7-year-old's photos to help develop funds for Cambodia

Kalliyan Srey-Ry Lagger holds one of her photos as mom Deb Lagger and sister Hannah Khim Lagger, 8, lend support. Kalliyan’s photos will be on display at Garden Smiles in Waterville.
( THE BLADE/LORI KING )

By JC REINDL
BLADE STAFF WRITER

Seven-year-old Kalliyan Srey-Ry Lagger rifled through a box of photos on the kitchen table, plucking out the most radiant prints of the bunch. "I like the color on this one. And I like the color on this one too," Kalliyan said, holding the close-up of a pink rose, its shiny petals dotted with beads of water. "I try to get the camera in the right place where I want it to be." Gathered by the side of the talented young photographer were her adoptive mother, Deb Lagger, and her sister, Hannah Khim Lagger. Hannah is 8 years old and, like Kalliyan, was adopted as a baby from an orphanage in Cambodia by Ms. Lagger and her partner. The family makes its home in Lambertville. Mother and daughters last week were making preparations to put Kalliyan's photos on display and on sale at the shop of George and Deb Carruth, Garden Smiles, in Waterville. The photos go up today with the plan to send half of the sales' proceeds to a recently opened English language and career-training center in Battambang, Cambodia, that was named for both girls. The center was the latest result of a partnership involving Ms. Lagger's employer, Goodwill Industries of Northwest Ohio, along with Goodwill Industries International and the Cambodian-based nonprofit, Digital Divide Data. Ms. Lagger is director of work force development. The rest of the proceeds are to go to Kalliyan's college fund. She and Hannah attend Monroe Road Elementary School, where Betsy Doyle taught them both for second grade. Mrs. Doyle's class last year decorated water bottles and sold them at school to raise more than $100 that went to building a drinking well for Cambodian villagers. This year her class plans to sell bookmarks to raise funds to buy maps and globes for Cambodians learning English. Ms. Lagger visits the girls' classes to talk about life in Cambodia, a developing Southeast Asian nation of 14 million people where much of the population lives in poverty by Western standards. "It's really neat to see the kids become aware of something beyond their own little world," Mrs. Doyle said. Ms. Lagger said her interests in Cambodia grew as she learned about the country's history. She and her partner had been considering adoption, and in 2000 they worked through the World Child International Adoption Agency to adopt Hannah from an orphanage in Phnom Penh, the country's capital and largest city. The trip to pick up Hannah was Ms. Lagger's first visit to Cambodia. She since has made three additional visits, each leaving indelible impressions. "It's unimaginable poverty. I mean absolutely unimaginable poverty," Ms. Lagger said. "You know the little scooters we have here? You'll see a family of six or seven on those scooters. It's unbelievable. "From our first trip there, I committed myself. I was just going to do whatever I could do to give back to the Cambodians for trusting me to take care of one of their children." Ms. Lagger returned the next year to adopt 14-month-old Kalliyan from a rural Pursat orphanage. All that was known about Kalliyan's biological family was she had been the youngest child of parents who died. The adoption process for both girls involved lots of paperwork and took about five months, she said. The Cambodian people have only recently begun to recover from decades of violence and unrest. After gaining independence from France in 1953, Cambodia experienced a military coup in 1970 and a period of civil war. The country was bombed and briefly invaded during the Vietnam war by U.S. forces hunting down Viet Cong. In 1975, communist Khmer Rouge rebels captured Phnom Penh and forced the evacuation of all cities and towns in their attempt to transform Cambodia into an agrarian society. More than 1.5 million Cambodians eventually would die from starvation, killings, and forced hardships under the regime's Pol Pot leader. These events were depicted in the Academy Award-winning film, The Killing Fields. A Vietnamese invasion in 1978 then led to occupation and nearly 13 years of civil war. Cambodia has been under a relatively stable constitutional monarchy for the last decade and today has a fast-growing economy. Ms. Lagger said she did not encounter much anti-American sentiment during her visits. Instead the Cambodians seemed to offer encouragement as they saw her, a white woman, cradling an Asian baby. She recalled a passer-by on the street saying, "Lucky baby. Lucky baby." "They're grateful to Americans for adopting their children," Ms. Lagger said. "And we kept trying to tell them, 'We're the lucky parents. We're the lucky ones.'•" Hannah and Kalliyan are aware of the circumstances of their birth. But while Ms. Lagger makes occasional visits to Cambodia for her job, she isn't sure whether the girls are ready to experience firsthand the rough-and-tumble lives many Cambodians still live and then make the inevitable comparisons to their own lives here in the U.S. "Maybe when they're teenagers," she said. Kalliyan will be signing her photos from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at Garden Smiles. Contact JC Reindl at: jreindl@theblade.com or 419-724-6065.