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kartaMgBiBN’BIRbeTskm<úCa An Exhibition from Cambodia
The International Tour
2008 The UN Palais de Nations, Geneva, Switzerland
2009 - 2014 Germany, Kosovo, Slovakia, UK, Ireland, USA, Thailand, Australia A United Nations resolution declared 2005 as the International Year for Sports and Physical Education. It called for governments and international sports bodies to assist developing countries in building sports capacity owing to sport’s ability to foster values essential to social cohesion and intercultural dialogue. Sport, particularly the formation of athletic infrastructures such The Issue as the CNVLD’s league, has been recognised for making a huge contribution to economic and social development. Following the surprise success of the Cambodian National Team’s Silver medal in the 1999 Bangkok FESPIC games, history was made in Sydney 2000 when the first-ever Cambodian national team to participate in the Paralympics managed to defeat the host nation, Australia. Sport’s ability to facilitate intercultural dialogue was beautifully illustrated when the Cambodian The legacy of the landmine lives on in Cambodia. Between 2 and 3 million mines remain scattered across the Cambodian team quickly became the media stars of the entire Paralympic games. The CNVLD subsequently set their objective to countryside and cause up to 1,000 civilian casualties per year. This has given Cambodia the dubious distinction of having become the top-ranked disabled volleyball team in the world. the worldís highest percentage of amputees per capita. Over 70 percent of the disabled athletes who participate in the Cambodian National Volleyball League (Disabled) (CNVLD) are landmine survivors. The Cambodian squad has gone on to compete in the 2001 World Organisation of Volleyball Disabled (WOVD) World Cup in Slovakia, FESPIC in Korea 2002, and the WOVD World Cups in Greece (2003) and Canada (2005). In 2007, Cambodia The landmine problem traverses geographical boundaries. Worldwide, thousands of civilians are injured or killed annually. hosted the World Cup. The country’s first international sporting event in decades, it was a resoundingly popular competition The global campaign to eradicate landmines achieved an unprecedented coup with the 1997 Ottawa Treaty to Ban Landmines, that attracted thousands of spectators. which was signed by Cambodia but sadly not by nations such as the United States. Eleven years on, landmines remain a pervasive problem. Cambodian organisations such as the CNVLD play a key role within the international community by The national team is now ranked Number One in the Asia-Pacific region and Number Three in the world. using their grassroots experience to advocate against this most insidious and cynical of weapons.
The living legacy of landmines, the amputees, are an asset -- not a hindrance -- to Cambodia. Although disability traditionally brought social stigma, it is now the athletes with a disability who are at the vanguard of Cambodia’s sporting development. Christopher Minko Secretary General of the CNVLD Their athletic achievements have been lauded in the national Khmer media.
The CNVLD also has a high international profile owing to the success of its program. The effectiveness of its approach has earned it “ Best Practice ” status by the Swiss Academy of Development (SAD) and a UNESCO International Fair Play Award. In 2008 it was also recognised by the Nike – Changemakers competition as one of 16 global finalists.
The CNVLD’s innovative approach to sport and development has attracted the attention of the international media, including CNN, ESPN and the Washington Post. Good publicity leads to widespread popularity - the CNVLD’s players have been dubbed ‘The Harlem Globe Trotters of the Ban Landmines movement’ and this goodwill and visibility have been used to implement real change.
Sport can be seen as a symbolic blueprint of social values and cultural norms. It can generate behavioral changes and encourage values that are crucial to the processes of individual and collective socialization. On an individual level sport not only improves physical well-being, but also influences personal competencies such as self-confidence and leadership skills. At a collective level, sport can build social capital such as creating of tolerance and trust between or within communities and thereby strengthen group identities.
Sport has massive potential for sustainable development, peace-building activities, and social and cultural integration in developing and transitional nations. The CNVLD provides a perfect illustration of a “ best practice ” model using sport Chris Minko was educated in Australia and Germany, and came to development from a background in the Arts, exhibition design and in large-scale event management. within development. In countries like Cambodia where conflict has left a tangible mark, the rehabilitative and reconciliatory Working in Australia, on amongst other things, the AFL, he then became involved in organising cultural exchanges between ASEAN nations and Australia. “Throughout my capacity of sport is highly apparent. Sporting programs like the CNVLD are an effective way of furthering the physical, career, in all fields I have worked in, I have placed an emphasis on the involvement of the disadvantaged”. psychological, social and economic rehabilitation of landmine survivors, former soldiers and other victims of war. Arriving in Cambodia in 1996 as an Australian Volunteer International (AusAID) with a mandate to work with Cambodian disability groups in order to generate awareness – both intra and internationally – of the insidious root cause of disability in Cambodia: Landmines. He has been working towards these aims with the CNVLD for the past 12 years using the unique power of team sport to foster social cohesion and civil society development.
