School of enduring lessons

The West Australian
18th December 2008

I walk away from the two rows of tents and the blue tarpaulin where people tired from a big day’s work are sprawled after a traditional Cambodian dinner.

Away from the single light, looking for a little solitude, I walk up the dirt road towards the Buddhist pagoda next door and hear chanting in the dark.

A man under a tree, not far to my left, is going through a series of incantations with gusto. Then, there is a high voice off to my right and a quick splash of torchlight on me.

I hold up a hand, open-palmed, in greeting, the torch goes off and the chanting resumes.

A dark figure walks briskly towards me, from straight ahead, his plainsong in time with his gait.

There are some 70 monks at the pagoda in the small Cambodian village of Balang, less than an hour from Siem Reap, and the dark night is thick with belief, under a hazy crescent moon and Venus rising.

It is half as hot in the night as it was all day when we were shifting soil in stretchers made from a sack nailed on to two bamboo poles. Hot? A searing, humid heat. But no one on the World Expeditions Balang Community Project trip gave up.

John McPhee, 66, of Victoria, towel tucked up under his cap to stop his ears and neck burning, trudged on stoically, as did all the others.

Hot? God, yes it was hot. Every piece of clothing was soaked through. But by 5pm, there was a bed of earth all around the village’s rectangular school, so that its concrete pathway could be completed.

And this is a holiday, which people have paid $1790, plus their airfares, to be on.

Chris Watson, of New South Wales, who emerged from the school blackened by a day of scraping walls ready for painting, explains: “I’m a city slicker through and through. I’m well outside my comfort zone with this type of work. But we thought that if we were going to go away, we might as well leave somewhere a little bit better than when we arrived.”

It is a recurring theme throughout the group of 14. No one here wants to go away for two weeks and lie by a pool.

That is precisely why World Expeditions came up with the series of Community Project holidays, from this work on a village school near Siem Reap in Cambodia to projects in Nepal, India, Vietnam, China, Peru, Venezuela, Tanzania, and two in Australia.

They vary from helping to provide clean water to work on a medical centre.

The Cambodia trip incorporates the four days at the school with two days of temple tours at Siem Reap, including Angkor Wat, a river trip on to Battambang and then a stay in Phnom Penh.

I had expected that we would leave some small, physical mark — in this case, the building painted and kitchen construction under way. I had even expected a sense of appeasement — something to set against our lucky Western largesse.

I had expected the sense of attachment which so many on the World Expeditions Community Project holidays feel.

But I thought that, in many ways, the biggest effect was just being there, feeling some traction in a complex country with a difficult immediate past, starting to understand the complexities, exchanging glances and a laugh with locals.

There are 50 children at the primary school in a country desperate for education and the plan is to step it up to take secondary students.

The work here by World Expeditions trippers backs in to the work of the Cambodian Orphan Fund and is supported by Footprints, an offshoot of World Nomads, a travel insurance company.

After years of work in social and community work in the UK, Nick Griffin came to Cambodia in 2006 to see what he could set up to help the children here.

“It was evident even before I got here that there was a high level of poverty and need,” he says.
After being handed a leaflet by children outside a temple, he visited an orphanage and knew that was what he had to do.

“I started an orphanage and it has expanded to over 70 children and two sites,” he says.
“There is a plan to build facilities for 200 children.”

He set up the Cambodian Orphan Fund as a non-government organisation and the day before I speak to him, in November, he signed a lease for a new building for an orphanage.

And it has all happened in 18 months.

Mr Griffin is also busy co-ordinating up to 40 volunteers a month who come, predominantly, to teach English language and play development.

“Most of the children here are extremely bright but don’t get the opportunity of education,” he says.

The overall Balang village project has also included US charity Human Interpretation taking five years to build a reservoir so that the farmers can produce a second, or even third, rice crop a year, outside the rainy season. It also was opened early in November.

The Americans were also told by people in the eight villages in the reservoir’s area that what they wanted was education.

“What they asked for most was to learn English,” Mr Griffin says.

And so it was that the Balang school came into being. World Expeditions adopted it as one of its Community Projects holidays and four days’ work here is the centrepiece of a 12-day Cambodia trip.

Footprints stepped in to fund specific World Expeditions community projects, including this.

Footprints was set up by World Nomads, which has travel insurance to cover every individual traveller’s demands, to fund community projects.

Travellers buying their insurance can donate between $2 and $10 to the projects. Well over 90 per cent do so and have contributed to the $600,000 which has already funded more than 30 projects.
On this particular November trip, the task is to get the school ready to open in four days' time.

