Advisor

He cannot know it, but the resemblance to a young Charlie Chaplin is striking. Sokha, a sinewy 16-year-old with rouged cheeks and stencilled-on moustache, has an uncanny grasp of slapstick. In a quiet classroom, the aspiring comedy actor halts our interview for a moment, seizes my dictaphone and sings into it with theatrical gusto – a sweet, haunting sound that rises and falls like the lilt of a chapei. Not a word has been spoken.

Deaf since birth, Sokha lived in a silent world for the first four years of his life, unable to communicate with his own family. He made sounds, but no one understood them. Now, he communicates at lightning speed, fingers fluttering in fluent Khmer sign language. Twenty years ago, this would have been unthinkable. Today, it’s a testament to how Cambodia – with a little help – is challenging traditional attitudes towards disability.

In 1991, the signing of the Paris Peace Agreement brought an official end to the decades of conflict that had ravaged Vietnam and its smaller neighbours. Tens of thousands of Cambodian refugees, many of them children born in the sprawling camps set up along the Thai border, were finally allowed to go home. At the camp known as Site II, then the second-largest gathering of Cambodians in the world, a small bamboo centre that had sprung up to shelter abandoned children began preparing for the repatriation process. Funds were raised; school uniforms made.

Among the many waifs and strays at the centre, called Krousar Thmey (‘New Family’) – the subject of a documentary screening at Meta House this week – was Wanna, a blind 10-year-old whose parents had abandoned him in a hospital. As the young refugees readied to set foot on Cambodian soil for the first time, Wanna asked why he couldn’t go to school alongside them. “A blind school?” replied Benoit Duchâteau-Arminjon, then a 21-year-old who had relinquished his role as a financial controller with Accor in Bangkok in order to volunteer in the camps. “There’s no such thing in Cambodia.”

“It was not possible for him to go to school because there was no school for the blind and there never had been – ever,” explained Benoit at Krousar Thmey’s rousing 20th anniversary celebrations in 2011. “During the French, they never developed anything. During Sihanouk: never, ever. Nothing existed. When I went to see the Ministry of Education, they said: ‘The blind are not our priority.’ When I went to see Unicef, they said: ‘We do not have enough schools for normal children.’ And I said: ‘Why not the blind?’”

In Cambodia, as in India, attitudes towards disabled people have long been shaped by Buddhist beliefs. Handicaps are the result of bad karma; manifestations of faults committed in a former life. It is not uncommon for aid workers to uncover disabled children who have been hidden in their homes for years. “If I look back, I remember some families not showing or even accepting that they had blind or deaf children,” said Benoit. “We knew they were there in the districts, but the families were saying ‘No, we don’t have’ because it was a source of shame for them.”

Inspired by Wanna, aided by the Ministry of Education and under the tutelage of the Thai Foundation for the Blind, Benoit and his team tasked themselves to reverse generations of prejudice, one child at a time: in short, to create an education system for blind and deaf children where none had previously existed. “When Wanna came with us, we realised what life was like for the blind,” said Benoit. “Neither myself nor the children at the orphanage had ever seen someone who was blind. One put a krama on his eyes to blindfold himself and they started to play. Then they realised how hard it was to be blind, and this…” – the Frenchman clicks his fingers – “was the shock that made the children accept one another.”

Armed with a few progressive individuals, the team set about creating comprehensive local versions of Braille and sign language, hitherto unheard of. The decision to localise Braille was particularly bold: equivalents of the 33 consonants, 21 vowels and punctuation of the Khmer alphabet had to be invented in order for students to comply with all the subtleties of Khmer grammar and spelling rules. Fazed, several linguists suggested using abbreviations instead, but Benoit was resolute: this was not an exercise in creating ‘special education’, but in adapting normal education to meet special needs.

“Everyone was saying: ‘Why have such a difficult system?’ Why? In order for the kids to understand their language, their culture. Language is a vehicle for culture. Using the other [abbreviated] system, they didn’t know what was going on. For us, it was very important they understand what’s going on in order to integrate into normal schools. Today, with our kids having baccalaureates, having graduated from university, having changed the perception of being disabled, we’ve proven the system we chose — the system we created — was the right one,” said Benoit.

In 1994, it took three weeks, a Perkins machine and a perfect knowledge of Braille to produce one book. Today, the Braillo — a much more sophisticated printer — can produce about 600 pages an hour. Page by page, Krousar Thmey is in the process of translating every single book on Cambodia’s national curriculum into Braille. Integrate; don’t separate.

From being a shelter for 35 abandoned kids, the organisation is now instrumental in the care and education of almost 4,000 children, 700 of whom are blind and 300 deaf. In 2009, for the first time in history, two deaf students successfully passed the national High School Exam. In 2011, the first of two volumes of the Khmer Sign Language Dictionary rolled off the press. It’s also online.