Minko has been working on this exhibition as a labour of love for the past 10 years and is a firm believer in showcasing, via this exhibition, to the international community, a new positive and unique perspective of Cambodia, an internationally recognised leader in landmine clearance and landmine survivor rehabilitation programs. “ Cambodia remains one of the top three nations most affected by the proliferation of landmines and UXO, after Afghanistan and Angola ”
John Vink was born in Belgium in 1948. He studied photography at the fine arts school of La Cambre in 1968 and has been a freelance journalist since 1971. He joined Agence Vu in Paris in 1986 and won the Eugene Smith Award for his work on Water in Sahelí that same year. Between 1987 and 1993 he devoted his energies to a major work on refugees in the world. He became a full member of Magnum Photos in 1997. He first visited Cambodia in 1989 and has used the kingdom as his base since 2000. Besides documenting the social and political John Vink situation and the Khmer Rouge tribunal, he is working on a major essay about land issues in Cambodia. Luke Duggleby
Luke Duggleby is a British freelance photographer based in Bangkok, Thailand. Born in 1977 in the north of England, Luke completed a photography degree from the UK and then immediately left the UK for Asia. Ever since he has photographed cultural and social issues throughout the continent. In 2003 he joined OnAsia, an Asian specialist photo agency, and regularly undertakes assignments for some of the world’s most respected publications and NGOs. In 2006 and 2007 he was ‘Highly-Commended’ and ‘Commended’ for his portfolio in the Travel Photographer of the Year Award; in 2006, he also won the Environmental category in Canada’s prestigious Banff Mountain Photography Award. In 2008 his first book project, “The Invisible Side of Paradise”, which he has been docmenting for the last five years in a remote mountainous region of southwest China, will be published in Italy.
“ Sport has a unique power to effect positive, sustainable social change ” Hacky Hagemeyer
“ Sport can be a low cost and effective means to foster positive health and
Hacky Hagemeyer was born in 1961 in Schotmar, Germany. In 1992 he founded ‘Transparent’, a photography agency well-being for persons in Cologne, Germany. He spent over a decade as a freelance photographer covering conflicts in Yugoslavia, Eritrea, Algeria, with a disability ” Congo and Rwanda for numerous international publications. In 2002 he had his first solo exhibition, ‘Looks on Eritrea’, which travelled to Eritrea, Yemen and France. In 2005 he initiated the Edelweisspiraten Festival in Germany to commemorate the activities and music of the anti-Nazi youth movement, ‘Edelweisspiraten’. The project won the History Award in 2006. He has also produced various film documentaries, such as ‘Gregor Gysi’with the director Maik Bialk. His work on various photo and video documentaries includes ‘Tsunami - One Year After’ for NGOs in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Since 2006, he has also worked as a video trainer for GTZ, a German government organisation, in the United Arab Emirates. “ 70% of the CNVLD athletes are amputee survivors of the Landmine ”
Michael Huber
Michael Huber was born in Germany in 1954. He studied mechanical engineering, received a degree in occupational safety and currently works at the Hospital of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Since he got his first camera at the age of six, photography has been his passion. Besides travel and event photography, he has worked for the CNVLD for almost a decade; his photographs and stories about sports for the disabled have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers. Armed Art by Don Bosco Cambodia / Val Sutherland Cambodia’s weapon destruction program Photographs by Chhor Sokunthea The sculptures and furniture on display have been fabricated by the students of the Don Bosco Technical School Phnom Penh under the supervision of Australian Business Volunteer Mr Val Sutherland from scrap metal officially provided through the Government of the Kingdom of Cambodia’s weapon destruction programme. A League of Their Own “You look at these athletes who, 6 to 10 years ago, were mostly beggars in the street,’’ says league founder Chris Minko when I meet him in late 2006. “The money allows these people to create small businesses and send their kids to school. It’s an enormous privilege what I do. They’re remarkable people.’’
