The Orphanage Drop In The Ocean Festival Built

Three years ago Nottingham musicians, promoters, bar owners, staff and music lovers came together and created Drop In The Ocean (DITO) – a charity music festival that took place in dozens of venues across Nottingham. The first event took place on Sunday 20 January 2005. The second took place on Sunday 11 June 2006. Between them the festivals raised £84,200 which was distributed amongst worthy causes. Jared Wilson paid a visit to Cambodia and the children’s shelter in Phnom Penh that your beer money helped to build…

If you think crime and corruption in Nottingham has been bad over the last decade then Phnom Penh, six thousand miles away in Cambodia, is on a whole new level. I hadn’t even got to my hotel from the airport before I was offered guns and prostitutes. A friend of mine who was there around the same time had a guy in the street offer him 'little girls, all under ten years old'. From our safe base in the UK it’s hard not to judge because of these horrors, but you have to know more about the upheaval the country has been through to understand why it’s like this.

Put simply, it can be a struggle for Cambodian people to guarantee a half-decent standard of life for themselves and their families. Summing Cambodian history up in a few paragraphs is like trying to write a dictionary on a matchbox, but after several decades of political upheaval and the tyranny of Pol Pot (which claimed the lives of up to three million people - including all schoolteachers, doctors, journalists and anyone deemed to be an ‘intellectual’) the country is still recovering and so are the people.

There are no state benefits and not enough jobs for the amount of people there. One of the main ways to make money is through crime, and children are one of the few resources which they can trade. Despite the fact prostitution is illegal in Cambodia, if you have enough money you can do just about anything – including buying police protection. Sadly, as a result the country has become a regular holiday spot for Western paedophiles. We’ve read all about Gary Glitter in the UK press, but there are hundreds more like him out there, just without the ex-pop star baggage to attract tabloid attention.

The Cambodian Center for the Protection of Children’s Rights (CCPCR) is located on a quiet street outside the centre of Phnom Penh and was set up to help the victims of sex crimes and domestic violence. From the outside you can’t tell what is behind the big metal gates and the people involved with the shelter clearly appreciate this privacy. The children that come through the doors are referred by Social Services and many of them (some as young as six or seven) had been working as child prostitutes.

The place is custom-built for their needs and is run by a small team comprising the shelter manager (Mr Yim Po), the housemother (Ms Tho Tharee) and part-time teachers. Anne and Alex, representatives of Family Care Cambodia, run an assistance program for the shelter and acted as guides for the day I spent there. All of them do their jobs out of a powerful sense of belief for the cause.

The plaque above the door on my way in made me smile, stating proudly ‘This building was funded by Drop In The Ocean, Nottingham, UK.’ As I enter I am greeted by the happy faces of the mainly female children who live there. Despite the fact that they have experienced atrocities that people like us will never have to deal with, there are beaming smiles all around. Unlike in their family homes, the children now have their own bed in a safe environment (rather than just a blanket on a dirty floor) and are schooled in English, maths, knitting, farming and word processing. The emphasis of the shelter is on them recovering from the traumas they have been through whilst learning skills that can offer them a future out of crime.

You’d think that the children would look older than their years because of their past. If anything it’s the opposite. Years of malnourishment have meant that many of the older teenagers appear to be barely into their teens. On my way there I stopped off at a fruit market and spent $20 (they trade in US currency as well as Khmer) on bananas, rambutans and apples (which are an expensive treat out there). This bought three binbags worth and when I handed it over to them as a pre-dinner treat they were all delighted, though insistent that I eat it with them.

Then, with the help of their teacher Huch Phat, I took a class for half an hour - a good chance for them to practice their already impressive English language skills. They ask me about my family, my job and my life back in England. The cultural differences are obvious to see. When I tell them I have been travelling the world for the last few months they look astonished. Most of them have never even been or will ever go outside of the city. Even though I am not religious, I say a quick prayer for them and count myself lucky to be born in a country where I have levels of freedom I’d never fully appreciated until that moment.

There’s a little bit of Nottingham culture in Cambodia and it’s changing the lives of young people there forever. Everyone who had any involvement in the festival should feel really proud that three years on the money is changing Cambodian children’s lives forever. The organisers of the festival have told us that there is unlikely to be another DITO as they feel they have passed the torch onto the likes of Hockley Hustle (who raised over £15,000 with their festival in October) and Oxjam. It only takes a drop in the ocean to change the tide…