While in Cambodia, Danielle along with Ashlee Larsen, a Brigham Young graduate student, accompanied Stirring the Fire founder, Phil Borges as he documented the work of Youth Star.

Of the several Youth Star volunteers we met, only one was a woman and from our perspective she had the hardest assignment of them all: to go to an isolated, rural village on the Vietnamese border to work with an ethnic minority – the Stieng people. While the Stieng people speak Khmer fluently out of necessity, they have their own language and cultural traditions. They live in a more dense jungle area and are more secluded than the Cheungdeung, the other village community we visited.

School Girls from the Youth Club Welcoming Samphors.

Samphors (pronounced “Sopur”) Chae, a 25 year old university graduate with a BA in Agriculture, set forth as a Youth Star volunteer in 2009. After the 3-week intensive training she boarded a bus that took her to the nearest town, Snoul, where she waited for her village contact to come get her. She waited. No one came. So she contacted the village representative and they grudgingly came to get her. Due to the remoteness, the road into the village was non-existent. So what takes us 15 minutes today (the dirt road is now finished) took her much longer.

Samphors faced numerous challenges. She wasn’t warmly welcomed by either her host family or the village council. A few days after arriving, she learned that her grandfather had passed away. She struggled with the decision to go home but realized that by the time she would have gotten there it would have been too late for his funeral. So she stayed, steeped in the overwhelming experience of culture shock, isolation and learning new ways to communicate and greet the people she would be spending the whole year with.

Stieng Village Elders

Shortly after she came to the village the chief and his council sat her down and told her that they hadn’t asked for a female volunteer. They said that they were concerned about her safety because of the local gang activity and that a single female is an open target. They then asked her to return home.

Here Samphors’ own story comes into play. She has faced her own adversity that she has transformed into a spine of steel though not at the expense of her heart. She is one of seven children, comes from a broken home, and was the only one to go to, and complete, university. Her heart and head are in the work she does making her strong enough to overcome challenges that would send other people packing. She believed in herself and in her ability to help the people in the village. Not only did she win over the support from her host family, but told the chief and his council the following: what a male can do, a female can do too. Give me a chance to prove myself.

Samphors and a Youth Club Member peeling Cucumbers

And she did. We visited Samphors’ village after she had concluded her volunteer year. When we arrived with her, we witnessed nothing short of what looked like a family reunion. It was clear that the people had fallen in love with her and that she had become an important and influential person in this village, especially to the girls. She is a powerful role model to the girls and young women and clearly had the slight status of celebrity. When she spoke, they listened.

Samphors Saying Goodbye for a Second Time

We had the privilege of seeing Samphors interact with the community for the next few days. It became very clear that her presence, her person, her commitment transformed many people’s lives for the better. We asked her how she did this and here is what she said: speak with an open heart and be authentic in who you are.

Those are wise words we can all live by.

Stay tuned for a family’s story on how Samphors positively changed their life.

Youth Leadership for Violence-Free Communities

Empowering and engaging youth as actors for change is a fundamental but underemployed approach for ending violence against women and girls. Youth Star Cambodia is an NGO that provides Cambodian university graduates an opportunity to gain experience and develop their civic leadership skills by working as volunteer interns in underserved rural areas. With support from the UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, Youth Star Cambodia enlisted 20 university graduates for a year-long volunteer service in an education and youth-led mobilization programme to address domestic violence.

Working with youth and other community members in districts across rural Cambodia, the volunteers created space for dialogue and education on values, sexual rights and gender relationships and sparked community action to prevent gender-based violence. While the youth volunteers themselves gained a range of skills and experience in mobilizing youth for action and change, the youth credited the programme with improved relationships, decreased violence, a sense of value and place in their communities, and increased school attendance.

The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women, managed by UN Women, is a leading source of support for local and national efforts to end violence against women and girls. Join the UN Trust Fund in this vital work—for more information on how you can support the UN trust Fund click here.