Cambodia charity Pour Un Sourire D’enfant asks Hongkongers to put smiles on children’s faces
PSE Hong Kong establishes presence in the city to raise funds for education and vocational training for Cambodian children who scavenge in rubbish dumps.
It all started 20 years ago, seeing children scavenging for food at a rubbish dump in Cambodia.
“We saw children who were staying at the dump day and night, eating the rubbish. It was awful,” said Marie-France des Pallières, who in 1995 founded the charity, For a Child’s Smile, in Phnom Penh with her husband, Christian.
Since then, the charity – Pour Un Sourire D’enfant (PSE) in French – has grown from a programme aiming to feed children at rubbish dumps in Cambodia’s capital city to an organisation that educates and teaches them skills to keep them out of poverty.
“When we asked the children what they wanted, they said one meal a day and school. So we help them to go to primary school,” Pallières said. “But we quickly realised that primary schooling [by itself] couldn’t help them get a job. [So] then we started professional training programmes.”
The non-profit organisation, which raises money from seven countries including France, Germany, the United States and Britain, is now hoping that people living in Hong Kong can help too.
Guillaume Ponticelli, president of PSE Hong Kong said they were in the final phase of registration for non-profits in Hong Kong and the Inland Revenue Department would grant PSE charity status in the city in less than one month.
Cambodia is one of the poorest countries in the world, despite a fall in poverty in recent years. Approximately one fifth of the population is living in poverty, according to the latest figures from the World Bank. However, it’s common for many children to drop out of school and the country is still recovering from the genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime.