FOOTBALL4GOOD MAGAZINE | MARCH 2020

built upon “having fun and everyone enjoying themselves”. Since passing on the title of chairman, he’s happy to be remembered with the “wonderful title as the ‘Old Grandfather’ of ISF”. In name and nature the philosophy has stood the test of time, though from those early days much has changed. Be it common to many newly found- ed NGOs, ISF’s early problems were never ones of funding. That was relatively simple given their contacts and willing sponsors from Hong Kong. The problem was what they were offering itself: education. “At that point, our first job was to get this impromptu school out of the dump,” says Brogan, “so we rented a building where we could offer free meals, as well as vaccinations, along- side the schooling.” However, in Stung Meanchey, whether young people went to school or not was determined by the necessity of working and con- tributing to the family’s or individu- al’s financial survival. “To get kids to attend the school and stay there, in a sense we had to bribe parents,” explains Brogan, “which meant compensating the par- ents on what they would be losing out on through a day’s child labour,” he remembers. The partners decided to instate a policy that stipulated, as Brogan ex- plains, that: “if your child attends 80% of school, or 23 days within a month, we supply the families with a monthly food package containing the necessi- ties: rice, vegetables, preserved meat, and cooking oil.” Beyond forfeiting education for a mentality primed around surviving the day ahead, lay a deep-rooted suspicion of education tied to the dark history of the country’s all too recent past. Among the millions that fell victim to the Cambodian genocide under Pol Pot’s dictatorship, one section of society the Khmer Rouge regime targeted and effectively deci- mated, were those considered to bear intellectual qualities. “In those early days, whenever someone was wearing glasses the sur- rounding atmosphere turned into one of real concern,” remembers Brogan. Glasses were a symbol of intellectual- ism and were commonly regarded as sufficient to identify potential dissent- ers willing to rebel. There was also an apprehension, as Cubbon describes it, towards “a group of guys in their fifties wanting to set up a school, especially following years of well documented cases of foreign organisations offering aid and nothing of any good coming from it.” Brogan remembers speaking to one local NGO in that period and asking whether they would share their child protection policy: “but immediately they said no and wouldn’t go as far as discussing it.” In hindsight, both Cubbon and Brogan place ISF’s early struggles down to a limited understanding of the cultural nuances Phnom Penh presented. “When I look back, I now realise we weren’t yet in the field of transform- ing lives and were content with only “YOU CAN HAVE YOUR PERCEPTION OF WHAT YOU THINK PEOPLE NEED BUT WE’RE NOT FROM CAMBODIA, WE HAVEN’T LIVED THROUGH WHAT THEY HAVE, AND IN FACT WE BARELY KNOW THE COUNTRY” Leo Brogan, one of Indochina Starfish Foundation’s founding trustees 46 FOOTBALL4GOODMAGAZINE | MARCH2020