Funding drought threatens Happy Garden

Young Victorian of the year, Leigh Matthews. Photo: Jason South

http://www.theage.com.au/

CHRIS JOHNSTON

November 7, 2009

(Posted by CAAI News Media)

LEIGH Mathews is a Melbourne girl from a blue-collar family, her father a truck driver, who grew up around Seaford. The family of three split when she was very young.

She was expelled from school at 15 for venting anger bottled at home. ''Swearing and fighting and yelling at teachers,'' she says, ''and not turning up.''

She left home, too, and at 16 was living in Frankston with friends and working in cafes. She did bits of other schooling but not much and drifted through jobs and then she started travelling.

In 2004, her life changed in an instant - literally as she turned a corner in a side street in a ghetto in Asia. Now, and because of that, Ms Mathews runs a unique charity - a non-government, community development called the Future Cambodia Fund - for some of the world's most dispossessed children.

At last count, 2000 children had used its programs in Cambodia. Ms Mathews (below) is Victoria's Young Australian of the Year for 2009. And next week, she will be announced as one of 10 outstanding young people of the world by JCI, a United Nations-aligned welfare group.

But the Future Cambodia Fund's own future is in jeopardy after most of its funding vanished. Ms Mathews has 10 staff in Cambodia but the charity may have only three weeks before it folds.

''I'm devastated,'' she says. ''There is a such need for what we do.''

The thing that Ms Mathews saw in Siem Reap in Cambodia in 2004 was two young boys, aged six and three, unconscious in a gutter, ''covered in shit and dirt and water, the tourists walking past, horrible and upsetting''. She got them to a hospital but it refused to treat them because they were street kids.

The medical staff called the police, who accused Ms Mathews of being a journalist trying to get inside the hospital. She was intimidated and held until, in the morning, she said, ''I'm not listening to this'', and left unimpeded but with a new realisation of how endemically dysfunctional and unjust a country like Cambodia could be and how those at the bottom had no status.

''That turned my whole world upside down,'' she says.

She started researching how aid agencies worked and what the notion of community development meant. She raised money and set up street medical clinics.

Next, Ms Mathews tried to set up a drop-in centre for street kids. She registered the Future Cambodia Fund as a charity and assembled a board of directors.

Then she came across the phenomenon of ''relocations'' in which entire communities and suburbs of lower socio-economic people were evicted to make way for new developments. It is estimated that 200,000 Cambodians have been evicted since 2000. Last month 30,000 were forced from Phnom Penh's Boeung Kak Lake district.

At a place called Andong, Ms Mathews found that 8000 people from central Phnom Penh had been taken 22 kilometres away to a field with no food, power, sanitation or shelter. A tent city went up and a dirty slum rose of ''traumatised and very sick people''. The UN deemed it a humanitarian crisis.

By 2008, Ms Mathews' fund was working to help the children there. It began with seven children in a tent doing music and art therapy and language lessons. Slowly, she hired teachers and counsellors and set up an office in Phnom Penh and then moved into a disused pavilion opposite Andong that she renamed ''Happy Garden'', now hosting 2000 children a year for schooling, therapy, sport and lessons in nutrition and health. It has vegetable gardens and a soccer field.

Funding of about $150,000 a year was provided by Oxfam, a fund administered by Lonely Planet publisher Tony Wheeler called Planet Wheeler, and private philanthropic groups and public donations.

But the money has dried up. All that is left is a small grant from the Australian embassy in Cambodia and the remains of some bridging finance from Planet Wheeler.

It is not lost on Ms Mathews that she is driven to help others because as a child she needed help. Nor is it lost on her that she has been awarded for setting up a charity that now may die. She feels she is letting down 2000 Cambodian children and also letting herself down because she is supposed to be so capable.

She says $150,000 a year is not much and that the problem could be solved ''with the click of someone's fingers''.

''I've tried everything … I don't know where to turn.''

http://futurecambodiafund.org/