Between Cultural Heritage and Capitalism - Children in Cambodia “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – M.Twain

My Photo scholarship 2010 entry

Cambodia | Sunday, October 17, 2010 | 4 photos

My name is Katharina Grube. I´m 31 years old, living in Hamburg, Germany and working as a fitness instructor as well as a journalist.
In the early age of 13 i´ve been on travels the first time. Two years before that the wall came down and i was to curious to be afraid of what´s expecting me travelling on my own. I wanted to see the world, see what´s going on and document it with my camera. Lots of continents, countries and cities followed since that time. Today i´m the founder and publisher of open blackbook – an international online magazine about urban art and culture. It´s also mirroring my passions – traveling and art. The magazine and the upcoming issue was one of the reasons i went to Cambodia. I was hunting on the cambodian streets for murals or graffiti. And surprisingly i´ve found some. But more than that i´ve been watching children working for their families to get some money to make a living out of it. One family in Cambodia makes a living out of less than one dollar per day. So, no matter how old the kids are either they´ll be used by their parents for a rip off to get money from the tourists or they´re old enough so you could catch them working themselves on the field as well as in front of the world heritage of Angkor Wat instead of being in school or even have a normal childhood. I´ve met kids who crewed up in a gang. These gang kids were looking for waste left behind by tourists to collect it and get some money out of that.
The most emotional and at the same time magical moment for me was when i´ve been on my way to the Tonle Sap Lake. As we all know Cambodia was briefly invaded and bombed by the Vietnam and U.S. forces. Just the bombs in todays tourist areas have been removed by the corrupt government but beside that thousands of these bombs are still there in the fields and nobody knows for sure where they´re. So, I´ve seen a group of kids working on the field and of course, it was like totally normal for them working there but i had for a second all these bombs and only one thought in my mind: One of these kids could make just one wrong step and all of ´em would be dead! I had tears in my eyes thinking of it while i´ve driven past that scenery but at the same time they´ve been so busy making jokes and having fun that it was like a vacuum of piece, fun and cambodian daily routine. The children of Cambodia are the future of a country whose past is still affecting the present between cultural heritage and capitalism. I should be chosen for the scholarship because until my journey to Thailand and Cambodia end of 2009 i used to write and use words to reflect the daily ongoing that happened. On my trip through South-East Asia and also afterwards i´ve revealed what i really wanna do, where my heart belongs to - travel photography.