Risk, hope, havens and hard labour

Otago Daily Times (New Zealand)
http://www.odt.co.nz

Tue, 16 Jun 2009

In this week's reader postcard Steven Foote dodges roadworks in Cambodia.

In Poi Pet, Cambodia, the main road is a simple dirt one that they are presently upgrading.

This resulted in us playing a cat-and-mouse game with heavy rollers and graders every time we went to cross the road.

Instead of using big orange road cones, they have human road cones, Cambodian poor spaced out evenly in the middle of the road leading up to an area with roadworks.

We met up with Chomno, who founded the Cambodian Hope Organisation where we were to help for a fortnight.

We looked around many projects they were developing: Schools for children, with 20-30 children on one mat placed down in a clearing among trees. They have more than 500 children being taught this way so far.

These are for children whose parents could not afford to send them to local schools and schools in isolated villages.

Teaching young boys with no education how to repair motorcycles.

Sewing classes for the girls using those old sewing machines that require continuous foot pedalling.

Orphanages for children who have either been freed from child trafficking or been abandoned.

Providing food and support for HIV/Aids patients and their families.

Their main objective is to stop the trafficking of children, particularly in Poi Pet where it is notoriously bad.

They are working with government organisations to eradicate this and free these children.

Much of our time was spent building a "Safe Haven" - 10 houses for children freed from child slavery and orphans in family units with a couple caring for each unit.

The organisation plans to build additional buildings as schools and are setting up vegetable gardens, fish ponds and a small pig farm to teach these skills.

The work we did was mainly physical.

We dug trenches into very stony soil and made bricks for a large wall to surround the area as protection for the children who could be snatched.

Then we spent two days at Siem Reap visiting the large temples around Angkor Wat.

It was hard to comprehend the amount of hard labour put into building these temples for their king.

Exploring these was risky as the steep crumbling stone stairs were designed for a person with a foot about half the size of our feet.

I managed to fall up the stairs once, and still have the battle wound to show for it, but this outcome was much better than falling down the high, steep structures. - Steven Foote