An essay by Christopher R. Cox Minko, 50, an intense man with a bone-breaking handshake, grew up poor in an Australian bush town as the son of World War II refugees. Trained as an With photographs by Luke Duggleby artist, he has always empathised with underdogs, whether directing a documentary film about Irish Republican Army hunger strikers or designing provocative
Aboriginal-themed parade floats. For five years, he also organised half-time events for the Grand Final – the championship mayhem that is Australian rules You get to the village of Prek Ampil by taking a rusting Phnom Penh ferry across the flood-stage Mekong River, then haggling with a motorcycle-taxi driver for football. In 1996, he volunteered to help raise awareness of landmines and disability in Cambodia, a place with a surplus of tragedy. A savvy promoter, Minko an eight-kilometre scramble up the left bank. Halfway there, in a hamlet where every hut has a scarecrow to ward off vampires, the monsoon renders the dirt quickly hit upon team sports as an ideal vehicle; volleyball, the de facto national pastime, was a natural choice. Amputees could play the game standing up lane impassable. Time to wallow in the mire. Hopefully the scarecrows will keep any monsters at bay; this is Cambodia, and ghosts are everywhere. on prostheses, observing standard volleyball rules. “I’m a firm advocate of the unique potential of sport over and above anything else to reach out and effect Luckily the man I’ve travelled this far to see is waiting just beyond a crew of hoe-wielding monks. Barefoot and smiling, Chim Phan stands in the brick-red positive social change,’’ Minko says. “It’s a unifier like no other entity.’’ muck besides his cousin’s Khmer-style SUV: a horse-drawn cart. One of the country’s most decorated athletes swings effortlessly onto the wagon and shyly beckons me to board; it’s only then that I notice the lighter colour of the mud-flecked prosthetic right leg that has been Phan’s special curse.
The 38-year-old amputee has plenty of company. Four others in this settlement of 1,000 families have lost limbs to land mines; no one knows how many millions more explosives still poison the countryside. An estimated 50,000 Cambodians – or 1 person in 240 -- have been maimed by the lethal legacy of decades of warfare. Road accidents, polio and other birth defects have crippled even more, giving the benighted kingdom one of the world’s highest rates of disability.
Not too long ago, Phan’s grievous injury would have meant a life sentence of grinding poverty on the margins of Khmer society. He had little education, one good leg, and, by Buddhist reckoning, a boatload of bad karma. But Phan and scores of other broken men have enjoyed a very different fate because of a unique athletic endeavor, the Cambodian National Volleyball League (Disabled). The most gifted, such as Phan, also compete for a national side ranked first in
Asia and third in the world – an astounding feat for a developing nation where subsistence farmers or fishermen comprise 80 percent of the population.
Consider this: the entire annual budget of the CNVLD – equipment, uniforms, referees, transport, stipends for coaches and players - runs about US$150,000.
The same money, in American sports terms, that pays a baseball player like Boston Red Sox slugger Manny Ramirez for a single game in a 162-contest season supports 150 disabled Cambodian players and their families for an entire year. Chim Phan looks out of the window of his house located approximately 30 kilometres west of the capital Phnom Penh.
More than 30 years of conflict had calcified training and technique, so Minko brought in Western coaches to upgrade the stolid, East German style. He
also searched for athletes, no matter the sport; in a former prison 30 kilometres west of Phnom Penh he found Phan, an accomplished runner who made
wheelchairs for a living. Like every Cambodian of his generation, Phan has suffered and survived repeated hardship. He was just seven, with one year of
schooling, when the Khmer Rouge stole his childhood. Pol Pot emptied Cambodia’s towns and turned the kingdom into a giant gulag; from 1975 to 1979, an
estimated 1.7 million people would be executed or perish from disease or famine, including several of Phan’s relatives. The Khmer Rouge removed the
children of Prek Ampil from their families and formed youth slave-labour brigades to work rice paddies and tend animals. Slowly starving on a diet of watery
rice porridge, Phan hunted birds with a slingshot and frogs with his bare hands to survive. To avoid the soldiers’ punishment, he ate his kills raw in the fields.
