http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/npfo136.html Kit's Kids She has visited impoverished children in Africa (right) to bring them good cheer, and now Kit Chan is doing the same in Cambodia BY TEO KUAN YEE Dec 18, 2000 THEY are kids and, naturally, they want to have fun. But they can't have much of it, given their circumstances. No wonder, then, that they took to the slides and swings, screaming and squealing, to have the time of their lives that day. Singer Kit Chan, 28, was on the phone in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to tell us about it. She had to speak louder to be heard above the din in the background. She said: "It's like a little society here, with 20 people trying to squeeze onto the slide. The small girls are being bullied by the bigger boys." They are the street children in Cambodia, the product of 13 years of civil war there. Aged between seven and 15, they are orphans or were abandoned by families too poor to feed them. And that was why Kit was there - to help. She joined a delegation of 17 Singapore Institute of Technical Education students who had been there since Dec 3 in a project organised by World Vision International. The homeless kids had been roaming the streets until they were picked up by social workers and housed in an education centre built by World Vision. Kit said: "They are orphans or children with poor parents, and runaways. "The social workers have a hard time integrating them into homes because they tend to run away again, so it is an ongoing process." Earlier, Kit was part of a human chain, carrying soil to build a toilet in a primary school for the kids. She said: "The students had to fill up the toilet area with the soil. They got so tired after working for four hours straight that they were begging for a three-minute break." Communication was a bit of a challenge. As the children do not speak English, Kit taught them simple English words like animal names - by imitating their sounds. This was her second trip as a youth ambassador for National Youth Council in collaboration with World Vision. In August, she was in Ethiopia, visiting impoverished villages. She even adopted a 13-year-old Ethiopian boy, Garbo Shanko, under the World Vision's Child Sponsorship Programme. In Cambodia, she suffered food poisoning. Said Kit: "I took salad that was not cooked. It was not the first time I had food poisoning in a developing country. I have to be really careful about what I eat." Asked to compare the two trips, she said: "In Cambodia, the danger comes from rebellion or human causes such as robbery. In Ethiopia, it's diseases. So it is quite different." Would she sponsor another child? Kit doesn't rule it out, but felt that if she were to do so again, there should be equality of sexes. She said: "Maybe I'll sponsor a girl in Cambodia or Vietnam, because a lot of the sponsored children are boys." Kudos to Kit! --

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