Bill's Cambodia Art Charity: Changing Lives, One Brushstroke at a Time

 Bill: Hey world. I'm Bill Gentry and I am here right now in Cambodia at the gallery, The Colors of Cambodia, which is an NGO type school that I founded about 15-16 years ago. So welcome to this podcast, and this will be the first in what could be a long number of podcasts in a series of world changing sort of discussions.

I've traveled around the world and I've lived in Asia, most of my adult life. I'm not just, what do they, what do they call in Singapore? Amo. I'm kind of a travel well-traveled dude from America, white guy. So, today with me is Mark Gleason. He's a good friend of mine. I have worked with him in the past. He's an excellent conversationalist. He's gonna be interjecting some comments and some questions and some ideas. Cause he's in many ways, way more interesting than I am. You can tell just by the outfit he's got there.

He's good friends with Don Keho and he was out there training some new. In Spain here recently in between bottles of amazing Spanish wine. So anyhow, thanks again. We're going to, I'm gonna talk about my first trips to Cambodia and how I got involved here.

Mark, did you wanna say anything? 

MARK: Yeah, Bill, Bill, Bill. I appreciate it. I'm just here to be Bill's Ed McMahon.

Mark: I was cold here. What's the weather like there? Also, what is ngo? Because I don't even know what that is.

Bill: An ngo. Non-government organization. So you're funding this, it's kind of an acronym. A little little term, also equates to a charity.

It's an official charity. You know, like if you see as an email address, dot org OG organization, that could be an ngo. 

Mark: Gotcha. I just should not know what that meant. I'm just trying to help our viewers, you know, educate them, you know, get them involved.

Bill: Yeah. Thank you so much for that. Cause you're probably not the only one who's not a hundred percent sure what that term means.

Ngo, a non-government organization. So  it's like 8: 35 here in the morning in Cambodia. Mark is there at 7:30 at night. Mark is at the NBC Studios here in Hollywood. Are you right in downtown Hollywood?

Mark: It's a live satellite from Crane, Missouri. I think.

Bill: It's yeah, from Crane.

Mark: So what's the weather like there?

Bill: I mean, right here. It's gorgeously sunny. It will get up to maybe 30 to 32 degrees Celsius here, which is gonna be somewhere in the, you know, 85 to 90 range I think. It'll be humid, but it got cool over the night.

It's winter here, it's not gonna get cool enough to snow, but it gets down to about 22 degrees or maybe 75 at night, which is, you know, with a little breeze. Not bad. Where you're at now, are you at, 

Mark: I'll show you a little bit. 

Bill: This is some of the art. That's art by our gallery manager.

Maybe not quite world famous, but she's definitely famous here. She's a leader in the community here amongst women as well as men.

This art project now has become a very prominent and pretty well-known organization here in Seri, and I'll explain why we're in Seri. 

Mark: How did you first come about going through Cambodia? Now, I know you've lived in Singapore and you've been an international traveler with one foot in the United States, one foot over in Asia, but why then Cambodia?

Bill: At one point I would say it was more like my whole, all my feet were over here . I would say there was about a 10 year period mark, where I only spent about two weeks a year in the States or so it seemed. I got quite disconnected, like a lot of these football teams. What? Tennessee Titans. I came back to America and was like, “what's the Tennessee Titans?”

The first trip I took here, I believe it was 1999, and I was asked to come along with my wife Audrey. I helped build some houses and just visited Cambodia.

I first went into Nam Pen, which is the capital of Cambodians.It probably has 4-5 million people there. Now it's on the Mekong River, and so we built houses for a couple of days up on stilts. A lot of the homes here are built elevated, so the breezes can come underneath the wooden structure and cool it during the day and the night.

Mark: Is this like a humanitarian effort or something like that? I just didn't know if you were over in Cambodia on vacation and you decided to start building a house someplace.

Bill: No, it was part of an organization called Tabitha, which I believe might still be around.

The lady was older 20 years ago. She also was very involved in helping teach skills for women. A lot of the multiple wives concept here in Cambodia. I don't know if it's really legal or not.

Mark: LeMans over there what they, is that religion, is that a big deal over there. John Morman or what?  Mormon? 