He had no time, or energy, for sports. Chris Minko, founder of the CNVLD, takes a coffee break at his favourite street stall. Only after Pol Pot was chased from power did some semblance of normalcy return. A guerrilla war ground on, but Buddhist temples reopened, small businesses started, home gardens sprouted. After a two-year hitch in the Cambodian army, Phan returned to Prek Ampil and took up the peasant life, planting rice, raising After moping at home for six months Phan heard about Banteay Prieb (“Center of the Dove”), a cattle, cultivating corn, bananas, and papayas. In 1990, he married a local girl, Prek Polly; their daughter, Srey Thea, arrived the following year and a son, Jesuit charity built atop a onetime Khmer Rouge killing field. It would take two hours by horsecart,
Lyheat, was born in 1993. Rangy and 1.79 metres in height – tall by Khmer standards – Phan also became the top volleyball player in Prek Ampil. “I wanted to ferry, and decrepit bus for Phan just to get to Banteay Prieb, but its carpentry-training program be the best in the village,’’ says Phan. offered a trade and a chance at a new life.
When people first come, they’ve completely lost hope,’’ says Sister Denise Coghlan, OSM, an
Australian-born nun who directs the program. “Then they start to learn a skill. And they learn other
people are in the same boat.’’ Phan studied for a year, learning to operate drill presses and table
saws and to expertly mitre cuts, then got a job making seats and foot rests for wheelchairs built by
Banteay Prieb’s on-site workshop. It is a humming operation, with 23 disabled employees sawing
and hammering, welding and assembling 1,000 wheelchairs a year for needy men, women, and
children across the country.
“I can help other disabled people,’’ Phan relates. “I see the chairs I’ve made around Cambodia. It
gives me a lot of pride.’’ During breaks, he also began running and playing volleyball. It wasn’t long
before Sister Denise noticed the superior athletic skills and serious sense of purpose of the Chim Phan stands with a wheelchair that he helped make at the “quiet bloke.” In 1997, she sent Phan to Paris, France, where he rode a three-wheeled pedicab to Centre of the Dove at Banteay Prieb where he works. Brussels, Belgium, an eye-catching stunt that garnered global media coverage for the International Chim Phan changes protheses in his lodgings at Banteay Prieb to go for a run. Campaign to Ban Landmines. And she encouraged his nascent track career. “It’s very good for other
people with disabilities to see someone who’s participating,’’ she says. “He’s got this champion attitude.
Still, athletic success in war-ravaged Cambodia counted for far less than good land or a productive cow, which could keep a growing family from destitution. He’s probably not the absolute best at teamwork in volleyball, because he’s so much better than a lot
Phan’s gruelling life got grimmer on a dry-season morning in 1995 as he hiked into a mine-riddled forest to gather firewood. He’d walked the faint trail before, of the other players.’’ but this time his luck ran out. There was an explosion, followed by searing pain: a Type 72 anti-personnel mine had shredded his lower right leg. It took four hours for friends to carry Phan home and load him into a small motorboat for the dash to a Phnom Penh hospital, where doctors amputated his shattered limb. With a Malaysian-made running prosthetic, Phan has covered 100 metres in just 12.15 seconds and 400 metres in 57.17 seconds. That athleticism
Fitted with a prosthetic leg, Phan shunned therapy. “I’ll go home and learn by myself,’’ he told his nurses. and focus also won Phan a spot on the national volleyball team preparing for the 2000 Paralympics. Outfitted with rudimentary $200-prostheses, the Cambodians
finished seventh out of eight in Sydney, Australia, then fourth the following year at the World Organisation of Volleyball for Disabled (WOVD) competition
He would not do gait training at an amputee-clogged rehabilitation centre, struggling up ramps and lurching through tyres. Instead, following his four-month in Slovakia. In 2002, they won the Far East championships. That same year, Minko launched an eight-team league with backing from non-governmental hospital convalescence, he returned to Prek Ampil. Phan spent the monsoon in his cramped wooden hut, listening to the rain beat against the tin roof, too organisations (NGOs) working with disabled Cambodians. It was a radical notion: marginalised amputees who publicly avoided displaying their prosthetics depressed to visit even his closest friends. He was 27, with a young wife, two children under five years old, and no prospects. would don shorts and jerseys to compete in a mainstream sport complete with mascots and media coverage.
