Source: The ROAR (Australia)
18,500km into our 18 month bicycle journey, we stumbled across one of the most courageous and heartwrenching stories to date. It comes from a remarkable education and welfare centre in the heart of Phnom Penh, Cambodia.
After the horrific suffering of the Cambodian people throughout the Pol Pot regime (Khmer Rouge), the country was brought to its knees and life for many millions became a daily struggle between life and death.
Thousands of children and families were left to live and feed off the scraps of food at huge rubbish dumps, and to scavange whatever reusables they could find amongst the broken glass, syringes and rotting waste. If there was ever any doubt as to the destruction caused by the regime, you might find suggestion in their radio broadcasts to the people “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss”.
Many of the estimated 2.5 million victims of the genocide were educated, city dwellers, the brains behind business, and often nutritionally the healthiest sector of society. Over 10 years of slaughter, the national average height dropped by a staggering 10 cm, a difference that takes around 100 years of human evolution to gain back.
We were unsure what rugby story could be found in a country that was effectively born in 1980, the Khmer Rouge’s “Year Zero”? The findings were nothing less than inspirational.
The rugby journey began in 1995 when a French couple visited Phnom Penh in Cambodia. Christian and Marie-France des Pallières witnessed children living and working through the rubbish dump and decided that something needed to be done. Starting only by feeding these children, they returned to France to raise awareness of the situation and began collecting donations to assist with their work.
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