THEY CALL ME Mum
How a job posting to Cambodia opened up a whole new set of priorities for Geraldine Cox
The first time my kids see me they think, She’s huge and she has red hair! You can see the distrust in their eyes, even from five and six year olds. I squat down at eye level and put my hand out. They will pull away like an abused dog. Then I gently stroke their arm. “It’s OK, you’re safe now,” I whisper.
Sometimes it takes a few months for them to let me pick them up. One little girl came to me after she was raped at age nine. She wouldn’t even
look at me. After about six weeks, I was having an afternoon nap in the gazebo over the pond where I live near Phnom Penh in Cambodia, and I woke up to find her cuddled up next to me, fast asleep. I knew I had won her.
I have been “Mum” to literally thousands of children in Cambodia over the last 25 years. At the moment I’m helping 2500 children from families of local subsistence farmers through childcare and education, as well as about 120 who live in residential care in my two centres near Phnom Penh and in Siem Reap. These are the ones
who are disabled, emotionally disturbed, or who have been trafficked or abandoned.
Children don’t have any power over their lives. They are the most marginalised people in society, and that’s particularly true in Cambodia. There is no social welfare system – the only way some kids can eat is to sell drugs or their bodies. I’ve looked after children who have been injured through acid attacks or who have been burnt. They are maimed so they can beg more effectively. We give them good food, a solid education and lots of love. It transforms their lives – education is their ticket out of poverty.
But perhaps the biggest transformation has been in my own life. It’s been like a patchwork quilt. I have seen the world and lived the high life. But it is here that I have found peace.
I left school at 15. I fell seriously in love with a man, but it didn’t work out when we discovered I could never have children. We’re now very close, but at the time I was lost and didn’t know what to do with my life.
I joined the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) as a secretary. I thought it would be glamour and travel. I was hoping for Paris, Rome or Cairo, but at my posting meeting they told me I was going to Phnom Penh. I had never heard of it. I went to look it up and was trying to find it under ‘N’.
In 1970 I flew out to Cambodia, first class. I got blotto on French champagne and as we landed I noticed a few broken aircraft on the tarmac. The airport had been seriously hit the day before and ours was the last aircraft to land. I started to sober up around then. Driving through the streets I was shocked to see amputees begging, and whole villages with their cows and goats forced out of their homes by the carpet bombing, a policy of the Nixon/ Kissinger administration.
Every day trucks would come into the city carrying the dead and wounded from the front, and the air would be full of the screaming and crying of the families. To live dayto-day you just kept looking straight ahead so you wouldn’t see what was going on at your feet.
The life of the embassy was still cocktail parties every week. I remember wearing an evening gown with long gloves, carrying a bottle of champagne and stepping over the war-stricken refugees in the street. Looking back, I’m very ashamed of this.
I was still intent on trying to have a child and I tried to fill the gap by volunteering at the orphanages. One day an orphanage told me there was a seven month old found by a soldier in a cardboard box in the streets about to be eaten by dogs. She still has a scar on her arm from a bite. I was allowed to take her and I started legal proceedings to adopt her. I called her Lisa.
It took about two months before I realised she couldn’t hear and wasn’t developing as normal. I took her to an American doctor and found out she
had cerebral palsy. “She won’t hear or speak or walk or go to school,” he said. I gathered her up and went home.
I was single, she had disabilities, and I wasn’t going to be able to adopt her and bring her back to Australia. But the worst thing people can do is tell me I can’t do something. I pulled all the strings I could and Lisa stayed with me for seven years.
WE LEFT CAMBODIA IN 1973 and moved to the Philippines. By this time she was having grand mal seizures two or three times a week and needed 24-hour care. I was on my own and couldn’t cope. I went out and bought matching nighties for the two of us and a stack of sleeping pills. I was about to end both our lives when, for the first time ever, Lisa
looked straight into my eyes for two seconds and smiled. I couldn’t do it.
I put my daughter into care in South Australia – she’s still there, in her 40s now – and carried on with my life. The guilt of those years has never left me. During my 18 years with DFAT I lived in Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand, Iran and Washington DC. I married – and divorced – and by the time I was nearing 50 I weighed 124 kilograms. I was working for Chase Manhattan Bank in Sydney, and I was unbelievably dissatisfied with my life.