“I thought I’d be unhappy forever,’’ Phan recalls softly, in Khmer. “I can’t do anything in the future. Sometimes I just wanted to die. I was very sad. I don’t want to live.’’ Phan joined the Phnom Penh Sunway Dragons, but left halfway through the season. According to Minko, the enigmatic player was still coming to grips with his In 2006, because of interest in outlying provinces, the CNVLD expanded from 8 to 15 teams. Minko also landed corporate donors such as express-mail disastrous performance in a crucial match at the 2001 Worlds. Caught in transit during the 9/11 attacks, it had taken the Cambodian team five stressful days service DHL, which put up US$7,000 to sponsor the Siem Reap Eagles, additional NGOs, and even the International School of Phnom Penh, whose students just to arrive in Slovakia. Facing a well-organised Polish squad, Phan had decided to be The Man. He ignored the coaches’ game plan and his teammates and raised enough funds through bake sales and a fun run to co-sponsor the Takeo Falcons. tried to single-handedly spike Cambodia to victory. Instead, his stubborn free-lancing collapsed his team. “They could have reached Number 3,’’ Minko says It was money well-spent, says John Lowrie, country director for Ockenden, a British charity backing the Sisophon Cranes in rural western Cambodia: “Given flatly, “and Chim Phan kept them to Number 4.’’ how many people that money helps, it transforms their lives. It gives them an identity, a social status, a sense of worth. It promotes social inclusion.’’
Long-time national captain Cha Hok, who coaches the Kampong Speu AusAid Kangaroos, agrees: “Phan’s a good player, but he’s too proud. He thinks for That involvement and reintegration even extends to former Khmer Rouge cadre representing a new entrant from Pailin, a remote, formerly autonomous himself.’’ Phan won’t say much about the incident, except that he had promised his track coach he would return to sprinting. In short order, he again began municipality along the Thai border that was a final rebel stronghold. Seven of the 10-man Pailin Hawks have a Khmer Rouge pedigree; two other players, racking up medals in running competitions throughout Asia. Korea. Vietnam. The Philippines. incredibly, were government soldiers.
“Slovakia was a hard trip for everyone,’’ Minko relates. “We all came back physically and emotionally exhausted. “You look at these guys and you think: Six or seven years ago, they were still shooting at each other,’’ says Gio Tatti, then the country director for AustCare, an
“Chim Phan’s such an independent individual he just went away. He kept on running.’’ Australian NGO underwriting the Hawks. “I get this morbid thought: How many of those missing legs were caused by people in this league?’’
In addition to widespread recognition – league matches are covered by Khmer TV stations and newspapers as well as the English-language Phnom Penh
Post – CNVLD players also receive a stipend. $6 a week for training and $10 for weekend games may seem ridiculously meager, but the steady paycheck is a
godsend. The money helped bring Phan back into the league.
“I get a lot of medals from running, but there’s nobody to help me,’’ says Phan. “I’m still poor. Volleyball helps me a little bit. I get money every weekend.’’
“From the money I make playing sports I built a house,’’ says Phan, who replaced his old wooden home with a sturdier timber-and-concrete structure. The
open ground floor holds a kitchen and a pen for several cows; upstairs, he and his wife
share an expansive room with their children, Phan’s younger brother, and his father-in-law.
It’s a humble space: several mattresses separated by mosquito nets, a simple bureau with
a battery-powered boom box and TV. A player for the Pailin Hawks sits on a motorbike after arriving for training.
It is a solitary, ascetic life. His wife and three children – he also has a six-year-old daughter, Phan Cheat – still live in Prek Ampil, a prohibitively long, expensive Despite his international athletic success, there’s no Ego Wall filled with medals and commute from his job. During the week, Phan shares a single-room house behind Banteay Prieb with seven male co-workers - a rough-hewn place with trophies. Phan’s neighbours never knew the quiet man played in the CNVLD until they saw nudie pin-ups on the planked walls, simple wooden lockers, and an outhouse. For an hour each morning before work, and again every evening, Phan does him in a match televised on Khmer TV. calisthenics and then runs two or three kilometres along dirt lanes that cut through the rice paddies and small hamlets of rural Kandal province. Then he settles Chim Phan walks out of his lodgings at Banteay Prieb to go for a run after onto a rusting weight bench in the shade of the trees and lifts. Twelve reps each with 10-kilogram dumbbells and 50-kilogram barbells. Three sets apiece, having just put on his running prosthetic. coupled with running and his simple diet, as well as two-a-day volleyball training sessions on the weekends, have molded Phan into a ripped, 67-kilogram “The guy simply loves sports,’’ Minko observes. athlete with single-digit body fat. “Now I’m strong again, like before my injury,’’ he says. “I’m disabled, but I’m still strong.’’ In the evenings, his roommates That simple equation amplifies Phan’s return to volleyball. The CNVLD is the best-run competition in a country too often coloured by chaos and corruption. hook up a cheap TV to a car battery and watch Khmer variety shows, Thai soap operas, and best of all – English Premier League matches. “Nistelrooy… More than money, Phan is motivated by a gym rat’s love for the game and an elite athlete’s drive to measure himself against other men in the arena. “Even
Lampard,’’ Phan says in English, citing his favorite players. “Man U.’’ though I lost my lower leg, I can still play the same as before,’’ he says. “I’m still the best player.’’ Phan apologises that he can’t show me any snapshots from overseas. “When friends come to visit, they take a few photos home with them,’’ he explains. 25-19, Sunway.
