Young Australian awarded for Cambodian orphanage work

Tara Winkler, an accomplished musician, plays for "her children"

ABC Radio Australia

Updated January 27, 2011

In Sydney, Tara Winkler has been named the New South Wales Young Person of the Year, for her work with a Cambodian orphanage.

She was just 18, when a trip to Southeast Asia brought her into contact with orphans in Cambodia. It led to an enduring commitment and now Tara runs an orphanage in the province of Battambang that houses 41 children and young adults. The work has its challenges but also rewards.

Presenter: Liam Cochrane
Speaker: Tara Winkler, founder of the Cambodian Children's Trust

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COCHRANE: Now let�s go back to the start, you first visited Cambodia in 2004, what was it do you think that made such a strong impression?

WINKLER: I arrived in 2005 actually, but I arrived in Cambodia and I had just never experienced poverty like I saw in Cambodia, and also my own heritage and my grandmother was a survivor of the holocaust, so experiencing the genocide that happened in Cambodia had quite a profound impact on me.

COCHRANE: And several years after that first visit, you started to support the orphanage, but you then realised that the children were being neglected. What did you do?

WINKLER: Yeah that�s right, I visited a couple of orphanages in Battambang and I wanted to contribute something small and I went to one particular orphanage that was desperate for help and so I went home and raised the money, and came back and worked with the kids and got to know them really well. And then on my second trip back I found out what was really going on there, and just how much money was being embezzled by the director of the orphanage, and also of the abuse that was happening there both physical and sexual abuse. And by that stage I knew the kids really well and they begged to help them. So I just didn�t feel like I could walk away. So I worked with a local man, who is my current director, and we worked with the local authorities to rescue the kids out of that centre, and give them a new life and a new home.

COCHRANE: And how difficult was it to work with local authorities and get all the necessary approvals and permissions to takeover an orphanage full of children?

WINKLER: It was a pretty intense time, we didn�t actually takeover the orphanage. We just got permission from the Governor of Battambang and the Social Affairs Department to give the kids permission, give them a chance to leave if they wanted to. So we showed up with a bus one day and the kids there grabbed their few belonging that they had and jumped on the bus and never looked back.

COCHRANE: And tell us about those kids; it�s obviously grown since those early days, tell us about the children that you care for now?

WINKLER: We have 46 kids now that live in four different homes. We really try and maintain a sort of real family vibe to the centre. We try and stay away from the sort of institutionalised models, so we have four different homes housing those 46 kids. But we�ve also been able to grow into much more than just an orphanage, because what we found in my work in Cambodia is that a lot of orphanages are just comprised of poor children who are not actually orphans at all, and are just taken away from their parents because of poverty, because their parents are too poor to support them. So instead of taking those children away from their parents and putting into an orphanage, we work with the family as a unit, so we work with the parents, set them up with vocational training and small business enterprises and set them up in a secure home, and work with the family as a unit so they�re able to take care of their own children.

COCHRANE: And I understand you�ve also worked to improve the medical care offered to the children, and in particular one case where a young woman was HIV positive. Tell me about the difference that modern medicine made to her life?

WINKLER: The medical side of things in Cambodia is always a challenge, especially where we are in Battambang province, which is north-west Cambodia and not a particularly big city. It is the second biggest city in Cambodia, but there is no tourism there so there�s no international hospitals or anything. So all of our healthcare has to be done elsewhere, either in Siem Reap or Phnom Penh or in serious cases in Vietnam. But so all of our healthcare, the kids that we have that are HIV positive get treated in the out clinic in Phnom Penh. And we�ve had a couple of kids where their lives have literally been saved by those anti-retroviral medications.

COCHRANE: You mentioned earlier the attempt to make it a family kind of environment that you�re caring for these children and young adults. How do they see you, I mean you�re quite young, do they see you as some kind of mother figure or a big sister or something else?

WINKLER: It�s probably a mix of all of those; the little ones will call me mum, my youngest I picked up when she was nine months old and she�s now three and a half and in international pre-school so she�s speaking English and things like that. So the younger ones do tend to call me mum, but the older kids I�m just their Tara, I don�t know.

COCHRANE: And just finally, obviously there must be challenges to your work, but also amazing rewards. What do you personally get from the experience?

WINKLER: Those kids are my life. I adore them and they�re like my family and I would do anything for them. I feel apart from the challenges and the obvious difficulties of living in Cambodia and things I feel incredibly lucky to be doing what I do and to be working with these kids who are an incredible inspiration to me, and are so resilient and such survivors. I just feel incredibly lucky to be able to do the work that I do.

COCHRANE: And of course especially since the ABC, the Australian Story documentary on you and your work, you�ve obviously been boosted into the limelight. But we should also focus some attention to the work of your colleague, Jedtha, how important is he in all of this?

WINKLER: That�s right and I do try to make sure he gets the recognition that he deserves, because I honestly, we are a partner in this and I could not be doing it without him. I am fluent in Khmer, which makes it easier for me to work with him and to work with the local authorities and all of our local staff and the kids and things, but the partnership between having a foreigner and a local working together and how well we work together at CCT and all of the work that we do, that could not happen at all without the dedication of Jedtha Pon, and he�s such a compassionate man and he really cares about the children, he really cares about the work, and he�s a huge asset to us.