Changing perceptions has been the most painstaking part of the process. When the first school was inaugurated in 1994 by the Queen at Chbar Ampov, a woman who had seen the ceremony on TV walked into the office. On realising her son was blind, she told staff, she had wanted to kill him and then commit suicide because she was ‘bringing a lot of shame’ to her family. Today, deaf and blind children are encouraged to do their homework outside, in front of everybody. “In order to integrate children within normal schools, first we must integrate them into their families,” said Benoit.

On arrival at Krousar Thmey, visiting primary school students are handed a book in Braille and asked to read from it. Insisting there is nothing written on the page, they then select a passage from their own printed textbook. A blind child, fingertips expertly interpreting raised paper dots, promptly reads the same passage aloud. Realisation creeps over the children’s faces: reading and writing can be done in more ways than one.

Facilitating such realisation at ministerial level presented rather more of a challenge. Parish Without Borders once wrote that ‘one of the difficulties in Cambodia is knowing which government officials are really interested and concerned about such issues as the disabled, which ones are worth working with and which ones should just be bypassed.’

Had Prime Minister Hun Sen not been blinded in one eye while serving as a guerrilla commander with the Khmer Rouge between 1970 and 1975, Wanna – now in his 30s and teaching music – might still be bereft of an education. Hun Sen, who once balked at being called ah kvak (‘blind’) by his fellow politicians, has publicly called for respect: “We must value people with disabilities.” During the anniversary celebrations, addressing hundreds of assembled dignitaries, teachers and children, the premier, with trademark embellishment, declared: “Being physically disabled does not mean being mentally disabled. Even myself, I am blind in one eye, but I can look so much further than most.”

It took 15 years for Krousar Thmey, now staffed exclusively by Cambodians, to be approved by the Ministry of Interior. Without Hun Sen’s support, one can only speculate on what fate might have befallen their efforts. At the Phnom Penh Thmey school for the deaf and blind, there is an interactive exhibition called Seeing in the Dark. Participants are led into a lightless room and, guided by visually impaired students, asked to perform a few simple day-to-day tasks. The idea is to simulate the kind of sensory conditions experienced by the sightless in order to ‘address integration issues in a tangible way’. Of the dozens of government officials present at the anniversary, only the Minister of Education would enter. The Ministry of Social Affairs asked for the lights to be turned on.

“Reeeaally? Are you suuure?” The drawn-out, teasing tone suggests I should be anything but. In total darkness, it has taken several excruciating minutes, fingertips fumbling over the raised markings on a child’s ruler, to work out that the 3D cardboard shape on the desk before me is a rectangle measuring 10cm long. Only it isn’t. My guides giggle. I start over: slide, count, slide, count. Peals of laughter erupt from the impenetrable gloom. I exercise a climb-down, much to my companions’ amusement: my first guess had been two centimetres short  – and that after stumbling repeatedly, trying to mount a scooter facing backwards and flailing my arms to avoid phantom obstacles.

Outside, in the daylight, 30-year-old Ngoun Chanthon is waiting. How did it feel? Was I afraid? As grillings go, his is tenacious. Blind since birth, he feels scared sometimes, too. Not by things he can’t see, but by his future. Like many former pupils, Nguon wants to stay on as a teacher, but worries what might become of him were it not for Krousar Thmey. In a display of far-sightedness, the organisation is legislating for the long-term. Today’s pupils will become tomorrow’s tutors as it embarks on a plan to train teachers across the country to accept blind and deaf children into mainstream schools. Ultimately, new arrivals at Krousar Thmey will initially be given special education within its walls before joining regular state-run classes. As disabled children are integrated into the standard schooling system, the focus will shift to developing peripatetic teacher training centres. Within a decade, the intention is that Cambodia will offer the best education for deaf and blind children available in the whole of Asia.

Mention equality, however, and Benoit snorts. “You will never be equal. You have to be 150% better than the others. We’re in Cambodia: there aren’t enough chances for everyone, so how will you have jobs for the deaf and blind? If you teach them they have rights, they will believe they have rights. No, they have a duty: a duty to be better than the others in order to be integrated. They have to push society to integrate them.”

Backstage, as children wriggle in and out of ornate traditional costumes (deaf dancers keep time by feeling the vibrations from blind musicians), we sit down to eat. Small brown hands swat the sweat from my face with an improvised cardboard fan. I return the favour, a tiny blind girl, feeling for my wrist, erupting in giggles. Sokha waves me over with an impish grin, gesturing that I’m not to go anywhere before the big show. After all, it is my turn to have my cheeks rouged. He laughs, making the sign for ‘fun’. Integrate; don’t separate.

WHO: Everyone
WHAT: The Children Of Krousar Thmey documentary screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 4pm December 19
WHY: Integrate; don’t separate