Bill: No. I think even in Chinese cultures and many of the Asian cultures have more than one wife. Is it legal to have more than one wife here? It may be legal, but I don't know how they still do it. I never heard the term divorce, but there's a lot of the kids who come into our project who have somewhat been discarded by their fathers because their father has moved on to a new one. Creating a new family and they sort of shove the previous wife and family off to the side. So it's a cultural issue here. I don't know if you wanna call it a phenomenon or just a fact of life. 

Mark: What you're telling me then is that this school is somewhat, I don't wanna say for wayward people, but people who are not privileged in society. Is there class there, you think of Asian and maybe not Indian class systems or caste systems and stuff like that.

I dunno if they have that there though, but it sounds like your students are not from the Bridge part Society. 

Bill: Yeah. The concept, I'll get into that as I'll explain why I first came to Cambodia and then.  and then how I started this project. Okay. As well as why I started this project and so forth. But, I'm gonna go back to talking about this organization, Tabitha.

We were building houses for a couple of days and then we took a trip up here to Siem Reap, which is about a five hour drive or so from Nam Pen. During that, that was the first visit I saw. We went to a school out of the country. It was maybe 15 minutes outside of Siem Reap. It was called at that time, SAVI school.

It was managed by a man who actually became my first manager of my project. But anyhow, I started going to SAVIS school. I visited SAVIS school on that first trip, and I was just, Whoa. I was so dumbfounded and awestruck by the eye-hand coordination that the kids had and the refined detail of some of the drawings they were doing that I saw on the walls.

I go, “wow, this is not normal”, because I've taught art. I was an art major and I graduated with a fine arts degree. I was living in Singapore as a businessman, working for my family's business. I set up the operations in Singapore while I was living there and we were also involved with a satellite company in Indonesia, which I'll probably talk about in another podcast. I had been visiting and donating quite a bit of money to an orphanage in Indonesia and there it was a Catholic church slash orphanage attached to that church and a phenomenal man, Father Ron Re. 

I would meet with the pastor, the father who ran this whole diocese, actually for the Ral Islands of Indonesia, and, and we're having lunch one day, and he said, “Bill, you know, we appreciate your money, but if you're going to be doing something that can really help kids, people go into these places and give time, they've got enough money”.

So much money gets thrown at Cambodia. Go in there and give time. Our business had been running for five years or so by that time in Singapore, and I got permission. I saw that maybe I had some time. So I talked to SAVI back at this school back in like 2000, maybe on the second trip.

I went there and I said, Hey, Savi, do you mind if I come here every once in a while and help teach your kids art and some of the fundamentals in how they can improve their art because it's a very agricultural society here. It might be that 80% of the people are still involved in agriculture, which is their main way of  making income.

So in essence, What I'm doing is teaching in many cases rice farmers' kids and, and their opportunity for the future, because they don't make a lot of money.

Mark: So this, so you got any blow back from, from the parents or anything like that, you're teaching their kids skills that are not gonna be useful in the rice farming industry.

Bill: You know, that really hasn't hit. You know, I've tried to teach in India and the, and the, and the, and the kids will come up to me in the class and go, are you sure this is a smart thing to do? My mom and dad say I should be an engineer or an accountant. And I'm like, you know, learning how to draw and paint can only be a good thing.

Now whether you wanna become a professional artist or not, It's one of the toughest things to do. There's more brain surgeons in America than there are artists who make their living off of their art. Wow. It's not an easy thing, but here, you know, a kid can sell a drawing for $10, $20, and I can feed a family for a week.

It becomes something that's very valid here. And a lot of art gets sold here in this is a tourist town that draws people from all over the world. It makes it an interesting town. So anyhow, I got permission from SAVI to come into his school and start teaching at that time there.

Six kids and for some reason we always kind of refer to 'em as the advanced kids because they're 10 years and up. My first really, really gifted student, which we, we came up with the term rockstar. My first rockstar was a guy named Penn Riti, who went on to college in Phnom Penh.

He got some subsidies elsewhere, went on to college and has now become a very prominent architect here in Seri. He's nothing but effusive. Thank you to me for the help. Maybe the hope, the additional skill sets that I handed over to him back in 99. And you know, I'd forgotten about when I'd really started this.

You know, this was back almost before cameras. It was definitely before. Camera phones and everybody took a picture of everything that's going on every 30 seconds. But Penn Richie said, Bill, it was 1999 because in 1999 I was 12. And then I helped teach him all the way until he left for college.

