34
FAHTHAI
I
t was 1988, on the dusty border between Thailand and
Cambodia, and the early morning heat was already
sticky and oppressive. A scrawny 15-year-old boy
jumped out of bed and hurtled towards a hut stitched
together with palm leaves and mud and filled with
around 20 bamboo tables. He knew the tiny classroom would
soon be packed with up to 50 other children, all jostling for
space in which to spread out their paper and pencils. He was
determined to nab a prime position.
The hut was buried within Site Two, the notorious refugee
camp that was set up in 1985 in the wake of a Vietnamese
offensive in its longstanding conflict with Cambodia. At one
point it held nearly 200,000 Cambodian refugees. The teenager,
Bandaul Srey, who spent his Khmer Rouge-era childhood years
turning cardboard scraps into shadow puppets and carrying
hand grenades in his pockets as if they were cricket balls, was
finally learning how to draw.
His art teacher was Véronique Decrop, a beautiful young
French woman who favoured shiny gold glomesh earrings
and braided hair. She’d come to Site Two as an administrator
with an aid agency but quickly realised the children in the
camp needed an escape from the desperation and violence such
conditions often breed. She joined a Thai relief NGO led by
her friend Père Pierre Ceyrac and together they hatched a plan
to offer the classes. Her daily lessons drew more and more
children each day and ran until just after the 1991 signing of
the Paris Peace Accords, which marked the end of the war and
of the UN’s peacekeeping mission. Decrop had given her classes
a name by then, Phare Amis, which means “bright friends”.
“I had to make one decision: should I consider drawing as
just a leisure activity or as something more important – a way
these children could express themselves. The second option
seemed obvious to me,” she wrote in French in her diary.
Over 25 years later I’m sitting with an older and more
filled-out Bandaul in a classroom at Phare Ponleu Selpak, one
of Cambodia’s leading arts centres (the name is a mixture of
