Before I get to the answer to this question, let me first explain this is probably one of my more positive and refreshing experiences I've had in Cambodia's NGOland since I've settled into life and work here. I suppose that the overhanging annoyances of the corrosive mixture of race and gender here have been a major theme of my thoughts of late, and I didn't want to necessarily taint my blog with angry typings about post-colonial-subcontinent-fetishizing sexpats.
The answer to the above query: www.korsangkhmer.org
In the aftermath of 9/11, national security policy sought to be-rid American soil of any possibility of a homegrown terror, be it of the Al-Quaeda sort, or the poverty-born criminal sort. As a result, criminals who were not American citizens and had infringed the "3-strikes and your out" law found in many states, were deported back to their home countries.
Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, the USA was a recipient of many Cambodian refugees. As many of you may, or may not know, the genocide and destructive activities of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge regime displaced many Cambodians to refugee camps along the Thai-Cambodia border. One of my drivers, whom I like to call good friend as well, Phirath, was raised in such a camp. The UNHCR and IOM mediated much of the sending of these refugees either to be re-patriated to Cambodia, or for resettlement in the USA, mostly in the recipient states of Florida, Kentucky and California. Many of these refugees resettled in the USA were small children, who's would only know the USA as home.
Arrival in the US was tough. Children old enough to remember bore the psychological scars of the genocide and civil war. Those young enough not to remember found lives embedded in poverty as new arrivals with parents who had limited social networks and social or fiscal capital. The combination of rampant poverty, a poorly constructed education and social welfare system in the USA caused many of these kids grew to be adolescents who turned to crime. Being such a youth in the 21st century was clearly not easy. But with 9/11 in the background, things were made tougher.
Approximately 10-15 such youth, between the ages of 18-30 are deported back to their supposed homelands of Cambodia each month. In 2004, several of such youth collected together and formed Korsang.
Korsang is an NGO in Phnom Penh, which seeks to provide harm reduction, HIV/AIDS prevention and rehabilitation services to drug users. They use peer education, skills training, needle exchange and safe injection, and health service provision to accomplish their goals to reduce the risks associated with injection and amphetimine drug use. An exciting program is the use of hip hop (and might I add, Khmer hip hop is awesome) for both skills building and physical strength training for recovering drug users. By teaching music production and lyric development, recovering drug users also build a great foundation for the nascent hip hop scene in Cambodia. By teaching young recovering IDUs the styles of breakdancing and hip hop dance skills, it is not only building up their physiological status, but also bringing in a very cool cultural imprint on a North American cultural phenomenon previously relegated to the urban hip hop scene.
They have been so successful in Phnom Penh, that they now work with the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC). The WHO and UNODC recently worked with Korsang to produce a music video/harm reduction campaign to teach IDUs how to reduce their vulnerability to HIV infection by the proper cleaning and use of needles....through a hip hop music video.
Sitting in my Joint UN Team on HIV/AIDS meeting and having just watched the premiere of this video by my venerable colleague at the WHO, team members remarked "well, it's a little fast isn't it? I don't think they'll get it?" To which I thought - "no! the song is still reverberating in my head! it's catchy! and awesome!"
The success of Korsang can also be seen through how much funding they receive and how much they have expanded their activities since their limited beginnings. They are now internationally renowned for their established best practices and I look forward to seeing them at AIDS2008 in Mexico City...spreading the word of rehabilitation and harm reduction in the aftermath of deportation and crime and in the crushing environment of the slums of Phnom Penh.
I was lucky enough to meet the founders and heads of Korsang at a Livelihoods and HIV Knowledge Sharing Meeting at the Hotel Phnom Penh last week. They even had members of their hip hop dance class put on a show. It was amazing and I thought these kids had just hopped out of a KRS-One video.
I don't think I had felt this excited about something since arriving in Phnom Penh 2 months ago, and I'm really happy that I didn't write about the activities of post-colonial-subcontinent-fetishizing sexpats. It would have been a terrible post filled with angry observations made from the club scene here.
