As you walk through the FCS Centre, it is difficult to imagine that these children come from the Phnom Penh municipal dump. There are so many of them, and so many are smiling! And yet, it was indeed in a municipal dump where it all began, nearly fifteen ago.

In October 1995, little scavengers took Christian des Pallieres, recently retired and on a humanitarian mission to reconstruct the Cambodian primary school education system, by the hand to Phnom Penh’s largest municipal dump. Shocked, he discovered the fate of hundreds of children, working day and night at picking up rubbish in appalling hygienic conditions.

Lacking proper care, schooling, sufficient food, they had no hope. Christian des Pallieres and his wife Marie-France thereby decided to do all in their power to help these children out of poverty. And so began their adventure, in the Spring of 1996, with twenty children. The couple overcame numerous obstacles, one by one, and today assist over 6,500 children!

This adventure is far from over: with the closure of the Phnom Penh municipal dump, there is a need to find new sources of income for the Cambodian families who made a living by working on the dump. In addition, and representing a greater challenge in many respects, there is a new population of scavengers who work the streets of Phnom Penh by night, searching for ‘fresh’ rubbish. They must now also be helped. This is a new and significant challenge which PSE and FCS must now rise to.