It is only with time that we realize we have lost, or at least damaged, our ability to look at things through the lens of purity, so that vice, moral poverty and evil in the world have little or no impact on us any more. And then innocence is what we find most unsettling. It disturbs us when we see before us the total vulnerability and absolute dependence on human goodness that is typical of children, fragile as tiny insects we might hold in one hand. And so, if we consider our ability to withstand or remain indifferent to the world's falsity a great conquest, we forget that children have a lot to teach us about the true essence of life. These are people who have such a clear vision of what it means to be human that they ignore the criteria usually applied to assessing good and evil: what helps or hinders us as individuals. All they see is the essence of things. In a part of the world that still brings to mind scenes of adventure in the western imagination, as in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, lives a man who may seem to have gone crazy, but is afflicted by a particular kind of craziness: he firmly believes that men can live in peace and brotherhood. David J. Biviano, an American professor who left everything behind to go and live in Cambodia, the scene of a true apocalypse in recent history, is a sort of new Kurtz at the head of a tribe of children whom he leads with the force not of terror, but of love. These are the children who have found refuge in his acceptance and understanding, and in the big house he bought with his own money and donations from friends all over the world who share his special kind of craziness. Here as in other developing nations, children are often considered a burden on society, a nuisance or a resource to be exploited, and many of them die while still in swaddling clothes, never having known the warmth of physical contact; those who do survive infancy are subjected to even worse privations. These children, like all children, are fragile, soft clay, mud that any educator can mould as he wishes, whether he is inspired by a vocation for giving and sharing, advising and aiding, or on the other hand by one of those base instincts that make men capable of harming their fellows. The fate of an innocent being often hangs on the possibility of a chance encounter. The House of Peace for Cambodian Children is a refuge and a shelter from one of the most common and infamous injustices of life in this part of the world.