The Global Child: Lessons on the Tenacity of the Human Spirit
Photographs by Robbie Flick '08

First Floor, Nott Memorial
May 29, 2009 - June 14, 2009

Cambodia: we are all too familiar with the horror stories. Millions of citizens systematically exterminated for reasons ranging from wearing glasses to speaking a foreign language.  The Khmer Rouge, intent on returning Cambodia to a ‘purer’ communist agrarian society, was responsible for the deaths of roughly 1/5 of Cambodia’s population – approximately 1.5 million people. Thirty years later and Cambodia still suffers the ruins wrought by that destructive regime. Suffering, corruption, and despair prevail.

It is far too easy to become consumed by these forces. Pity, judgment, condemnation, dehumanization, and indifference are our pitiful defense mechanisms when approaching the reality of the human condition in the developing world, mechanisms we adopt far too quickly, mechanisms that blind us. Amidst the rubble strewn across this land glints a myriad of tiny seeds of hope sprouting up from the desolate past. These seeds are sown by the next generation of young Cambodians, a generation rising from their nation’s troubled past, shrugging off its crippling, haunting shadow of history and taking a stand for their belief in a better future. These are the children that hail from Cambodia’s roughest slums and dedicate their lives to an education, with the fervent belief that it will bring them a more fulfilled and balanced life than that which they have known in the slums. These are the students who will, and already are, changing the face of a troubled land with their spirit and enthusiasm.  We have much to learn from them.

The individuals in The Global Child: Lessons on the Tenacity of the Human Spirit are students at a specialty school in northern Cambodia for street working children. A number of the students are without a family, and those with families are often victims of negligence, abuse, and exploitation.  They have come to TGC to build a better future for themselves.  The school provides the support network and opportunities that these students never had; students live, eat, study, play, and grow at the school.  In their dogged pursuit of a better future, despite the personal horrors they and their compatriots have suffered, these young students are an allegory for the tenacity of the universal human spirit, and a lesson of its power to surmount even the most difficult odds. 

As I worked with these students in Cambodia I was shocked by the enthusiasm they showed for life despite the tragedy of their individual pasts. I present to you an attempt to convey this enthusiasm through photography, and to reveal a different side of Cambodia than is often focused on; a generation of Cambodians with high hopes who are already exercising their potential. All proceeds from this exhibition will benefit The Global Child in its mission to empower at-risk street children of this generation and give them the opportunity to pursue a better future for themselves and their nation.

We all have much to learn from these young Cambodians. Through them, we can strive to better understand all individuals living in abject poverty. By awakening our universal humanity, we can be cognizant of the boundless potential in every human being.  It is by recognizing, empowering, and harnessing this potential that we can begin making the changes we all recognize are desperately needed in our modern era.

 –  Robbie Flick