Thirty years after being ravaged by war and genocide, Cambodia is still one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. The Khmer people struggle to find the basic necessities of life. They are more likely to have a cell phone than access to running water or a toilet. Unfortunately, no one suffers more than the children. Seven percent of children don’t live to the age of one. And those that make it often have to go it alone. Over ten percent of Cambodian children are orphans.
Wat Opot orphanage is a NGO trying to make a difference against these long odds. It is a community for children and parents affected by HIV and AIDS in Cambodia. Â Not every child is HIV positive, but all have been impacted, whether being orphaned after losing their parents to the disease, or forced to seek assistance because their sick parents cannot support them. Wat Opot provides them a place to live, food to eat, an education to help reverse the vicious cycle of poverty, and health care and medicine to grow up healthy. In a country were HIV and AIDS still carries a stigma and people can be ostracized, Wat Opot is a safe haven where kids can just be kids.
But it's easy to forget when you're with these fantastic, energetic kids what a long and deadly journey it's been. When Wat Opot began, HIV was a death sentence in Cambodia. Â Drugs to keep the disease at bay were too rare or expensive to be readily available. Â And the stigma associated with HIV and AIDS was such that families would kick their own sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, out of the house when they were sick and most in need of help. Â Crematoriums would refuse the bodies. Â Wat Opot was forced to build its own crematorium to dispose of its dead. Â Of the 1,500 children and parents Wat Opot has helped over the last ten years, 500 ended up here. Thankfully, medicine has turned that tide and this year this awful oven has only been used twice.