So anyhow, I started coming with the permission of my wife. My sons by that time, were like, Hey dad, we're gonna hang with our friends. We don't need you around here all the time, if you wanna go to Cambodia, go. So I started coming to Cambodia about every 10 weeks for, let's say an extended long weekend and teaching at Sabis school.

Then it went beyond that. So I started visiting other schools out in the country. One of them that I'll make note of right now was called bong. Bong is near one of the old ancient temples, the Bong Temple. That school was even way more remote. And let's just say poor, we're talking about no lights in the classroom.

All the lights come in through the windows tables that were just barely hammered together. Old wood and dirt floors and teachers who would oftentimes not even show up because the government back in those days, paid the teachers so little that teachers couldn't survive off of it. So in a lot of the schools, the kids would have to donate money to the teachers so they could come regularly and teach them.

It was at that school. I had, well, I would take all the materials with me. I mean, I'm doing all this for free. So when I'm going to SAVI school, I'm bringing drawing pads, I'm bringing paper, I'm bringing pencils and all that is still the same concept with the colors of Cambodia project. But I'm bringing all these materials and during this process we, I would bring Crayons. Some of the kids tried to eat the crayons cause they were colorful and looked like candy or something to that . So we're talking pretty remote here, right? We're talking pretty remote, but still mark this amazing amount of talent I think you mentioned. What are some of the names like here? A lot of the people here are named.

Like a S is the first letter. Now the written language here, I think, is a variation of Sanskrit. Is that right? Written Kami. Do you know what the basis is? Catch you later on that . There's not letters. It's not like A, B, C, and D, but, and they somehow do a transformation into. Kama, which it's the Kama culture here in Cambodia.

They're not Cambodian as much as they're Kama. I called it kae incorrectly for many years, but it's Kama and their language looks very similar to Thai. It's not like Chinese. It's more, I think the roots are more back in Indian Sanskrit. It's very gorgeous and curvaceous. 

Mark: Now, being that you've been there for, you've come and gone and stuff for 20 years.

Do you speak any of the languages or can you write the sands? Can you understand? You know, have you picked up?

Bill: I speak some of the general words like hello, how are you? A Koon is, thank you. My knowledge of the language is very poor, but I intend to, as I intend to start spending more time here after I've retired from the family business.

And so I want to start learning the language I got. It's a unique language, but there's many, many people like Sony here. We've got, Saru was a previous manager. We've got Set Singh, one of our key artists. There's a Nira and a Naoc Pen. Pen. Richie was the name.

Okay. So I would continue to travel here for probably three years. Just coming in, let's say five times a year, and teaching and developing relationships with more and more people. Some friends of mine were telling me that, Hey man, Sam Reep is gonna take off. It's for a while with these famous temples.

One of them got made quite famous by Angelina Jolie and the movie, the Tomb Raider, there's these temples, a lot of these, many of these temples basically got forgotten, covered up in jungle, but not totally forgotten. And they were still, I think, Buddhist monasteries. The country here, Cambodia, is predominantly Buddhist.

Basically it could be called the angkor wat complex. The anchor wat picture simplified is on the flag of Cambodia, and so Cambodia was starting to become on the radar. Because Temples Siem Reap is the sort of gateway city to the temples, Angkor Wat is just a 20 minute drive from here, and it's the largest temple complex still in the world.

Mark: Wow. If I was gonna go on a temple vacation, I should go there then. 

Bill: Right? You're gonna go on a temple vacation. This is one of the spots I've read that the complex, the temple complex here, there's about 80 temples. It was a situation where there's this kind of multi century dynasty here in the same area where every king would have a new temple for his love of his God or his wife or whatever.

So there's 80 main temples and there's maybe hundreds of, let's say, smaller temples outside of the complex. But anyhow, the angkor wat. They say it is the only structure that you can see when you're in space. 

Mark: Next time I'm in space, I'll be sure to check it out.

Bill: And second, cause I, I know you make a lot of money in that electronics industry and, and you and Bezos will probably be sharing a SpaceX or whatever, blue Origin White. I'd be one of those guys.

Mark:  There's a big underground temple community here in Springfield, I tell you that. Right. Hey, you got 80 temples. I bet you we have 250 Chinese restaurants here. So go figure. We put our priorities first. 