CRISIS SUPPORT LINES Lifeline Australia: 13 11 14 Lifeline New Zealand: 0800 543 354 Life Line Association Malaysia: 03-42657995 Samaritans of Singapore (SOS): 1800-221 4444
I spent my salary on jewellery, firstclass travel and catered dinner parties at home. I believed you weren’t a real woman if you didn’t have a mink coat. I was very decadent and self-absorbed. One day I was on the ferry and realised I’d teamed my emerald earrings with a ruby bracelet, and got off at the next stop so I could go back and change my jewellery. I never gave to charity; I’d walk behind beggars with tins so I didn’t have to part with 50 cents. Then I would go to the Sydney Opera House and have a $150 dinner with a girlfriend and say, “What a beautiful view” – and all the while a little voice would say in my head, Is this all there is?
After my divorce in 1990 I went back to Angkor Wat for a holiday and travelled there again in 1993, where I met the wife of Prince Norodom Ranariddh, the first prime minister of Cambodia. Princess Marie was running an orphanage and we stayed in touch. She would fax me every day at the office with requests for the kids. My mind was no longer on my job. Then one day I made a monumental stuff-up and got sacked. Now if I ran into the guy who fired me, I would thank him because without it, I would never have had the courage to move back to Cambodia.
It was three weeks before my 50th birthday, I was renting, and I had nothing to keep me in Sydney. Ranariddh knew I was helping his wife’s orphanage and offered me a job as an executive assistant in his small administrative cabinet. I wrote his speeches and designed their security and protocol manuals. My salary was US$100 a month, including a bedroom in the government guesthouse, a sack of rice and nine soft drinks! There was no air conditioning in the office and my sweat would drop on the correspondence, so they gave me a sheet of cardboard to use as a fan. “This is OK,” I told myself. “You are working for the royal family, you are back in politics and being intellectually stimulated, and you can help with the kids on the weekend.”
Ranariddh was in a coalition government with Hun Sen, the military leader, who was the second prime minister. Things were always difficult between the two of them. In July 1997, I could smell something was going on. A lot of the ministers were coming in and asking me to fill out visa applications for Australia and Canada.
“I’m very close to the 70 kids I live with – my house is their house, too”
I represented the cabinet on the evening of July 4, US Independence Day, and everyone was asking where Ranariddh was. I was angry because I didn’t know. The next morning there was no noise outside. I went out and there were thugs running down the street shooting people. It was a coup. [Following the takeover of power by Hun Sen, Ranariddh went into exile.]
All the embassies were leaving by plane. Everyone was saying, “Get on the bus, get on the bus” – but I couldn’t. I had already abandoned one Cambodian child. If I’d got on that bus I would never have had another moment’s peace for the rest of my life.
I made my way to the orphanage. When I finally got out there it was one of the most deeply meaningful experiences of my life. The kids had seen the planes and thought I would be gone, too. I drove through the gates and they lifted me out of the car. “Mum’s here, she didn’t go, she loves us, she’s really here!”
It was absolutely clear to me that this was going to be my life. From that day the kids have been everything.
THESE DAYS I LIVE IN A HOUSE on the property owned by my foundation. I don’t have a car, property or investments. I can’t get the pension because I don’t live in Australia. But I have never been richer in my life.
At the bank I was dealing with investments worth hundreds of millions of dollars. In Cambodia I’m dealing with requests from children asking to buy new thongs for $2.50. Not having the material things in life is a freedom. Cambodia has taught me that you need nothing more than a clean, safe place to sleep, food, money for your children to go to school and money to look after your health. Anything else Cambodians would call a luxury.
My riches come in other ways. I’m very close to the 70 kids I live with – my house is their house, too. We cook pancakes, watch YouTube. We talk about all the things kids talk to their mothers about. I make sure they all get vocational training or university scholarships so they can run a business one day and overcome the stigma of being an orphan in Cambodia.
Two years ago, for my 70th birthday, I was asked by one of my adult children to come on a cocktail cruise. More than 80 of my former kids turned up with their husbands, wives and children. I burst into tears.
Finding the money to keep going is a constant struggle – we need $3 million a year, so I spend a lot of time addressing conferences and telling people about what we are doing. But my future is in Cambodia. Because of the Khmer Rouge a whole generation of older people were lost, and my kids have never seen people with white hair. But I know the kids and staff will always care for me.
For more information, go to www.sunrisecambodia.org.au