“They want to see the places I’ve been. They’re proud of me. I have a disability, but I can go to another country.’’ He smiled: “They don’t return the pictures. Siemens hangs tough in the second game. But at 14-all, a perfect pass drops harmlessly between Phan and a teammate. From the sidelines, Sunway player-
They are in their homes forever.’’ His unlikely life, the distant wonders he’s seen, displayed like talismans in huts all across Prek Ampil. That is respect. What coach Chuon Kim Horn begins hooting. Loudly. Relentlessly. The rattled Demons repeatedly hit long or serve into the net. Meanwhile, Veasna windmills kill more could a man want? after kill, prompting more cackling from Horn.
Achievement takes many forms. For Minko, it’s the high employment rate of his athletes. The league’s United Nations recognition for “best practices’’ in 25-16, Sunway. sports and development. The creation of a wheelchair-racing program for women and double amputees and “Armed Art,’’ a travelling exhibit that began an Late in the third game and with Sunway in cruise control, Horn inserts himself - all the better to bask in victory. But Siemens runs off four points in a row, international tour in 2008. And the counterfeit T-shirts with the league’s logo – a prosthetic leg and volleyball – he’s spotted for sale in Phnom Penh’s central including a Phan spike, making it 23-18. Then, a poor Siemens serve; on match point, Phan’s blast catches the net and falls short. Game, set, $40. market. The knock-offs, Minko says with a smile, are “the true definition of success.’’ A Murderball-like intensity now ripples through the CNVLD. Minko “I didn’t perform well,’’ Phan says afterwards. “I’ll have to try harder. Man Veasna’s on two legs and he jumps very high.’’ boosted first-place prize money from $500 to $3,000 per team, and from $300 to $2,000 for the runner-ups. Even divided among 10 players, it’s about what a
Cambodian farmer earns in a year. “I’ll have more money to help my family,’’ says Phan. “I’ll keep it at home a long time – not use it to buy a lot of things. That means more road work, more weight training, more volleyball drills. Phan wants a piece of the Grand Final prize money and a World Cup roster spot.
If people in my family get sick, I’ll use the money to help them buy medicine or pay for a doctor.’’ Off the court, however, his life requires no improvement. He has a fulfilling job, a loving wife and three healthy children, the respect of his neighbours, the
opportunity to travel far beyond Prek Ampil. Many able-bodied Cambodians should be so fortunate.
The National Football League would blanch at the tampering, but several teams recruited aggressively to improve their odds at grabbing the small fortune. As an afternoon storm gathers above Banteay Prieb, I ask Phan to imagine what his life would be like if he hadn’t lost his leg. He’d still be in his village, he
Phan shifted from a Kampong Speu club to the Phnom Penh Siemens Demons, a perennial contender led by national-team server Ly Seng Hay. “Last year we replies, farming, raising a few cattle. It would be a peasant’s fate, just like before his injury. The work would be difficult, the money uncertain. Now he had a were third,’’ Hay relates. “Since he joins my team I hope we can be second or first. He’s a good player.’’ full-time job making wheelchairs and, in volleyball, extra income. He helps thousands of strangers. He also supports his family. His simple life has meaning
For standouts, there’s also the potential for glory: following the December 3 Grand Final, a new national team will be selected for the 2007 WOVD World Cup, and dignity. “I wouldn’t be happy raising cattle,’’ he replies. which will be held in Phnom Penh. Phan will then be almost 40; it may be his last, best shot. “He really wants to be on the national team,’’ says Minko. “I know A rumble of thunder, the wind rustling the big trees, and the rains begin. Chim Phan says goodbye and dashes across the old killing field to the cover of his him well enough to accept that Chim Phan’s very much an individual and a loner. But over the years he’s started to understand what a team sport is. We all workshop, running with an easy grace, one step ahead of the downpour. know he’s one of the ones we need. “Sure, he’s stubborn, but that’s not a bad thing at all.’’