Bill: I wanna ask you a question. How much of Chinese food is a religious experience? 

Mark: It's religion. I even ate Chinese food in a temple once and it was delicious. But anyway, so you had at this point in time put roots down in Cambodia.

No, I'm just, just coming in here and I'm not, I know, but you and your company, you know, you bought a building there like 20 years ago. Holy shit. You're crazy. So now you wanna put roots down there, you know? Tell me about that. Tell me about this exotic place. 

Bill: We heard that. Siem Reap was gonna just explode back in. There's a real estate move. 

Mark: Sorry. This is a real estate move. There's no, you're just looking to make a flip. A building. 

Bill: Hey, come on, come on. Alright, insider info. That's a privilege. How do you think these kids get there? Parchment paper for god sake. We gotta flip a few buildings and camp you, you bought the Temple complex, didn't you?

Mark: You and your family own the entire temple complex. 

Bill:  We made an offer on buying all of Angkor Wat, and I think we were. Final running. All right. Back to the question, and it's probably in some people's minds, how if I don't speak the local language, how do I communicate? Okay. And how do I travel around to these varied schools?

Answer is I had a translator. I found a tuk tuk driver called Lion, and he spoke great English. He was also a tour guide because the tourism industry was starting. And a lot of people here locally are learning English. Prior they might have been learning French because this was. French, Indo-China. Much of the culture is influenced by the colonizing French who colonized and lived in this part of the world, and I guess ruled this part of the world for 150 years.

I don't know exactly the number of years, but there used to be mostly French spoken here, and it was mostly when I started traveling here. And also during this trip also, it's mostly French people. If you're gonna. Caucasian. They're generally speaking in this part of the world, in Seif. They're gonna be French, and then probably second would be Australians.

Of course, yes, there are Americans here, but they're not a majority of the Caucasian. So Lion starts to travel with me. He'd pick me up at the airport, he would be my driver. I'd hire him for a week, and he would come in front of these classrooms trying to explain a concept on a chalkboard. It's an old chalkboard with a blackboard and explains and translates into the Kamaya language.

And that's how I was able to communicate with the kids and teach a beautiful story, let me tell you that.

Mark: I mean, once you start, I think there's gotta be, once you come you're starting to communicate, right? But your real communication is with the paintings.

Right. You can communicate that way with the students too, right? 

Bill: Of course. And you can also heal. I think it's the biggest gift given. Hope there's something more to life and there's, I might be able to get good enough and sell some of my art as these kids grow up.

One of my students, pun lure now, is becoming sort of a famous painter down in Nam Pen Ed Gallery. He's got a gallery representing his art. He's a phenomenal painter. Anyhow, we get kind of convinced that maybe we should try and make an offer on a building. Our offer to buy Anchor wa has been turned down.

Maybe let's come, let's take a little step down, be more humble. And we found a building, right in the middle of town, right near the old market. Right near what has become Pub Street, a very famous street for bars. We have moved out of that and sold that building, but we bought a building and we started having, what I would say, advanced classes in the building.

I started hiring part-time teachers. There was a school in another city here called Batam Bong, where the French had an art school, Batam Bong as, what is it, two hours away, three hours from Siem Reap. There's a really huge multidisciplinary cultural art school. In a city called Batson Bong.

And so I started finding ex-students from there who would come in and teach and go and then teach the kids inside the gallery, which was Now we did buy the building.

Mark: What is the building zone there? Is it a building designed for stitching?I don't think they really have that kind of a concept here of zoning it.

Our address, because this is still formally a communist country, we were part of a commune. We were within a commune. And the only reason I ask that question is, is that coming in a foreign American or whatever, coming in, buying a piece of property, how do you do that?

Bill: Let me point out behind you that sign, if you lower your head, Art Will Save the World. That's one of our trademarked slogans, and this is one of our sort of iconic advertising posters for the project.

Art Will Save the World. I painted that. We had that slogan painted on the top of our building when we first bought the building. 

Mark: Looks familiar. I can't place it, but it looks familiar to me. 

Bill:  I'm sure you've seen it in some movies. I'm not sure it made it into the Angelina Jolie movie. I think she was here a few years before me.

So we bought the building. I'll explain how we went through that process. But we bought the building. We moved in, we did some renovation work to it after a while to where we could have some sleeping quarters upstairs this time, still had a good relationship with.

