The three 20-year-old men sitting in a dusty school yard just graduated from 8th grade -- but far from being dismissed as laggards, they're being hailed as trailblazers.
Mao Vannary, Sean Vibot and Mean Sothey are Cambodia's first blind students to pass the national exams for high school.
Ahead of the UN's International Day of Disabled Persons today, they have become an inspiration for the disabled -- long marginalized by the pressing problems of rebuilding a nation ravaged by war and the genocide of the former Khmer Rouge regime.
PHOTO: AP
And though it's estimated that up to 15 percent of the population is disabled -- largely due to poverty, poor health and explosives left over from the war -- many here face discrimination based on the widespread belief their difficulties result from wrongdoing in a previous life.
"This success meant to me that I have passed the first phase that many people thought would be impossible for us," said Mao Vannary, who is now taking classes with the other two at a high school and an institute for the disabled.
Cambodia's school system had to start from scratch after it was destroyed by the Khmer Rouge, whose 1975-1979 rule left more than 1.7 million people dead. Many schools don't have toilets or drinking water, and some teachers have to instruct 50 students at a time.
That leaves little resources for special education in one of the world's poorest countries, with 36 percent of its people living on less than US$1 a day.
"Kids with special needs have not even been in schools until recently," said Kathy Kremer, an adviser with the Disability Action Council in the capital, Phnom Penh.
But things are changing. The government opened a special education office two years ago that works with nonprofit groups to raise awareness about the disabled, counsel their families and train teachers to work with such students.
But most of its work so far has been in just six of the country's 24 provinces.
"We're just starting, " said Un Siren, a worker at the special education office.
One of the country's few organizations to hold classes for the disabled, Krousar Thmey or "New Family," created a braille alphabet for the Cambodian language. It started in 1994 with about 15 students -- including Mao Vannary, Sean Vibot and Mean Sothey -- who started first grade at age 11.
Some of the others in the program dropped out for vocational training. Others repeated grades.
Mao Vannary said other children had shunned him before he started the classes.
"They told me: `You're blind and you shouldn't play with us.' I was extremely upset with myself. ... I did feel somehow that I wouldn't have a future."
Today, about 740 students go to Krousar Thmey's schools for the blind and the deaf.
At the group's school for the blind in Phnom Penh, some children giggle and chatter during class. Others diligently work.
During breaks, they sit on a swing and sing songs in a yard filled with roosters and dogs. Others work on a computer in the library.
Despite the progress, since many in Cambodia believe disabilities result from bad karma, the blind are often shunned as a source of bad luck.
Some communities "still believe this is a punishment of the gods," said Yi Veasna, head of the National Center of Disabled Persons.
The challenges don't appear to get the three 8th-grade graduates down.
"Everything has changed for me at this school," Mean Sothey said. "What other people can do, I can also do."
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