The Daily Struggle to Shelter Orphans From the Storm
Geraldine Cox doesn’t seem the likeliest candidate to run an orphanage. No Mother Theresa, she peppers her conversation with expletives, and her long hair is dyed several shades of red and pink. But the outgoing 56-year-old Australian, who describes herself as “the milkman’s daughter,” has run the Sunrise Children’s Village in Cambodia since 1993.
Her life and work provides the focus of a “Cinemax Reel Life” documentary, “My Khmer Heart,” premiering Tuesday.
Written, directed and produced by Janine Hosking and narrated by Peter Ustinov, “My Khmer Heart” was filmed over three years and chronicles Cox’s battles to keep the orphanage open amid political strife in the country. It has been an uphill battle.
Two years ago, Cox almost lost the orphanage when its owner, Cambodia’s Princess Marie--the wife of the country’s former leader, Prince Norodom Ranariddh--told Cox that she and the children had to vacate the premises. So Cox turned to the new prime minster, Hun Sen, for help. Much to Cox’s surprise, the prime minster gave her more than 10 acres of free land to build a new orphanage.
“The documentary has a happy ending,” Cox said during a recent interview in Los Angeles. “But I haven’t had success in raising the money to build what we need on the site. I have raised enough money to build a dike to stop the floodwaters. I raised enough money to put up a fence and another $55,000 to do the earthworks program [to get the land ready for construction of dormitories].”
For the last year, Cox, her staff and 53 orphans have been living in a rented villa.
“When I say a rented villa, I don’t mean a villa,” Cox says. “It’s just a small, five-bedroom house, and there are over 60 of us in those bedrooms,” she said. “The children, the staff and myself, and the kids are sleeping in hammocks. We don’t have a kitchen, so we cook outside in the weather, we eat outside in the weather, we prepare food outside in the weather, and during the rainy season for four months of the year, we were up to our knees in water in the girls’ dorm.... We often don’t have enough water to flush toilets. So it is less than ideal living. It is Third World living.”
That said, she added: “When I compare myself to the Cambodians who live pretty much like we live all the time, I don’t think I can go back to the government and say, ‘Give me money.’ He has already done more for us than he has for a lot of his own people.”
To raise the $1 million to build dormitories and a school, Cox has gone on the college lecture circuit in America. “I am hoping that word will get around that I am a good speaker, and I might be able to raise money through lecture tours as well,” she said.
Hollywood has also embraced her cause. Danny Glover, Matt Damon and several other celebrities held a screening of “My Khmer Heart” and a silent auction at the Directors Guild of America last month. Currently, a celebrity auction for the orphanage is taking place at www.cambodianheart.org.
It has been estimated that more than 500,000 children were orphaned during the genocide of Cambodia’s Khmer Rhouge regime of the 1970s, and the country has been mired in poverty and political instability ever since. Several of the Sunrise children lost their parents to civil war, while others were given up because families no longer could take care of them.
Cox was never able to have children. Thirty years ago, she adopted a Cambodian orphan baby, Lisa, who was later diagnosed as both mentally and physically challenged. When Lisa was 7, Cox realized she couldn’t care for her daughter properly.
“She’s in Australia,” she said quietly. “I haven’t seen her for two years because I need a bottle of gin and tonic to prepare myself before I go see her. I have never been able to accept the fact she doesn’t know who I am. So I need to get myself pretty pickled before I go. The people who take care of her, I am in touch with them all the time. I am very fragile when I go visit her.”
A heartbreaking sequence in the documentary shows a widow giving Cox her three young daughters because she can’t afford to keep them. Cox acknowledged identifying with the woman because of her experience with Lisa.
“I reached the stage where I couldn’t provide the right care, so I pulled myself together and found people who could take care of her,” Cox said. “This woman had also reached the end of her ability to care for her kids properly. It wasn’t through her lack of love--it was the opposite. So when I hugged that woman, I really knew what she was feeling.”
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“My Khmer Heart” airs Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. on Cinemax.
