In case any of you are wondering why there have been no updates in about 10 days, the reason is that I have been out of Phnom Penh for the last week on an outreach trip to see some of Bridges Across Borders' other projects in the Kampot province.
A group of about 12 interns left last Monday morning to take a bus ride to Kep, a beautiful sea-side town in Kampot province where we stayed for the week. However, the purpose of our trip was to spend time working in a small village about 45 minutes away from Kep. I would love to tell you what this village is called, and I asked several times, but I seemed to get a different name every time I asked. In any case, it was a very small village in an area that had formerly controlled by the Khmer Rouge, and the whole area is very close to the Vietnam border.
Bridges Across Borders runs a number of Community Development Programs, including one in this particular village. In the village there is a school building with 2 classrooms and a plot of farmland behind the school. This is the base of the BAB program in this town. The program focuses on 3 areas: education, agriculture and health. The school runs several English classes for children and apparently some health education classes for adults too. Behind the school, the program is setting up a demonstration farm, and I believe they are planning to start a co-operative farm there and sell crops for the villagers and to support the development programs.
During our week, we helped out with the farming and education. Several of us had the chance to teach English classes to kindergarten-aged children in the mornings. The kids are unbelievably cute but very rambunctious, so the teaching was exhausting, but obviously very rewarding too. I will post some pictures of the kids soon.
We were asked to help out with some farming as well, but we only did this in the mornings as it got too hot to work by mid-day. Our normal routine was to wake up around 5:30 AM at our beautiful bungalows in Kep and take the 45 minute moto ride into the village as the sun was rising. We would generally get to the school at about 7 and do some farming and/or teach an English class. Sometimes another group would stay back in the morning and then come in the afternoon to teach English classes in the afternoon and evening, but I enjoyed waking up early, working in the morning, and then spending the afternoons reading and relaxing. The farming was actually really enjoyable...it can be nice to do some manual labour once in a while and it certainly made me appreciate a little bit the life of a farmer.
The whole week was a great chance to get out of Phnom Penh to some clearer, cooler air and to see a very grassroots development project. The first few days in the village were a little bit frustrating as they didn't seem to have much work for us to do, the language barrier was evident, and the whole experience seemed unorganized. But, I soon figured out that the trick was to let go a little bit and go with the flow. The project is still in the early stages so I understand that there will be some bumps in the road early on. As well, I realized more and more that development work is a slow process and the village cannot be transformed overnight and certainly not just because a few law students come into town for a few days. Of course, as usually is the case with these types of things, I took more out of the experience than I was able to contribute, but I think that was the whole point in going in the first place. They certainly didn't need us to plant the corn and there were several English teachers working there for the summer already, but it was a very educational and enlightening experience.
Not to mention that we were staying in a beautiful guesthouse overlooking the ocean, got to eat fresh crab, squid, and shrimp every night, and had the chance to stay Friday night on a virtually deserted island called Rabbit Island, about 30 minutes away by boat from Kep. We finally returned on a hellish bus ride (no A/C) Saturday afternoon, exhausted but also recharged by the change of scenery. It was a great week and I am ready to get back to work, finish up our HIV manual and hopefully move on to some more tasks, including perhaps teaching some of the lessons we have written.
I will post some pictures from our week shortly.
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