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Prasat Char Village

The first picture above shows a boy holding a rat that was going to be cooked and eaten (fortunately we weren't invited to join in the feast). 

You can see in the middle picture that some of the children's clothes are nothing more than rags.  I intend to take out lots of clothes next time I visit.

Blankets

After being in Laos and then in Australia for a month I was very keen to get back out to our village and see how things were going.  One of the first things I noticed when I got back from Australia was that the temperature was quite a bit cooler.  Not cold, by any means, but the evenings were chilly enough for me to use a blanket.  I immediately thought of the people in the village because I knew they didn't have blankets.  So my first task was to buy a stack of blankets and deliver them to the approximately 20 families that I consider to be the poorest.  They were extremely grateful.  

Gifts from Australia

I returned from Australia loaded up with toys for the village children.  (Thanks Mum and Mrs Schmidt.)  The children in the village had never owned any toys and I think the photos below speak for themselves.

Sovanne's English lessons

Sovanne is doing well.  Thanks to your donations I have been able to pay for him to resume his English studies.  As our work with the village expands I find we are having communication problems and he was very keen to improve his English - he just couldn't afford it.  He now attends English classes five nights a week.

A new school room

There's nothing like starting off the year with big plans.  As I've mentioned before, one of my main goals is to try and get every child into school.  Several people, whose children don't go to school, have told me that the school was full and they weren't accepting any more students.  I decided to visit the school myself to find out if this was true.  It is indeed the case.  The school only consists of two rooms and they are both overcrowded.  I've made some initial enquiries with the village master and relevant authorities and it seems there are no plans in the near future for the authorities to expand the school.  So that brings me to goal number one for the year - to build a school room.  At present I'm brainstorming the different options we have to build another room.  One of my ideas is for me (us) to provide the materials and have the villagers build it themselves, but volunteering their labour for free.  I feel that having them build it themselves will make them proud of it and feel like they own it.  The only problem with this idea is that the villagers don't understand these concepts and when I suggested they might offer their labour for free they just couldn't grasp why I wouldn't pay them.   

Vegetables, tools, water pumps, etc.

It was very exciting to come back and see how much the vegetables had grown.  Some of the villagers have even been able to sell some of their produce.

No. 1      No. 2     No. 3      No. 4      

Picture No. 1 - This child was just happy to play with the cans of seeds we provided.

Picture No. 2 and 3. - Not too long ago this land was just uncleared scrub and the family had no vegetables at all.

Picture No. 4 - The guys who make the water pumps for us.  He actually uses a twig instead of a key to start this motor bike.

We continue to put in water pumps and now that the wet season is officially over we are looking at putting in concrete drainage systems around each pump.

We've now also bought a number of bicycles for different families.  The bikes are not just used by the children to get to school, but are also used as sources of income whether it be to transport vegetables to the market, or to collect and sell firewood, or to travel into Siem Reap to work on construction sites (a one hour bike ride).  I intend to provide a lot more bikes in the near future.

As well as working on long term sustainability issues with the villagers I continue to try and meet their immediate needs.  There are a few families that are so poor that at times they have nothing to eat.  I provide them with sacks of rice.

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Phone (in Cambodia):  092 442 669  (outside Cambodia)  855 92 442 669

Email:   grovesphotography@yahoo.com.au

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