A recent email from Ginny Hanson in Cambodia took us by surprise. Sometimes we’re taken aback by how far our little magazine travels. In her email Ginny, who runs a group called Sak Saum (the Khmer word for dignity), wanted to nominate a young NZ woman, Joanne Cole, to be a creative superhero. Joanne (pictured right) is about to give two years of her young life to helping women in Cambodia and she’s going to do it through beading!

A primary school teacher at West City Christian College, Auckland, 29-year-old Joanne Cole says that, for a while, she’d been thinking of ways she could volunteer to help others and, one day, a peculiar set of coincidences put a situation in play that changed her life.

“I feel passionate about helping women at risk,” says Joanne, “and I’d been making some jewellery I was calling Pearls of Hope to use as fundraising for women in Cambodia. One day, feeling a bit frustrated, I said a little prayer. I said, God, if you want me to go to there and help just give me a contact in the country and give me access to some materials.”

In a remarkable turn of events, within days Joanne’s sister called her saying she had met a woman called Ginny Hanson who was running a program in Phnom Penh, helping young women who had been saved from the sex trade. “It freaks people out when I tell them,” says Joanne, “but what my sister said was, ‘Jo, Ginny’s just received $800 worth of beads but she needs someone to go over and teach the girls how to use them.’ I mean, it’s amazing!”

Joanne’s first trip to Cambodia saw her in the capital, Phnom Penh, where Sak Saum operates as part of the In His Steps ministry. There Ginny and her team work to rescue young  Cambodian women from exploitive circumstances - dire financial circumstances sometimes see country girls sold into prostitution - but also to help restore their dignity and transform their lives. Sak Saum offers access to education and counselling, providing job skills, social training, health and nutritional understanding and, of course, new opportunities.

The circumstances of these women’s lives, plus life in the orphanage where she also worked, were a long way from Joanne’s loving home and community. “Honestly, that first time was very confronting. A family of four on one motorbike, cattle pulling carts on dirt roads... I just thought, what can women here do if they’re not physically or emotionally well enough to be working in the rice fields and so forth?”

Joanne “totally loves” jewellery making and has done it all through high school. She also likes ribbon embroidery. Because the women she was teaching were young - aged 16 to mid 20s - Joanne felt jewellery making was a on-threatening way to connect with them.

“These girls just look like the girl next door, it’s not what you expect, but you have to remember what they’ve been through. Sometimes they’ve been treated like animals or outcasts.”

On the practical side of things Joanne also had to take into account the girls’ lack of education. “Some couldn’t write their own names, most had never been taught to think about colours or so on,” she says. For a teacher this must have been all the more heartbreaking.

Obviously the long term plan is that the girls in the care of Sak Saum will be able to make jewellery to sell at markets and use this as a new form of income. In fact already some of their handmade jewellery has been taken on by Significant Blessings Pty. Ltd., a jewellery design company based in Singapore.

Joanne, of course, had another creative plan for the first collection she had helped to get made. “I mounted the pieces on canvases and exhibited them back in NZ as a further source of fundraising,” she says.

While the women are now being helped by Sak Saum it is Joanne who says she has received so much and this explains why, while the 2009 school term begins in Auckland, she’ll be heading to Cambodia to work for two years.

“It’s easy to feel like you can’t help people,” says Joanne, “but really you just have to look what you have in your hands, at your disposal, and make a choice to do something with it. For me I could make jewellery, I have my creativity so I am using that.

“You have to free up your mind to realise helping others is always an option... It’s real pleasure, an honour, for me to do this for them.”

Like to know more?
Sak Saum: www.in-his-steps.org/sak_saum.htm [in-his-steps.org]
Contact Joanne direct via email: joannec@windowslive.com

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