Monn Sokchea
Killing Fields Survivor/Teacher, Phnom Penh, Cambodia

“Vietnamese army were around us all. The people were so scared and ran as hard at they could. Suddenly my parents disappeared and left me with the big crowd! I couldn’t run like the adults but I kept running as hard as I could with the people!”
E -mail Correspondence, Sokchea

Sokchea’s words surged off the page and mesmerized Canadian teacher Terri-Anne Wilson, who would eventually collaborate with Sokchea to form the ‘New Generation Kindergarten’ in Phnom Penh.

Sokchea spent his precious childhood living from hand to mouth, scratching the surface of his war-torn country for meals, love and an education wherever and whenever he could. This continued until Pol Pot’s regime ended three years, eight months and twenty eight days after the first crack of gun fire shattered his family’s existence. Instead of dabbling in finger paint and lisping along to alphabet songs, Sokchea learned life’s lessons at the barrel end of a gun. When the regime was toppled, many believed that things would improve for the downtrodden people. It was not to be. The legacy of Pol Pot’s crippling regime remained, visible not only in the thousands of skeletons that litter Cambodia’s terrain, but in the poverty, pestilence, child sex trade and biggest AIDS crisis in all of Asia. Sadly, these remain some of the hallmarks of this country’s existence. As Sokchea grew into a man, rather then choose to follow many of his people in a life of corrupt practices in order to survive, he found a way to serve his people and help usher in a new generation of Khmers who would work together to mend the shattered state of his society. Facing insurmountable odds, a corrupt state and a penniless, inexperienced and often uneducated population, Sokchea founded the New Generation Kindergarten in October, 2001 with a sampling of donated school supplies, a tiny room and twenty dollars in paint to coat its filth and shabbiness.