Published in The Age’ newspaper on 7th November 2009
By Chris Johnston
LEIGH Mathews is a Melbourne girl from a blue-collar family, her father a truck driver, who grew up around Seaford. The family of three split when she was very young.
She was expelled from school at 15 for venting anger bottled at home. “Swearing and fighting and yelling at teachers,” she says, “and not turning up.”
She left home, too, and at 16 was living in Frankston with friends and working in cafes. She did bits of other schooling but not much and drifted through jobs and then she started travelling.
In 2004, her life changed in an instant — literally as she turned a corner in a side street in a ghetto in Asia. Now, and because of that, Ms Mathews runs a unique charity — a non-government, community development called the Future Cambodia Fund — for some of the world’s most dispossessed children.
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