We were. Poorly, a marginally funded project. In those days, we weren't an official ngo, so it was all a very minimal amount of funding. Anyhow, we had teachers come and go because they could as, as this area progressed, more and more companies moved in who could pay better salaries than we could. The Vietnamese concept before I explain about buying the building, the Vietnamese concept is I travel a lot to Vietnam for business, because we had some very large vendors who supplied us electronic components that we put into our bigger electronic components.

There's so much amazing good art done in Vietnam. The Vietnamese people really learned a lot about the art painting skills from the French and so in Hanoi and in Not Ho Chi city used to be Saigon. It's amazing number of galleries. Highlighting what I think are some of the best paintings in the world that are made in Vietnam.

And so I thought, well, with the talent that's here in Cambodia, innate talent that's here, it's in the blood. I think here it's a right brain society. They're just amazingly creative. They just need some help. So anyhow, I thought I used to call it my Vietnam concept, which is to do what the French did in Vietnam, and I would help to try to do that here in Cambodia.

The Vietnamese concept thing is all about, so I think it was probably around 2003. I started looking for a possible type. For the colors of this project, which we ended up calling the Colors of Cambodia, and we found a building right downtown, I think I mentioned earlier, near Pub Street.

In the old market, there was a three story, kind of a townhouse structure, maybe 20 feet by a hundred feet deep, and then three floors. There were two blocks actually, and then there was kinda like a little penthouse cut on the top. Were the second and third floor. 

We're in the big city, so the floors were tile and a lot of the old houses here are really gorgeous, and they're all made out of wood. That's common also in Thailand. I have not witnessed that in Vietnam. So I've gone to a, what do we call it, A mixer. I was part of the Chamber of Commerce.

The company was in Singapore, and I went to a kind of a mixer where the topic was and. Beach given, and it was about investing in Cambodia. And prior to that I'd been a little bit on the fence about, you know, really do I want to spend the time, the money, the tackle, the possible issues of buying a property in pretty much a total full on third world country.

I met the ambassador through America to Cambodia. He was an ex general in the military and I met some lawyers. He introduced some lawyers who were based in Nam Pen, one of them I actually, I understand, was part of the whole Angelina Jolie entourage when she adopted kids and et cetera.

But so we're dealing with probably the most, are her kids, Cambodian, I think she adopted two or three from here. I think that was before the Brad Pit period. He's from Springfield, Missouri, where you're sitting right now. So I started having conversations with the lawyer. I went and visited him.

He was very gungho on, of course, more companies like ours getting involved in Cambodia. More investment, more intellectual spreading of concepts, And teaching the kids art. He thought it was a wonderful deal. So he took on our project and he gave me one of his lead lawyers to help us go through the process of what we needed to do.

So what we needed, because a foreigner and a foreign company at that time could not, purchased land in Cambodia. So we created a number of legal documents, but the key one was called a power of attorney. And I also became familiar with this in some projects that we had in Indonesia.

Foreigners are not able to do certain things there. What you do is you get like local nominees who basically say that they will be the, in writing, only the owners of the building, the separate power attorneys. You know, it alleviates them of any financial or legal issues that might come out of this whole project.

There was a Buddhist prayer going on outside just a second as we were walking by.

Mark : Really? Can you snatch the pebble from his hand? 

Bill: No. I was the pebble in his hand when I was in the right space. When I get in that right space, I become a pebble. The building was very important, became a community center.

It became a big advertisement sign.

Mark: That all you do in this place, these three floors that they committed you to, you met in a community center, other things like people, you get maybe a wayward soul that needs a place to stay for an evening.

Bill: Something like that.

Well, sometimes the kids will sleep. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. In one of our rooms here, and, and I've slept in some of the rooms here, are dedicated to learning. Right. There's no other. There's no other studies. It's simply an art building.

Bill: Well, that's all that I finance and teach, but I know the kids come here and they might study on their other academic pursuits.

We play a lot of music here. They are traditional instruments. So many of the kids have learned how to play guitar, and some of the kids come in here every day. 

Mark: Did the kids come after school or could they during?

Bill: Yes. They could come after school and maybe stay. All right, so as not to bore you, let me finish. We find this guy who's gonna sell us this building and he's an older guy and he doesn't speak any English.

