I was assigned an alternate school at another temple approximately 5km out of town as the Wat Thmei temple is being used for another purpose this week. The new classroom and surrounding area is actually quite pretty (relatively speaking). I must be getting used to the surroundings already...
I have completed the first full week of volunteer work. It took a few days to get into the routine. When I attended the first class last Friday the classroom was a small grass hut with a mud floor. To my surprise, when I arrived Monday for the same class a new classroom had been built over the weekend. A cement structure, no windows, but of similar size, again with a mud floor. The...
Outside the morning schoolStudents show off their assignmentsInside the classroomYou are #1 !Volunteer work started Friday November 24th after a month of touring Thailand and Vietnam. My last stop was Siem Reap Cambodia where I plan on volunteering for three to four weeks.The days start...
This morning we headed to the village to see how the wells turned out, and to finish our interviews for the Loan Project. Both of the wells are working wonderfully, and the villagers seem to be happy with them! We did 4 more interviews today, and one story was particularly interesting for us. A woman with seven children was among the first to receive a loan, and used the money to expand...
This morning we went to Wat Thmei to plant a garden in the front of the school. With the help of a few students and some of the resident monks, we cleaned up the grounds and prepared the beds for planting. We then headed with Brandon across the street to a nursery, where he picked out plants that will require little maintenance but still look nice. After lunch, we returned to the...
Today the well installation began in the village. We were supposed to go to the village at 8 a.m. with the well guys, but just as Brandon warned us about, they took their time getting here and we didn't leave until 10! Apparently that's how it always is in Cambodia....Once in the village, we showed the men where the wells were going to be placed, and watched as they began jetting...
This morning we headed to a nearby squatter's village with Brandon. We had two missions today: first to interview participants in JWOC's Loan Project, and second, to find locations for the next two wells to be built. Journeys has just started the Loan Project, which provides microloans to people in the village. So far the program seems to be very successful, and it was interesting...
Hello! We are Kaitlin and Sean from Connecticut, USA, and we are here in Cambodia for 2 weeks. We are doing a Give and Take Tour through Journeys Within, which means we spend half of our time here volunteering, and half sightseeing. Today was the first day of volunteering, and we went to Wat Thmei Pagoda School, a language school sponsored by Journeys. We spent the two hours meeting...
Travel Aid Volunteers next to their donated wellTwo shy girls below the well donated by Travel Aid.The Travel Aid SignThe mother shows how clean the water is!A typical water source in CambodiaConducting a household surveyRhodri with the kidsCheck it out: it's a soccer ba...
JWOC runs a sponsorship programe which gives out scholarships to promising and talented university students by paying their university fees of 360 USD per year. About 50 students had applied and it is our task now to figure out who the are the 6 most deserving of them. It's a scary task with lots of responsibility if one considers how many doors are opened by a degree.For their application...
The nice and comfortable house of 'journeys within' stands back to back with a settlers' village. It is rather different to the villages we have visited the past days in that the houses are much closer together, there is no open countryside and people have only come recently from all parts of Cambodia and thus don't know each other that well. Our task was to find out what water sources...
I have been told off by Andrea (pronounced the German way) for not introducing ourselves, so here goes. I'm Rhodri Saunders, the co-ordinator of this trip and now the TravelAid president. I have just completed my Masters in Biochemistry at Oxford University (2.1) and am about to start a Dphil there in statistics (don't ask). Anya I met through my biochemistry course, she's a nature...
Day 1 of volunteering - Water surveysThe aim of today was to visit some areas where JWOC had already installed some wells to see if they were being used by the villagers. We visited a number of villages in the Angjor Thom area. Questions were not only about their water use but also more general health issues such as sanitation and understanding of disease. Interestingly, going to the...
