AGELESS IN CAMBODIA

If I could put a black border around this thread I would. We just lost a good sixteen-year- old student to poverty. He (nameless) worked with his family in a brickyard, but with the economic crunch on building has slowed down. So, he enlisted in the army even though he was only sixteen, two years short of the legal age. No problem in Cambodia, you just see the right people and they will adjust your age up or down for a fee. So, what is he doing now? Defending his country from all enemies foreign and domestic? No, he's on a work crew run by a military officer building God knows what, but most certainly not his future.Here's how it works in the other direction. A young girl in my wife's family, her niece actually, really loves school and studying. They tried to keep her from entering school years ago on the grounds that she was too small.

She held on to the doors of the school room, refusing to let go -even when her embarassed mother tried to pull her off-education was that important to her. She reached a realisation at an age that many villagers never realize in their whole lives. The upshot is that she has just been told that she must now (years later) stay back a grade, even though she is a top student, because she is too young!The family has been told that the solution is, of course, to visit the right functionaries and have her age legally (?) changed. What is the moral to all this? I don't know, but it would appear that excelling is not sanctioned.