beg.

Kerri home schools the whole crew, carts them around in a tuk-tuk, and cares lovingly for their 10-year-old sister adopted from Thailand who has cerebral palsy and is autistic—in Cambodia, where special needs services are non-existent! Did I mention that she is also a single mom, the whole time her husband has been working in the states to support his family in Cambodia.

Next year I am going to nominate Kerri and John Evans for National Parents of the Year. The sacrifice they are making to keep their children together in the face of an obscene immigration policy is bold and inspiring! Click here to read their full story “Trapped in Cambodia”.