Stories of Love
One song is, “Love, love, love, love . . . love your fellow man.”
Thirty years ago, Cambodia was a killing field. Babies, children, adults, the elderly – no one escaped.
The Khmer Rouge killed people if they didn't like them, if they didn't work hard enough, if they were educated, from a different ethnic group or showed sympathy when their family members were killed. All institutions were banned including banks, hospitals, stores, schools, religion and the family. Fathers were forced to spy on their children and children forced to kill their parents. Many children were carried off to carry guns as soldiers.
It's estimated 2 million Cambodians died from torture, starvation or execution. The country was left in shambles with ten million landmines buried in the ground – one for every person in Cambodia.
How do people come back from such a tragic upheaval of their nation and the complete disintegration of the family as an institution where love and trust died under brutal oppression and a whole generation grew up with no understanding of what it means to have a loving family? How do they rebuild their confidence, their lives – their faith in each other?
CORDE (Cambodian Organization for Research and Development) decided the only way was social transformation through education – to rebuild the foundation of families and community relations on which a nation can be built. And the only way to build up education in the country was to help people learn to do it and sustain it themselves.
Mona Foundation helps CORDE train teachers who hold classes in their own villages. The classes usually start in someone's home or out in the open, under a tree. Up to 50 children sit on the ground or on plastic chairs to write out lessons on mini chalkboards.
When there are several classes in an area, a “center of learning” is built. These centers of learning are simple cement buildings with electricity, plastic chairs, tables and a chalkboard.
The means are simple, but the education is profound . . . and healing.
Peace education, primary health care, classes on the environment, community banking and organic agriculture are all taught at these centers of learning. Classes are in English because it's a marketable skill that helps the students provide for themselves. Village children and their families learn they can change their lives and determine their own path of growth.
At one village school, the son of a survivor of the genocide explained how service to the community is a core value of the CORDE curriculum. Because of service from people like him, children now receive free education two hours a day, five days a week.
The class starts with a song. And from the first line, you know something has changed in Cambodia. Love and trust are what hold a family, indeed a society, together. And so the children sing at the top of their lungs: “Love, love, love, love . . . love your fellow man.”
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