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Cambodia, a country with one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in Asia, is showing encouraging progress in the fight against the spread of the virus. The number of new infections has gone from 100 a day in 1997 to 20 in 2004.

Over the last six years, UNICEF has been collaborating closely with Cambodian monks, nuns and local elders in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Now that collaboration is being harnessed to fight avian influenza.

Two actors in heavy make-up swagger drunkenly across the lot of a garment factory in Phnom Penh. Their antics draw raucous laughter from a growing crowd of young women who are taking a lunch break.

Fifteen-year-old Seng Srey Mach had to drop out of school for two years to work in the fields when her mother was ill and too weak to work.  For a girl who always was first in class, not going to school was devastating. “I used to cry when I saw my friends on their way to school,” Seng Srey says.

When two of Chea Samoeun’s children came down with life-threatening illnesses at the same time she was able to take them to hospital secure in the knowledge that the cost would not ruin her family.

For Sok Em and her neighbours, finding clean water has never been a simple task. 

Until a few months ago, she could only draw from a murky pond outside her village. Its water took a toll on her four children who would often get sick with diarrhoea. And as a result, all the family’s spare money was used up to take care of health problems.

During the day eight-year-old Cheang Pheap is a happy, playful child who goes to school in the afternoons. He is in the first grade at his local primary school and, from his seat in the third row from the front of the classroom, he can read the blackboard clearly.

In October, the nearly submerged tree tops in the Prek Toal Core Area of Tonle Sap are rife with activity. Tucked away on the Northern edge of the Tonle Sap, this core area in the lake’s biosphere reserve is home to 15-20 different species of birds, including seven thriving colonies of globally threatened or near threatened birds.

As motorboats navigate the sunken forest, people like forty-one year old ranger, Vong Vannak, lie prone on treetop observation platforms with high-powered Bushnell binoculars in hand. They will call these trees home for a week or two at a time throughout the year as they work to ensure that anyone entering the park has paid the entrance fee and respects this photogenic yet fragile environment.

In its recent history, Cambodia has suffered from every modern malady that could afflict a developing country: war, terrorism, genocide, foreign occupation, poverty, environmental degradation, human rights abuses and landmines (four million estimated in an area of 181,000 square kilometres). A small, agricultural country nestled among Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam, Cambodia has also been the site of one of the largest and most complex UN peacekeeping operations ever: The United Nations Transition Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC).

Sopheap, an 18 year old Cambodian girl, was planning to migrate to find work in Korea, as she had heard work there is easy to find and salaries are higher than in Cambodia.