An eye-opening, life-changing time in Cambodia

In September 2017 I started my preparation for my LaSERIO trip to Cambodia in summer 2018. We worked hard to get to know our team (none of whom I’d met before the selection process began) through three planning weekends and a final meet up. As the girls on the trip came from all over London and South East England, these were held at Burgess Hill (with a day trip to Brighton), near Sevenoaks in Kent, near East Grinstead, and then in London. We used this time together to understand the culture of Cambodia and learn more about the country, as well as planning the finer details of our trip and forming close bonds with the other girls on the trip.

We left for Cambodia on 28^th July. I had an amazing and life-changing experience over my trip, as we spent two weeks working in a Cambodian secondary school. I taught English to classes of up to 53 students aged 12-15 in the mornings (as part of the care section of our project), focusing on vocabulary learning to begin with and then branching out into grammar and other harder topics. We spent our free time planning different lessons and sharing ideas about games to engage the children and help them to learn better.

Our days were very full as in the afternoons we helped to build a concrete path by hand (including smashing bricks and concrete with sledgehammers) and painted two classrooms as the community aspect of our project. The path connected the main area of the school to the toilets, to make it safer and easier for children to access them, especially during monsoon season. The classrooms needed rejuvenating and we spent a long time cleaning the walls and filling holes before repainting them to create a good working environment for the children. Building the path was physically demanding, but left us every day feeling we had really achieved something, and that the hard work of carrying stones and mixing concrete was all worth it.

I will never forget working and playing with the children, and the fun everyone had playing football and other games at the school. We tried to engage with the children as much as possible, through different games, highly competitive football matches and talking to them about ourselves in class. On our last day, we attended their Buddhist ceremony after their own fundraising efforts, and danced with the leaving students (12^th Grade) who had just finished school. I felt very privileged to meet so many amazing and inspirational young people, I am so thankful for the opportunity to get to know them a little.

Whilst in Cambodia, we visited a dance school and learnt some traditional Cambodian dances from the students and it was really fun interacting and dancing with them. We also ate at restaurants run by other NGOs (Non-Government Organisations) to support their vital work such as the Friends Association which trains people in different circumstances to become waiters, chefs and other professions, and The Daughters of Cambodia restaurant and shop, where everything was made by those who the NGO had helped escape the sex trade and trained in many different skills. I also tried eating tarantulas and other local dishes! We visited the Killing Fields and S21 Prison to learn about more recent Cambodian history and the Khmer Rouge. This was both upsetting and powerful, as it taught us where the country had moved on from, and how hard people had worked to rebuild their lives. It was also very eye-opening to discover the atrocities committed, as we had talked about it before we left England, but hadn’t appreciated the extent of what had happened.

When we were in Phnom Penh, we also visited the Royal Palaces, and Watt Phnom, learning more about the history and evolution of Cambodia, and the royal family.

On this trip, I met so many amazing people, especially when we visited a village outside Phnom Penh (the capital) and spent the day with the local Guide group there and found out about their lives in the village. We played games and did a scavenger hunt around the village (meeting some of their families and neighbours in the process), before cooking a traditional dessert using rice flour and palm sugar together. It was sometimes hard to communicate with the Cambodian Guides, but we taught them songs and clapping games, and in return they taught us songs too. It was a very memorable day working with so many amazing children and young adults and seeing how they lived their lives (and how different they were to ours).

The women working to promote Girlguiding in Cambodia were inspirational, and we spent as much time with them as we could, around our busy volunteering schedules. This included a visit to the house of Vannath Chea, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge and one of the founding members of Girlguiding in Cambodia. Her stories were very moving and inspiring, and it was amazing to talk to a woman who had worked so hard in such difficult circumstances (she was part of a group nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize). We met some other women at Vannath Chea’s house who had also survived the Khmer Rouge and met the Princess of Cambodia. It was very special talking to all of them about their experiences, and afterwards we all went to a restaurant and were joined by many other guiders and commissioners and had an amazing evening with them. We hoped to show them what guiding was about for us, and everyone shared their hopes for their future in guiding in their own language (which was translated accordingly). The leader I sat next to only spoke Khmer and French, so I ended up writing a paragraph in French about what we had been doing in Cambodia – it was a very special moment to be able to communicate with someone in a mutual language and have that connection that we otherwise wouldn’t have had.

We also took a 5 day trip up to Siem Reap, getting the chance to see the Angkor Watt temple complex at sunrise, taking part in a pottery class and visiting various NGOs where we found out about the amazing work they did. We also explored the markets and visited a cultural village, where we watched reconstructions of marriage ceremonies and dances that helped us understand more about the rich culture of Cambodia. Taking a boat trip to a floating village was impressive; however, we also saw many animals kept there in bad conditions, which was quite eye-opening.

I feel very privileged to have had the opportunity to go on such an amazing trip and experience such a brilliant culture, so I want to say thank you again to you for very kindly supporting me. This experience was eye-opening, life-changing, and incredibly memorable for me, and I am so grateful for the opportunity to meet so many inspirational and strong people. I have learnt a lot about myself, and about working with others far from home, in sometimes upsetting circumstances. But also, I have made many incredible memories that I will cherish for the rest of my life. I would love to go back to Cambodia one day and reunite with some of the awesome people I met there, whilst spending more time immersed in such a vibrant culture.