Newsletter
7
Hello again,
Today I'd like to tell you about a
place called the Land Mine Museum and about an art exhibition that will
be taking place in Toowoomba in
November. Before I left Australia
I met a man called Damien Kamholtz who works in the field of art therapy
with children that have suffered trauma. He said that he was
going to be holding an exhibition of children's artwork in November and
I told him that I was sure I'd be able to gather artwork from Cambodian
children to contribute to the exhibition.
Over the six months that I've been here
I have had lots of fun creating and collecting artwork from children at
the orphanage, the village and from the Land Mine Museum. Its the
Land Mine Museum that I'd like to focus on in this newsletter.......
Cambodia
still has an extremely bad problem with landmines.
It is estimated that there are still five million land mines.
One out of every 278 people are land mine victims. It is one of
the worst landmine affected countries in the world due to almost three
decades of conflict. Every single day another person becomes a victim of
landmines – often these victims are poor children in remote villages.
An
amazing man called Aki Ra opened the Landmine
Museum
in 1999. As a
former child soldier of both the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese Army, he
was forced to lay landmines. (There is a link at the bottom of
this page that will take you to the story of Aki Ra's life.)
Aki
Ra now travels the country training farmers how to safely remove
landmines and helping people who are victims.
He has cleared thousands of mines – all of which are on display
at his museum. He does all
this with very basic equipment, i.e. one method of clearing a mine
involves blowing it up using little more than a water bottle, string and
a couple of sticks.
The
Landmine
Museum
is currently home to about 20 children, most of them are landmine or UXO
(unexploded ordinance) victims, some of them are orphans. Each
child has his/her own story to tell. The Museum provides the children
with financial support that enables them to attend school and eat
properly. Volunteer English
teachers provide the children with English lessons at the museum.
Most of the children would not be able to attend school if they
remained in their own villages. Some
of the children had never attended school before they came to live at
the
Landmine
Museum
.
Aki
Ra and his family, with the help of volunteers, have been able to
provide a happy home for the children who may have otherwise been left
to live a life of begging on the streets or working at home and not
attending school. Akira and the Land Mine Museum receive no
government support and are funded purely by donations.
In
each situation I didn’t tell the children what I wanted them to draw.
I just let them do whatever they wished.
Almost all of the pictures from the children of the
Landmine
Museum
featured landmines. Maybe
its not just because they have been victims of them.
Perhaps they thought that I expected them to draw mines or perhaps
its because of the environment they live in.
They are surrounded by landmines day in day out.
Nonetheless, they seem to be a very happy group of children.
Given
the opportunity, most children preferred to copy a picture out of a
book. Creativity isn’t
necessarily free flowing in Cambodia
and has to be really encouraged. I
think this is why the children’s pictures often look similar to one
another. I wonder if this is
a result of the ravages of the Khmer Rouge regime where any citizen who
was educated or involved in arts, culture, etc, was killed.
Very few of the creative people survived.
In
each situation the children were very enthusiastic when I told them that
I was going to be showing their artwork to people in Australia.
I
only really had two “problems” during the gathering of this artwork.
Both of them were at the Landmine Museum.
The first problem was with Sok – the resident baby monkey.
He would run amok and cause no end of havoc
while the children
were trying to draw or paint their pictures.
We were constantly chasing him to try and get back pencils,
erasers and anything else he took it into his head to take.
Then he developed a liking to the actual paint and would jump on
the table and scoop up handfuls of it to eat!
(I tried getting him to paint a picture but gave up rather
quickly.)
The
other “challenge” occurred one day when one of the children decided
he would rather paint Sok’s face than his paper.
He then decided to paint his own face.
Before long
everyone had got into the act and I threw my hands up
in frustration. By the time
the session was over everyone, including the volunteers and myself, had
been painted. “Oh well”,
I thought “art is all about self expression and face painting is as
good a way as any to express yourself.”
Click here to read
individual stories of some of the children from the Land Mine
Museum.
Click here for Further
information on land mines.