The summer monsoon wrought havoc on the CNVLD’s schedule, but there’s no alternative season for the competition: many players are farmers, and the wet is their only down time. On this weekend, the deluge is compounded by the threat of Typhoon Xanglane, so there is time only for a “friendly’’ between two
Phnom Penh rivals, the Siemens Demons and the Sunway Dragons. The latter club has won every league title behind three national-team players, especially a high-flying, one-armed attacker, Man Veasna.
The players arrive by motorbike, already wearing their uniforms, and begin kidding around. Phan, however, stands quietly on the fringes, looking like an earnest salesman in his dark-blue dress shirt, khaki slacks, and black suede shoes. He is all business as he strips to his skivvies on the sideline, tightens the leather straps of his prosthetic legs, and dons his Demons kit.
Man Veasna stumbles after returning the ball in a game between the Sunway The teams face off and Minko lays out the rules: 25-point games. Best of five sets. And a $40-purse. “What about second prize?’’ Phan asks. “Nothing,’’ Dragons and Siemen Demons.
Minko replies. “Winner takes all.’’ Siemens bolts into an early lead behind Hay and Phan, who has enough hop on one leg to stuff several Sunway shots.
But Veasna, 27, who lost his right arm at age 12 to a cluster bomb, has two good wheels and at least a one-metre vertical leap. His teammates keep digging In 2007, Phan changed teams and played for the Sunway Dragons, which again won the CNVLD championship. All the hours of lifting and kilometres of out Siemens’ shots, then setting up the easy-going country boy for thunderous spikes. After one facial, Veasna flashes a broad smile and woofs at the running paid off; he was also selected for the Cambodian national disabled volleyball team, which placed third in the WOVD world championships held in
Siemens front line: “You cannot block me!’’ December in Phnom Penh. He still works at Banteay Prieb. To be Deter-Mined An Exhibition from Cambodia
A project of the Government of Cambodia and the Cambodian National Volleyball League (Disabled)
Patron: The Prime Minister of Cambodia Samdech Akeamohasenapadey Decho Hun Sen “ Sport can bring ex-foes together in a competitive The Exhibition gratefully acknowledges the assistance of: H.E Sok An : Deputy Prime Minister and Minister in Charge of the Council of Ministers team context and does play an essential role in conflict H.E Sar Keng: Deputy Prime Minister H.E Ith Sam Heng: Minister for Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation resolution, reconciliation and the rehabilitation of H.E Om Yeng Tieng: Special Advisor to the Prime Minister Oknha Suor Pheng landmine survivors ”
The Governments of Cambodia, Australia, Canada, Germany and Switzerland, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), the Swiss Agency for Cooperation and Development, the UN Palais des Nations, the Minko Family Trust, the Suor Srun family, ANZ Bank (Australia), ANZ Royal Bank (Cambodia), International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
A special thanks to the athletes with a disability of Cambodia and Thea Ruggia, Olivia Denonville, Louise Barber, Corinne Suor, Jimmy Baeck, Anya Minko, Chris Middleton, Stephen Higgins, Dean Cleland, Carole Ogelsby, Andrew Minko, Boros Sam Heng, Tassilo Brinzer and Christian Zepp
The Exhibition: To be Deter-Mined Technical credits:
Exhibition design / Curator: Christopher Minko
The Photographers Luke Duggleby ( UK - Thailand) John Vink ( Belgium - Cambodia) Michael Huber (Germany - Cambodia) Hacky Hagemeyer ( Germany) Chor Sokunthea ( Cambodia )
The sculptures: Don Bosco Cambodia + Val Sutherland Booklet design: Luke Duggleby / Christopher Minko Texts: Christopher Cox / Christopher Minko / Neil Wilford Front cover image by Luke Duggleby
www.standupcambodia.net Suor Srun Entreprise 5 Euro
All proceeds go to CNVLD landmine survivor athletes