Brooklyn Bridge to Cambodia began with the efforts of one woman, Paula Shirk, as a way of helping the birth parents and siblings of her son Rudi, adopted in 2003. Rudi, now eight years old, was born with the birth name Puth Chak to a woman named Ol Srun and her husband Chak. Because Chak left Srun when she was three months pregnant with three older children to raise, and because the family already was in desperate straits, Srun agreed in 2003, when Puth was 17 months, to give him up for adoption. Rudi was accompanied by a photo of his pretty, young birth mother and three birth siblings, two boys and a girl under ten. All stared into the camera of the adoption facilitator. All were clearly bewildered, sad, their makeshift hut behind them. Their faces showed hunger, for Rudi’s new mom, the photo became a motivating force. “I didn’t want Rudi at 18 to say to me, ‘You knew the despair my family lived in, and you did nothing.’”
And there begins a family’s story of renewal and recovery.
The income from this market stall is the family’s first step towards self-sufficiency and independence.
After considerable effort, Paula was able to locate the family with the help of a contact in Cambodia. Although the father had rejoined them in the meantime, the parents were unemployed and looking for work in a part of Cambodia still littered with landmines. The family moved back to Phnom Penh, living in a lean-to against the wall of a factory. During rainy season, their shelter would flood with sewage, and both Srun and the daughter became very ill. Through an exceptionally generous donation, the family was relocated to better housing.
When we first found the family they were living in this lean-to against a factory fence. They had no food.
Paula set the parents up in a market stall in Phnom Penh, and bought them a motor scooter to transport fish and vegetables to the market. Chak and Srun now work with a sugar cane machine, which they designed themselves, that makes a popular local drink. Profits from selling this drink have helped raise the family’s standard of living. Knowing how important it was for the children to get an education, Paula paid the school tuition for the surviving birth siblings, Sith, now 17, Srim, 14, and Sal, 12, at the Palm Tree Institute in Phnom Penh. BB2C has taken this expense on and the plan is for the parents to start contributing towards the tuition.
The three birth siblings are doing very well in school. Sith, Srim, and Sal have passed the final exams and all are eligible for moving up to higher grades in the next academic year, 2009-2010. Sith and Srim will go from Grade 5 to Grade 6, Sal will move up to grade 3.