My lawyer is doing a lot of the negotiating and let's just say the number was a hundred thousand dollars to buy the building. So he's not speaking English and he's of this age of which people are telling me, Bill, you'd better be careful because this guy, if he's alive right now, and you're familiar with the whole civil war genocide sort of scenario that started here back in the seventies.

So the word was it, that guy is alive. At that age, he had to have been Kamir Rouge. So you're dealing with ex Kamir Rouge Bill, so be very careful. So, okay, fine. We explained to him that the money was going to be wire transferred into his account. We've signed all the papers. The money is gonna be wired into his account, but it's gonna take two or three days.

Well, we go through this. The money was wired the next day. The money's not in his account, and I understand he just went holistic. He went crazy ballistic. My lawyer said, holy, holy man. This could turn into a catastrophe. We'll get, I'm gonna try and calm this guy down. We know maybe we wired the money and now it's gone and we'll never see it.

When we went into this whole project, we were aware that anything could happen. Any time and the hundred thousand dollars we're spending, we kind of immediately wrote it off. Because we just didn't know whether we'd ever, what was gonna happen. We're taking a chance, you know, we're international businessmen, and as far as I'm concerned, that's basically the only way you're gonna be able to move forward in many parts of the world.

I took chances. So I said, okay, I'll meet the guy and I'll try to. Playing and calming him down. So we met at this famous restaurant outdoors and I said, I want to be outdoors where a lot of people can see what happens if something really gets ugly. I'll talk about things like, pistols and things like that.

So I met him right out at the last table, basically almost on the street in full daylight and the view of everybody who might be walking by that morning. He shows up, but he's got nothing but a smile on his face and is like, I'm so sorry. I understand. It's translated to me. It's gonna take two, a couple more days. 

Thank you so much. But I had gone to this. This meeting is so completely prepared for the worst to happen. It did not happen. You're ready to kill the guy for god sake. Oh, well I was ready to die for this investment to come and spread the love and, and the skills to the youngsters of Cambodia.

That's like 2003. We move in, we renovate. And the other thing I want to do before we close this session. Mr. Mark. Thank you so much. As we had an art show, we had a kind of a grand opening and my daughter was here for the grand opening. She came and stayed here for about a month and we had a grand opening and we framed as much as we could and we filled all the walls with.

So many pictures of the kids' art and at that time there weren't a lot of what I would call really excellent advanced pieces of work. The process of learning how to do art and how to teach art is not necessarily a fast one. So anyhow, we go around town, we invite any guy who looks like he's got money in his wallet.

Come on over to our show. What happens is there has been some kind of a convention of doctors in town going on with doctors from John Hopkins University, a very famous medical school in America and in Baltimore, I believe it is. About five or six of these guys came and they bought everything off the walls.

We completely sold everything we had for sale. It was sort of like a blessing from God. This project is ordained, it's gonna be successful, and we move forward. We had a wonderful evening and I thank John Hopkins University and their amazing doctors to come and help us really start the colors of Cambodia project. Phenomenal. Take flight sort of moment.

Mark: What's happening right now is I'm thanking you. I want you to tell me right now, do I have talent? Because this is what I'm thinking. 

Bill: I'd say you could be one of my advanced teachers right now. Yes. You, you've got it, man. 

Mark: I'm sure you got pictures of your old building, right? 

Bill:  Well, no. What I think we will do is, depending on how this progresses, and I've got people helping me, we'll be splicing pictures of the old gallery, new gallery, pictures of the temple.

I didn't really talk much about it, I can talk more extensively in the future about the temples and just the whole vibe here in Cambodia. I very possibly might move here next year and maybe not spend all year here, but maybe 60, 70% of my time. 

Mark: Do you need citizenship or do you have a work visa? How does that work? How do you get to stay there?

Bill: I can just come in here for a month at a time and do a little slide to Bangkok and come back. A lot of people do that, or I'm learning that it's not that hard to get a six month visa here, An American just got one. So it's just filling out some paperwork and believe it or not, like since Covid, Siem Reap is exploding now as the, you know, COVID is sort of dissipated.

Places like Bangkok and I know for certain Singapore are still kind of under this cloud. Calmness. They really haven't awakened back fully yet. But Siem Reap is sparkling and vibrant right now, like I haven't seen in years. So it's exciting.