Save a Cambodian Child

See Yourself As If You Personally Were There… Save a Cambodian Child

To me the greatest challenge of the seder has been the one to walk in our ancestors' footsteps as they were freed from slavery in Egypt. It is the same mitzvah echoed so many times in the Torah when we read: for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

The teaching is quite simple: We were there. We know what it's like to be treated as if we were less than human. We know how it feels when a whole society stands by and watches it happen to us.

That's what I felt in Cambodia.

One of the most poignant images that stays with me still is the picture of a boy looking over the wall into the school where we were distributing supplies and games. We had brought fifty backpacks filled with pads and pencils and erasers. The orphans who were receiving them took everything out, tried the pens, looked at the pads and couldn't believe that all of this was theirs.

And then there was that boy – the fifty-first orphan, the one not yet taken in by a foster family because Arun, himself an orphan from the same community, did not have the $600 to pay a foster family for ten years of rice, the entire time that the boy would be in school.

We wanted to give him things anyway, but Arun said that there were twenty or thirty more just like him. So we gave him $600 right then, and now there is one fewer eager child unable to go to school or to have a family with whom to live.

Thanks to many of you at least four additional orphans will now be adopted. I so appreciate your caring and your rapid response.

Passover is a time of tzedakah – right before the seder begins. Maybe, those at your table, feeling the pain and isolation our ancestors experienced, could help to save one more orphan so eager to learn and to have a future, to become the wise child himself.

Let's bring them all over the wall and into the school!

Cambodia: Hope from Despair

The flight to Thailand was seventeen hours; three hours later we were in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I never settled into the twelve-hour time difference. After returning home, it took more than two weeks for me to return to my time zone, but the trip has buoyed my spirit and touched my soul.

There were two parts to our experience: the sadness of the past and the hope of the future.

Everyone we met had a story of a family experience and loss during the Pol Pot regime, when the educated class was murdered and all the schools were destroyed, at the end of the 1970's .

Often, it was a tale of brothers. I was in Cambodia, in part, as a way of memorializing my brother, Barry, who died a year ago and who was an extraordinary high school math teacher in Buffalo. It was during the shiva period that I decided to pursue this project.

Our first guide, Sokha, lost his brother, Phoung, during the genocide there. We stood at the stupa building in front of twenty stories of human skulls and said the kaddish, remembering him. The parallels to the Holocaust touched our hearts, and there were tears in our eyes.

But there was also hope, so much hope. We saw the children learning and playing in schools like the one that we will sponsor. We played jump rope with them, gave them kazoos to create an impromptu band and backpacks filled with school supplies. The smiles on their faces were worth everything.

It was clear that education is the answer. Everyone is striving to learn and then to teach in an effort to slowly replace the educated class that was lost.

HERE'S HOW YOU CAN HELP:

1. SUPPORT THE BUILDING OF THE SCHOOL ITSELF with its computer center, wells and water filters, English and computer teacher and so much more.

2. SPONSOR ONE OF THE ORPHANS on the waiting list who can go to school only if his/her foster family receives $5 of rice each month for the ten years of classes ($600 per orphan – to save a child's future).