Inspired Magazine vol 3

Below After years
of globe-trotting,
Cambodia has become
Geraldine’s home.
Opposite page
(left and right) Sunrise
Cambodia offers
Cambodia’s orphans
happiness and hope.
A DAUGHTER
While in Cambodia Geraldine had adopted a
daughter. The seven-month-old baby had been
found in the street, crying and circled by dogs.
When Geraldine met her in the orphanage, she
was smitten. Geraldine adopted the girl, named
her Lisa, and took her home. Within two months
she noticed Lisa didn’t seem to be reacting to
noise. She tried cleaning the wax from her ears. No
change. So she took Lisa to an American doctor.
“He just looked at Lisa and me and said ‘why
would you want to adopt a child with cerebral
palsy? She’s got cerebral palsy, she’s profoundly
deaf and dumb, autistic, epileptic, diabetic and
severely mentally challenged.”
Shocked, Geraldine took Lisa home and, for the
next seven years, attempted to raise Lisa as she
travelled to foreign posts for her work. Eventually
she realised she couldn’t continue to care for Lisa in
the way she needed. Consumed by guilt, Geraldine
took Lisa back to Australia and arranged for her
full-time care in South Australia. Lisa continues to
live there today.
SACKED
With Lisa now in care, life charged on. Geraldine
did Australian embassy postings alone in
Bangkok, Tehran and Washington DC and resigned
from public service in 1987, before gaining work
with Chase Manhattan Bank in Sydney. “I’d gone
from politics, wars and civil disturbance, to working
in Sydney in a bank and found it so boring,” she
says. “Eventually my attitude towards my work
reflected that. And I got sacked three weeks before
my 50th birthday. I thought ‘oh my God, I’m fat
and 50. How am I going to compete with all these
young lovely, long-legged, 30-year-olds going out
for the jobs I am going after?’”
With little idea of what else to do, and still
suffering from the guilt of putting Lisa into care,
Geraldine returned to Cambodia in 1995.
CHILD RESCUE
Before the coup, Geraldine worked for Prince
Norodom Ranariddh, son of King Sihanouk, who
had been elected prime minister – the same Prince
who’d been landlord for Geraldine’s embassy
apartment in the 1970s. “I used to go to him and
his Princess wife every month to give him that
embassy check and say things like ‘hello Your
Highness, my toilet is broken, can you please send
someone around here to fix it’,’ she laughs. “So we
had, I wouldn’t say a deep friendship, but we knew
each other and had a few laughs.”
Back in Cambodia in 1995, Geraldine regained
contact with the Prince and asked for work. He
asked her to help rescue a group of 24 children
abandoned on the Thai border. The kids, aged
from two to 18, had no parents or guardians, and
had taken up residence in an abandoned school,
with the Khmer Rouge fighting around them.
“In fact, when I first went there you could hear
the fighting from the Khmer Rouge close by, while
we were shivering in our beds,” Geraldine says. “It
was a very scary place to be.” The kids were sent
to a site in Phnom Penh. This group of rag-tag
children would form the beginning of what would
later become the first Sunrise Cambodia residential
care centre.
MUM LOVES US
Fast forward to the coup of 1997, after Geraldine
had refused to board the bus with the other expats.
Geraldine found she had to wait three days
for the fighting to ease before she could reach the
children. Fearing what she’d find, she drove into
the grounds where the kids were staying, beeping
the horn in the same manner she did every time
she entered. “When I did that the kids came from
everywhere – from the laundry, from the kitchen,
the dining room – they just ran out. They were just
screaming ‘look mum’s here, she didn’t leave us,
she loves us’ and they practically lifted me out of
22
GERALDINE COX