Mr Griffin outlines to the people the concreting, window fixing, cleaning and painting that lies ahead. But he adds that the school is next to a Buddhist pagoda and its monks and near an Angkor temple.

“You will be almost the only tourists in there and you will also be helping to set up a really exciting future for them," he says.

He suggests that the visitors see the word “orphans” in the Cambodian context.

“I sometimes explain them as boarding schools.” But Mr Griffin says, “The poverty here is terrible and they have no chance of breaking the poverty cycle. Our primary aim is to break that cycle.

“The children can’t just go to school because they can’t afford to. They can’t afford the uniform and they can’t even afford to be fed.

“This is also a socialisation exercise. Most of the future work in Cambodia is in tourism. They have to be able to deal with us strange foreigners — it’s as if we have landed from another planet. And we have to do that without destroying Khmer culture.”

He says that in 18 months of work, children who came to the school without a word of English surprise people with how well they can communicate in this new language.

“It’s amazing because they are so keen to learn. When you open an orphanage, you have to close the gates because there is a queue,” he says.

“They are desperate for what we are doing out here — and what you are going to be doing this week.”

It is fair to say that some of the World Expeditioners themselves have their vaguely desperate moments. By the second morning, there are already aches and pains. But the volunteers worked on relentlessly, alongside paid Khmer carpenters, in difficult and uncomfortable conditions and with less than comfortable camping facilities.

It is all driven by 25-year-old construction co-ordinator Yinh Ya, known to all as Chai, who is a single-handed inspiration.

A local boy, he had no choice but to fight for the Khmer Rouge, to keep his family safe. When he got away from the guerillas, he had to fight for the government forces.

“It’s not an obligation but you have no choice, to protect your family,” he says.

Then he worked and studied hard and graduated from secondary school, learning English and improving it by working his way through a small dictionary, picking up discarded newspapers and getting help from tourists.

It took him a year to save enough to buy a second-hand moped. He then worked and studied to become an accredited cultural guide. When he was guiding, he saved enough to get to engineering school.

Chai says simply that his life has been a “struggle” and that he is always looking for the future, an optimism set against the shadow of constant reminders like the landmine field behind the village’s ruined Angkor temple, where work still goes on today to clear the terrible blight.

Chai knows the value of education and this more opportune time for his country.

“Now we have the sound of children in school instead of bombs and shouting and screaming for sadness,” he says.

We might all have been soaked in sweat day and night to the point of nappy rash, but it’s not much to bear. We might crave the simple comfort of a camp chair and a cup of tea in the afternoons but that seems less consequential now, too.

Three things were being worked for. First there are the school’s children, then a personal ethic. And finally this disparate group of travellers, which included a real estate agent, two prison teachers, a pharmaceutical sales person, a movie script translator, a computer nerd and a truss builder, but who quickly become a team and then some-sort-of-family, drawn together from as far as England and Canada but mainly Australia.

Working for the likes of the tireless 26-year-old Carla Howe, from NSW, and Tracey Edwards, also of NSW, who modestly declared herself not practical but quickly earned the title “hinge girl” for her adeptness with a screwdriver on the window fittings, and maintained a luminous smile throughout.

For the “Dirt Boys” who dug and shifted tonnes of the stuff to make concreting foundations.

For the sake of being with decent, engaged people with the right motivations.

“I have really enjoyed doing something for somebody else,” says John McPhee, whose business is in real estate.

“When we were digging, the little girls would just take up the ‘Cambodian wheelbarrow’ and join us. They have shown us that basic things can be uplifting. It has been great to see everybody pitching in transforming the building.

“There are so many people in Australia that would get so much enjoyment out of this and contribute something. It makes you feel pretty good.”

Chris Noble, general manager of World Nomads and co-founder of Footprints, is here with director Trent O’Connell making a documentary on the project for their Positive Footprints series. It shows on 25 airlines and the National Geographic Adventure channel. He emerges a little bleary after a night’s rain, and says: “I don’t do camping. I don’t do hard ground.”

But do it he does, and work like a navvy, too.

And rain it does. Lightning enough to fill the tent, thunder rolling in. And then the first few heavy drops, which build to a drubbing.

I know the nylon tent wouldn’t keep much out. But then I hear the guides covering our tents with an extra flysheet. It comes in hard, pummelling the tent, but I lie back feeling the ground and enjoying the elements . . . I drift off to sleep again.

Then there is chanting. It is 4.30am and the monks repeat their lines meditatively, over and over and over, until I am buzzy with the chanting in the night.