History of CASF

One bitter cold February day at a Portland middle school I was reading my picture book, 'The Caged Birds of Phnom Penh', to a class when a young woman in the back of the room raised her hand and said, "Sir, isn't it so that this book is really about something deep in you?"

"What do you mean?" I asked.

The girl stammered a little then went on, "Well, I mean...something had to have happened to you in order for you to start a foundation. Were you for some reason the little girl in your book that made a wish and wanted the caged bird to fly free?"

Prior to this moment I had a lesson plan for the hour. Now I was unexpectedly challenged by a thirteen year old to look into my spiritual being while standing before 65 students. I was speechless, losing all sense of direction. The class was respectfully silent during my struggle to regain composure.

"You are quite right," I whispered. "Thank you."

My book was inspired by a photograph I saw from Phnom Penh and, after its completion, I decided to actually go to Cambodia to see the situation for myself. Much of what I learned there I did not relate to the class in Portland that day. I did not tell of my horror when first hearing of young girls being bought and sold for the sex trade. I did not share stories told by Cambodian human rights advocates of poor parents being offered a few dollars and promises of good jobs for their girls in the city; of these unknowing parents embracing their daughters for the last time as they were taken away to become part of the sex trafficking conspiracy in Souteast Asia. When I added these stories to the common practice of taking girls out of school for arranged marriages or to help with the family income and care of siblings, a profound silence overcame me; a deeper silence than the one in the middle school classroom that day.

When I returned to the US I realized I could not go back to living in the same way unless I was a part of the solution for nurturing and supporting girls' education in Cambodia. I am awed when I look over the past two years and see how a picture book led to setting up the CAMBODIAN ARTS AND SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDATION, the project to which I now devote my life.

Consider a theory for change coming from seemingly inconsequential events. It's called the "butterfly effect." In 1963, meteorologist Edward Lorenz remarked that if his theory were correct, one flap of a butterfly's wings would, when compounded in force over vast distances, be enough to alter the course of the weather on the other side of the world. This is exactly the way I feel about the impact of writing my book. In the beginning, nothing gave me the slightest hint of the remarkable journey I would travel from writing the book to celebrating today the two hundred Cambodian children the CASF is sponsoring in school. Let me add, not one of our schoolchildren has an address. Eee Arun lives along railroad tracks in the red light district of Phnom Penh. Chaan Mom lives in a shack on stilts over fetid water. Srey Lam lives in a village without running water or electricity and school is a ninety minute walk away. Our children, mostly girls, are typical of over seventy percent of the children in Cambodia.

So how does one get from writng a book to being part of changing the world ten thousand miles away? I have always been struck by the image of a monarch butterfly that flaps its wings while perched on a stem of milkweed in New England and, as a result, this charmed whisper of air ends up as a cooling breeze in Southeast Asia. All I have is the feeling something incredibly important is happening so I keep flapping my wings!

No wonder my book begins, "A yellow wind blew softley through the rice fields outside the city of Phnom Penh. Winds were yellow in Cambodia when they joined sunshine and sudden rains. They brought lush growth, and bowls of rice for children." Perhaps in some undefined moment when we are least expecting to be connected to the mysterious forces of the universe, a monarch butterfly slowly moves fragile wings on our behalf and the world changes somehow, some way...

Thank you for visiting the Cambodian Arts and Scholarship Foundation.

Frederick Lipp