True grit: from Hollywood to the horrors of a Phnom Penh rubbish dump
Haunted by images of destitute children scavenging through a Phnom Penh rubbish dump, Scott Neeson turned his back on a high-flying career in Hollywood to start a charity. Tibor Krausz finds out how the former movie mogul has transformed scores of lives
As radical transformations go, you'd be hard pushed to find any that have been as Cinderella-like as that of Ang Srey Mom. A mere five years ago, the Cambodian teen was a malnourished waif who dressed in tattered rags, was covered in dirt and lice and spent her days - and often nights - rooting through stinking mounds of rubbish at Phnom Penh's municipal dump, in the Stung Meanchey neighbourhood, on the city's outskirts.
"I lived on the dump, collecting garbage every day," recalls Ang Srey Mom, 20, a daughter of impoverished subsistence farmers who migrated to the capital in search of a better life but, like so many others, ended up collecting recyclables for a living.
She dropped out of school after the third grade and could barely read and write. She bedded down at night in a makeshift tent of discarded plastic and tarpaulin at the maze-like scavengers' shanty town that has grown up at the site. She earned 4,000 riel (HK$7.50) a day - a bit more if she was lucky. Her dream, if you can call it that, was to work one day in one of the country's myriad garment factories, which are little more than sweatshops but offer monthly wages of about HK$465.
But take a look at her now. A fetching young woman with a toothy smile and playful wit, Ang Srey Mom wears designer jeans with a cerise blouse sporting the logo "Fashion to reign on freedom"; she wouldn't look out of place among the trendy teens on Dundas Street, in Mong Kok. A budding fashion designer, she participated in the BBC's "100 Women" rights conference last October in London, sharing her story with British radio listeners. This year, Ang Srey Mom graduated from vocational school and had her first fashion show, at a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh, at the invitation of textile magnate Rubana Huq.
"Once I had no hope, but now I am excited about the future. I have a dream," says Ang Srey Mom, in English, a language she now speaks fluently. That future includes an invitation to study clothing design on an internship in Hong Kong.
"[Ang Srey Mom] is an incredibly warm, vibrant and articulate young person who mentioned that her ambition is to become a designer in the fashion industry," says Aidan O'Meara, president of VF Corporation's Asia-Pacific operations. "It was clear she also had a sense of style.
"Our Lee Jeans brand designs a large portion of our regional line in Hong Kong so we think we would assign her to that team. The details of the internship need to be worked out but it would normally be about three months in duration and she would … [gain] practical experience in all facets of product design and development together with some exposure to the sales and retail functions.
