If at Voice you DO Succeed! 

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Singer SPIDERMAN and the Cambodia Support Group (CSG)

The Cambodia Support Group is embarking on Year 25!  We of the CSG do not run our own projects, but help Cambodian partners to lead the way in serving women and families, children and youth, fine arts, and the disabled.

Along with a 100-traditional-instruments creation project, our newest arts focus will bring Cambodian tenor HY KIMCHANTAVOUTT (Voutt) to Canada . He will study music and English, and also learn about CSG and other human and global service models. He should arrive by September and be here for a one-year minimum, with extension likely.  

Now 22, Voutt has finished Year 1 at Cambodia ’s Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA).  He sings in six languages - arias, show tunes, jazz, classical, folk, pop - but he lives for opera, Italian above all.  In fact, his mother Kimhuot calls him a foreigner born in a Khmer (Cambodian) body.   

When Vancouver RMT Jocelyn Pritchard visited RUFA in 2005, Voutt had on a Spiderman shirt.  Jocelyn called him Spiderman – and the name stuck.  "I can sing opera song and walk up the wall, I'm okay!" he says.  The power in his slim Asian frame amazes listeners: “Where did that big voice come from?”  “I’d listen to him anytime, anywhere!”

The CSG’s aid to traditional and western music at RUFA serves Cambodia ’s dual focus - on its great heritage and on belonging in world music.  Local and foreign teachers of western music, with varied skills, come and go; so Voutt’s training is shaky.  He will study voice, piano and theory in Southeast BC while at Selkirk Secondary School in Kimberley BC for intensive English.  Later he will study at the Victoria Conservatory of Music.  He will attend operas plus voice and diction classes in Vancouver , Calgary and other centres.

Voutt cares deeply for children-at-risk and the poor.  He has already helped his country by singing in CSG fund-raising events, as a volunteer music teacher at COLT child-safe centre, as ‘Big Brother’ to other poor kids, and more.  In mid-May he took two dozen kids and caregivers on a RUFA field trip, to foster pride in their musical culture.  Seeing a sickly, starving baby by the road, he began planning right there to help the child and family.

The Spiderman nickname is well suited! Voutt is a hero in the making. Please help to make his dreams come true. Your one-time or monthly donations will have lasting value for this exceptional young man.