Continued from here ...

On the up side, this article gives a look at some terrific people really helping.

A survivor of Cambodia's notorious Killing Fields era, Phaly Nuon is a woman that has woven the painful bits of her life into a successful retail silk business that has expanded from her home in Phnom Penh to Hawaii's shores.

Though Nuon learned to weave silk as the privileged granddaughter of a royal fortune teller in Cambodia, she did not predict that one day she would use those shiny threads to form a business that would support hundreds of Khmer orphans, or that the micro-enterprise would expand beyond her native land.

And here's an award winner if I ever heard of one ...

Cambodian writer and artist Vann Nath is among a diverse group of writers from 22 countries to receive the prestigious Hellman/Hammett award, which recognizes courage in the face of political persecution, Human Rights Watch said today. He is the eighth Cambodian to win the award since 1995. Vann Nath, 62, is one of seven survivors of the Khmer Rouge secret prison known as Tuol Sleng or S-21, where 14,000 men, women and children were interrogated, tortured and executed during the 1975-79 Pol Pot regime. He is a torture survivor and experienced appalling conditions, including near starvation, during his time at the prison.

Anyone with even a passing familiarity with Cambodia has seen his paintings, and most of us with ties never get the images out of our heads and hearts.

And to end with some good environmental news, some very rare animals have been found in the jungles east of the Mekong in Stung Treng Province.

One of the species, the Slender-billed vulture, survives precisely because Cambodia is a poor and backward country.

The Slender-billed vulture is one of several vulture species in Asia that have been driven to the brink of extinction in the past 12 years after eating cattle carcasses tainted with diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory painkiller that‘s given to sick cows and is highly toxic to vultures.

Because diclofenac is almost entirely absent from use in Cambodia, the WCS said the country remains one of the main hopes for the survival of the species.

Cool.