Kimmie Weeks ’05 took a path like none other to Amherst College. Born in Liberia, he endured civil war at the age of nine, which brought him and his mother to a refugee camp, where they lived for six months. Once at Amherst, Weeks formed Youth Action International (YAI), now a global nonprofit that focuses on post-war countries which are beyond the need for international emergency services, but not yet advanced enough to have a self-sustaining commercial economy.

On Monday night, Weeks and Sarorng Sorn, who was a child in Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime, spoke about their experiences growing up during times of war and their present efforts to help today’s children in war-ridden countries.

“Sarorng and Kimmie grew up in two different countries, at different times, but much of their stories were very similar,” explained co-Chair of YAI Seguin Strohmeier ’10. “Both experienced the terror of war coming into their peaceful lives, and both had to struggle to survive in conditions deeply inhospitable to childhood.”

Sorn grew up in Cambodia during the Vietnam War. When the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot came to power, she was nine years old. In 1969, the U.S. undertook a secret bombing campaign of Cambodia as part of the Vietnam War. It was soon thereafter that Pol Pot took control of the nation and Sorn was relocated, along with her sister, to a children’s labor camp. Sorn beckoned the audience, “Imagine you were nine years old and suddenly everything is taken away from you. You are put in a children’s camp and everyone is forced to work all day long with very little food to eat.”

Sorn’s story was extremely powerful and vivid, in large part because Sorn had revealed her story to few people until now. This was her first time formally presenting it. “There was a beauty to how raw and straight-forward her telling of it was,” said co-Chair of YAI Trevor Lewis ’10. Lewis commented that it seemed clear that Sorn was reliving her experience as she was telling it, and the emotion she brought with it gave the audience—who may have been used to only hearing about such atrocities at a distance through newspapers and television—a powerful new experience.

Among the most moving parts of Sorn’s story were her telling of her sister’s death, her description of children and elderly people being left abandoned by the sides of roads and having to drink out of pools of water with bodies floating in them. Still more painful was her recollection of when she was trying to bring a bag of corn back to her starving family through the pitch-black jungle in the middle of a storm and eventually being forced to abandon the food. Even worse, she ended up wandering around the jungle for most of the remainder of the night, unable to locate her family.

After Sorn finished the story of her survival, she took some time to tell the audience about what she hopes to accomplish in the near future. Through her job as Director of Programs for the Cambodian Association of Greater Philadelphia (CAGP), she has been able to provide health, social and educational services to low-income, at-risk Cambodian and other minority community members.

Next, Weeks spoke about his experiences in the Liberian Civil War.One of Weeks’ most moving stories was about the child soldiers who fought in the war. The youngest soldier, he said, in the entire war was six years old. “At first I am seeing children who are holding guns. Real guns. Committing atrocities. Some of them who would see a pregnant woman walking up to them ... would gamble on [the sex of the child] and cast a bet and call the pregnant woman and take a knife … ”

Another more shocking story was his Weeks’ account of being thrown into a pile of corpses when he was very ill and being left there until his mother searched through countless bodies to find him. “He did a very good job of making himself the human face for the millions of children who needlessly die around the world each year,” described Lewis.

Weeks stressed that children in such situations have the same potential as any other children to do great things, but they are dying senselessly due to war, disease or another preventable cause. He emphasized that world poverty can be defeated as long as enough people are willing to take action and fight against it.

Both Weeks and Sorn called on the audience to work, in whatever capacity, for a better world free of poverty and violence. “Not to go home today and do business as usual,” stated Weeks, “but also to go back home with the knowledge that we must do something. I challenge each and every individual in this room to be involved in the fight to end world poverty.”