Little Angels

Shadow Puppet Carver Teaches New Generation

Sunday, 19 April 2015; News by Khmer Times/Nou Sotheavy

 

Director of Little Angels Orphanage and Khmer Art Center

 

Serey Rathana chiseling a shadow puppet out of leather. KT Photo: Nou Sotheavy

SIEM REAP (Khmer Times) – Sitting on a wooden bench in a small classroom, Serey Rathana looks around the school he built with his own hands. Photos of past students hang on bright, yellow walls painted with the sign “Little Angels” – a term of endearment the shadow puppet master craftsman calls his students.

There have been many angels in the past, but there may no longer be any in the future. Mr. Rathana, who runs the Little Angels Orphanage and Khmer Art Center on the outskirts of Siem Reap town in Phum Roluos, is worried that a cultural tradition that has survived in Cambodia for thousands of years is slowly dying out.

“There is no one to take over from me when I retire,” Mr. Rathana explains with a sad sigh. “The last school to teach the art of shadow puppets has closed in Phnom Penh and my teacher in Siem Reap is getting old.”

Little Angels Orphanage and Khmer Art Center, which is a 20-minute tuk-tuk ride from the Preah Ko temple ruins, is largely a self-sustaining school providing room and board. Mr. Rathana teaches orphans and children from impoverished families in the craft of leather carving, with an emphasis on shadow puppets.

The school’s fate is in peril as each year passes. However, its founder faced much tougher times.

The Mending of a Wounded Heart

As a student of the craft, Mr. Rathana would notice many children crowding around him as he worked on his shadow puppets. When asked why they were not in school, most of the children would reply that they did not have parents and lived with other relatives who needed their help with work.

“Their stories would break my heart each time I heard them as I recalled my own days of growing up without parents,” he says. “My father was shot before my eyes and my mother died a year later.”

After losing his parents, the young Rathana was left barely alive during the Khmer Rouge occupation after sustaining a gun injury. Semi-conscious in a cramped hospital, he was wounded in one eye and in critical condition. “No one would even look at me,” he recalls with a worn smile. “They called me demon because of the blood leaking from my eye.”

Things took a turn for the better, however, when doctors saved his life after injecting him with a series of an experimental drug. This saved his eye and gave him a new determination to live.

He began helping his grandmother sell bread and collecting recyclables and scrap metal. It was during one such outing that he came across a Cambodian doctor from Germany teaching others in the art of making leather shadow puppets. Calculating his options, the young boy knew he would need a skill and a trade to send three younger siblings to school.

Giving Back to the Community

Mr. Rathana slowly began mastering the skills needed to tan and dye leather and making carving tools and drawing designs for shadow puppet work. He was recognized for his talents, but his mind still wandered back to the days when thoughtful little eyes would watch him work.

Inspired, he decided to risk his life savings to open an orphanage and school as a way to provide opportunities and a trade for children to survive on. Starting off in 2002 with only five children, Little Angels Orphanage and Khmer Art Center today provides room and board to over 80 children. It has also relocated to a bigger area in a hand-built complex that includes a small library, two classrooms, a new kitchen and female and male dormitories.

The Legacy’s Shadow

Mr. Rathana has seen his first wave of students grow and prosper in the trade as they acquired the needed skills. Most of them are established in Thailand due to the limited JOB opportunities in Cambodia.

He has also seen students leave the program as young adults, being either influenced by the wrong crowd or looking for other means to make money. But those remaining behind are driven to learn from worn English books, and enjoy and celebrate the small pleasures of playing games and drawing with visitors.

The school relies on the kindness of a few individuals who provide private donations as well as the sales of its intricate leatherwork. These range from $2 to $300 per item and comprise small key chains, bracelets and bigger pieces of detailed carved shadow puppets.

The students put on shadow puppet theater performances on rare occasions when there is a large enough audience. They act out stories Mr. Rathana teaches them using English picture books and by watching old Khmer television dramas.

With his students looking up to him for guidance, Mr. Rathana wants his school to continue well into the future. But with more young Cambodians turning away from a trade that has survived for thousands of years, he can only hope that he inspires those who remain, and those yet to discover the wonders of leather carving, to take over when he finally puts his shadow puppets away.

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