About AVCLM

Mr. Chandaramony (Chandra) Eang founded Aid for Victims of Cambodian Landmines (AVCLM) as a registered charity in 2002 as part of a mission to improve the lives of families in his native Cambodia, and to unify the Cambodian community in his adopted country of Canada. Chandra is a personal survivor of Cambodia’s killing fields from 1975-1979, a time when at least a million people in the country died.

Shortly after his arrival in Canada in 1985, Chandra attended and graduated from George Brown College in Toronto. He combined the knowledge he gained from his college education with cooking skills that he learned in Cambodia to open Angkor, Toronto’s first Cambodian restaurant, which has been a mainstay on Gerrard Street East since 1997. The restaurant’s decor has a distinct Cambodian character, and is a way for Chandra to spread awareness about the country’s culture and history.

When he’s not cooking, Chandra devotes much of his time to helping Cambodian newcomers settle in Toronto. Yet Chandra is unable to forget the ongoing hardships of friends and family members that he left behind in Cambodia. A series of wars from the 1960s to the 1980s left millions of landmines buried across the countryside, which caused countless civilian mine casualties and crippled the country’s agriculture-based economy. It is estimated that there are as many as 10 million landmines buried in Cambodia.

AVCLM is Chandra’s way of giving something back to the Cambodian people who have been directly affected by landmines. AVCLM’s approach is unique, because it takes into account that these weapons are not only damaging to individual victims but are also devastating entire communities by cutting people off from the resources they need to survive. AVCLM’s aim is to provide assistance to mine victims and their families who live in rural Cambodia, to help them rebuild their shattered society by restoring their strong community traditions, and to steer them towards self-sufficiency.

Rescue Cambodia

Rescue Cambodia is the core project of AVCLM. The project emerged shortly after Chandra’s extended visit to Cambodia in 2000, when he spoke with and cooked for mine victims and their families in more than 100 villages. He learned firsthand from villagers which resources were most crucial to improve their way of life.

Rescue Cambodia proposes a model for abolishing poverty and rebuilding rural Cambodian society one village at a time by helping these victims and their families re-establish their livelihood. The one-village-at-a-time approach will enable Rescue Cambodia to achieve concrete results and expand its operation gradually in subsequent years.

Chandra has selected 435 people in Boeng Am Pil Village in Sdao Commune Ratanak Mondul District, Battambang Province as the model for this project. The mine victims in the village have already agreed to be the first participants, and are eager to begin working with AVCLM to help rebuild their village. The village is located 285 kilometres west of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital city, and contains available farmland required for rice plantations. All the landmines around the village have been removed during the past 10 years, making it safe for people to resume farming.

AVCLM has also established a partnership with a Cambodian organization named Poor Women, Children and Disabled Development Organization (PWCD). From 2003 to the present, we have been providing health and nutrition services to mine victims and their families, especially those living in remote areas. Together, AVCLM and PWCD have worked with village elders to advance the Rescue Cambodia project. We are now ready to take the crucial next step of raising money to begin the first stage of the project. This will require providing seeds for 435 people, and assisting them until they are able to re-establish their rice fields and return to self-sufficiency.

Brief History

From the mid-1960s until the late 1980s, Cambodia became the main battleground in an ongoing series of wars that ravaged the country. The most troubling aspect of these wars were the millions of landmines that were dispersed throughout its fields and the millions of gallons of Agent Orange sprayed across the countryside. Even now, decades later, the Cambodian people are faced with the consequences of these senseless acts of violence—severe injuries or deaths caused by the detonation of unexploded landmines, illness and birth defects as a result of drinking unclean water and water contaminated by Agent Orange. Hundreds of thousands of mine victims and their families are forced to spend all of their money on medical care, and as a result most of them live in poverty and can’t afford to send their children to school for a formal education.

Present Conditions

Most of rural Cambodia has now been cleared of mines, but unfortunately landmine victims and their families have no money to buy seeds, or to buy farm equipment or livestock to work the fields. Others are broke, have sold their land to pay costly medical bills, or have moved to the city because they don’t feel as if they can earn a livable income on the farm.

Cambodia used to produce hundreds of thousands of tons of rice and other crops to export to neighbouring countries. But this economic resource is no longer viable. AVCLM is proposing a solution for all these uprooted farmers and their families. The organization realizes that the only way to free Cambodian people from the cycle of poverty is to get them working on the land again.

Potential

Many of the mine victims and their families have already sold the land they once owned to pay for their medical bills. AVCLM aims to buy them tracts of land to use for farming, which is inexpensive compared with North American standards, so that they will not have to struggle to make a living. AVCLM’s approach will ultimately solve Cambodia’s most widespread problems such as starvation, poverty and access to clean water. To meet the primary needs of the Cambodian people, AVCLM’s main goals are as follows:

1. Provide them with rice seeds to plant, livestock to assist in farming the land, food supplies that will last them for a whole year until their crops are harvested, as well as shelter.

2. Build wells so that they have clean drinking water rather than the polluted water they use now, which comes directly from the river. 

3. Construct schools in the countryside so that children can receive an education.

4. Establish much-needed medical clinics in the countryside for sick children and mine victims.