At 35 years old, Romi Grossberg decided to give up her job as a social worker in Australia for a two-year contract at Tiny Toones, a hip-hop youth centre in the slums of Cambodia. It ended up changing her life.
Four years later, she moved to Thailand where she still lives.
“I guess I forgot to go home,” she told The AJN.
“Home” was Melbourne, where she worked in the areas of homelessness, mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse for many years. Throughout her time working in the space, Grossberg would write her thoughts and feelings down. Journalling was something she started when she was around 10 years old.
“I have always found writing a very natural way to express myself, and these days I teach a lot of writing therapy in my counselling sessions,” she said.
While she definitely thought of herself as a storyteller, she never considered herself a writer. Yet friends and colleagues would constantly tell her to put her thoughts, musings and journalling into a book.
In 2012, Grossberg travelled to Laos for her first writers’ retreat.
“I don’t remember making any decisions since. Things just happened. Writing articles turned into writing books,” she explains on her website. While she has written a couple of books in the past though, Grossberg said it wasn’t until she wrote her latest book, Hip Hop & Hope: One woman’s journey in the slums of Cambodia, inspired by her time at Tiny Toones, that she truly felt she could call herself an author.
Part memoir, part history and part travelogue, Hip Hop & Hope is described as a story of trust, friendship, faith and belief in oneself, even when the world is against you.
“Over my years working at Tiny Toones, I was told over and over that I needed to write a book, that my story was unique, not only because of the type of work I did but because I spoke the language and was invited into the heart of the city,” Grossberg said. “It was not that common for Westerners to be so ingrained in local Cambodian life, in the underworld in particular.”
Grossberg was completely immersed in the lives of many children. She would sit by their sides through drug addiction, family violence, slavery, corruption and poverty. And she was touched by each and every story.
“My intention when I first began writing, was to write a book for community and international development students to understand the reality of working in developing countries, which is something I wish I’d had at the beginning,” she recalled. “Over time the story changed and evolved into a personal story; the story of the founder KK, the kids I worked with, and mine, as they weaved together. I realised that through my writing I could give a voice to the voiceless and tell their story, a story of hope and resilience, of desperation and truth, and of dreaming for a better future.”
Grossberg describes Hip Hop & Hope as the culmination of journalling, blogs she wrote, photos and videos she took, and memories she formed throughout her time in Cambodia. Which, she explained, is strange because “those who know me know that I have a terrible memory”.
But she said, the situations she found herself in and the stories she heard and shared are forever etched in her memory.
“During my time in Cambodia I journalled furiously as a way of trying to understand and process my workdays which were full of chaos, emergency situations and ethical dilemmas on a minute-to-minute basis. Working with street kids in the slums, teens from backgrounds of gang life, drugs, victims of exploitation, family violence and extreme poverty was stressful to say the least,” she said, explaining that she felt wholly responsible for everything that occurred in the Tiny Toones centre, as she was the manager.
It is the story, she said, of how an educated Western woman, an illiterate, tattooed ex-felon Cambodian-American deportee, and a bunch of street kids became a family.
Writing the memoir, she said, was therapeutic. At one point, it was close to 150,000 words of “pure therapy” before being trimmed and turned into a book for others to read and hopefully learn from.
When asked what she hopes readers feel while immersing themselves in the memoir, Grossberg said she wants them to feel encouraged, enraged and uplifted.
“I hope readers feel encouraged by the resilience of kids who fight to live against all odds. I hope they feel enraged at some of the injustices in the world, and uplifted by witnessing these kids’ stories.”
The book is “a story of hope and resilience, and overcoming sometimes unfathomable obstacles, in the slums of Cambodia”.
“It really is a story of hip hop and hope.”
Hip, Hop & Hope, One woman’s journey in the slums of Cambodia is published by BB Press, $34.99 rrp.
Romi will be appearing at Melbourne Jewish Book Week on August 18, and will be launching the book at The Little Lost Bookshop, Katoomba on August 28 and Poetica, Clovelly on August 29 and Readings, St Kilda on August 31 and Jeffrey’s, Malvern on September 5 in Melbourne. For more: romigrossberg.com
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