Charity Cambodia

Tomorrow I start my trip towards Helsingborg. This means the blog won't be updated as regularly the upcoming time. I will come back to Sihanoukville in the middle of July and continue as usual. Although, some update will perhaps be made during my stay in Sweden.

I still have to figure out a good donation to collect for. I have some ideas, but it would be very interesting to hear if you have any other ideas. Please let me know what you think!

Thursday morning The Goodwill School had an appointment at a ear doctor, who is coming approximately every third month. They have a temporary station by an organization called M'Lop Tapang. This organization works with street children and you can read more about their work on the homepage.

As the rainy season has getting more noticeable it was raining heavy when I was about to leave for The Goodwill School in the morning. Luckily I live across from a supermarket and was able to run over and buy a raincoat. Taking the bicycle was out of the question and instead I took a motorbike taxi.

Finally at the school we took a tuk tuk to M'Lop Tapang. In the tuk tuk we were 13 persons, probably the record for me so far. Since many were children it was actually not so bad.

It is not only the children at The Goodwill School who are welcome but also the families living in the surrounding area. As you can see on the pictures there was a wide range of ages joining the visit.

This morning I went to The Goodwill School planning to take photos of the Khmer boxing class. The instructor, Pov, has been quite busy lately and therefore I made sure he was able to come this day. What I though missed was that he had promised the children in the class (10 children joined) to take them to the Independence beach. Therefore the attached pictures are from a short beach trip instead of from Khmer boxing as I planned. These kind of misunderstandings happen from time to time due to the language and I have also already learned not to take any plans for granted. Although, the beach trip was very nice and much appreciated by the children and photos from Khmer boxing will come another time.

After our daily meeting today I went for a walk in the area surrounding the Goodwill School with one of our teachers, Nain. I was invited in several homes and it was very interesting to see how they are living in a poor area such as this. The language barrier was of course big but Nain made it work by translating and I am glad she was along helping me. Since it was lunchtime they also invited me for a meal but I politely had to decline the nice offers since I wasn't willing to test how my stomach would react. The hygiene in this area is most probably a bit lower than what my stomach is used to.

I hope the attached pictures give you an idea what this area looks like and a view over the standard of the houses. The area doesn't have any running water but instead they all are collecting water from the well you find on one picture. By this well some of them are also taking their showers.