We were somewhere over Malaysia, wedged into economy with four kids, when the fighting started.
It was hot. It was cramped. And the chicken satay I’d wolfed down in Singapore was staging a violent protest somewhere south of my belt buckle.
“Just shut up, the lot of you”, I thundered.
My five-year-old burst into tears. “Daddy said the F-word!”
“Shut up is not an F-word”, I protested.
“We don’t speak like that in our house”, he sobbed, like he was reading me my rights.
Liz just glared at me.
We were on our way to Cambodia. I figured the trip would teach my kids a thing or two about how good they’ve got it back home.
Little did I know the biggest lesson was waiting for me.
But it wasn’t some big temple or ancient ruin that did the teaching. It started three months before we even landed in the country.
A mother gave birth to a little baby boy.
She placed him in a plastic bag. Then she tied it shut and, for reasons only she will ever know, tossed him onto a rubbish pile to die.
Yet he wouldn’t die.
This tiny baby, only a few days old, no bigger than a footy, screamed through the plastic and the garbage until a rice farmer walking past heard him.
Now, this farmer had nothing. Dirt floor, hungry kids of his own, crops that barely fed his family. But he still took that baby home, and he and his wife fed him and held him for three weeks, until they simply couldn’t anymore.
So they carried him to a hospital and prayed someone could give him the life they couldn’t.
That someone was Geraldine Cox, an Aussie expat in her eighties who has spent the last 33 years running Sunrise Cambodia, an orphanage for kids nobody else wants. The kids call her Big Mumma.
