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Published: October 26th 2007
Muddy road
This is the first road to get to the orphanage. We woke up to our last full day in Cambodia and went to have breakfast at USA Donut which is run by a gentleman who had emigrated to the US for a while. He lived n California & Utah for a some time before deciding that he liked the pace of life in Phnom Penh over the rat race in the US. He opened the first, and from what I was told, only donut shop in Phnom Penh. They're fresh, they smell (and taste) wonderful, and they are popular with the locals & visitors alike. They also serve US favorites such as French Toast for breakfast and hot dogs & burgers for lunch. We had a really nice chat with the owner about his experiences while we were waiting for breakfast.
The first thing on our schedule was a visit to an orphanage run by the Cambodian and International Children Friend Organization. We had wanted to do some sort of volunteer work while we were there, and the Lymans suggested a visit to this orphanage when Kendal was planning our itinerary ealier in the summer.
After a drive to a less affluent outskirt of Phnom Penh we turned off
Watery road
This is the road that takes you to the entrance to the orphanage (where the children are standing). We first tried getting their from the other side, this is the side that had the broken bricks dumped in it. onto a dirt road (yes, the capitol city of Cambodia has secondary roads that are still unpaved) and drove a short way to another side street. This brought us to a halt as the section in front of us had standing water & easily visible gooey looking mud. Just how deep the water was, and how muddy, we weren't sure so Kendal got out and walked a bit to where he could call out to some children further down the side street. It was some of the kids from the orphanage and they directed us to drive around and come in from the opposite side.
So we turned around and did a little backtracking and turned down another unpaved road wich was considerably muddier than the first one, but had traffic moving on it. Crossing our fingers we followed it until the turn off to the orphanage. This section too had standing water but members of the LDS had paid to have three truckloads of broken bricks dumped in the road to facilitate getting to the relatively higher ground in front of the orphanage (we are talking a difference of 6 inches or less).
As soon as the
Inside the gate
Every private residence in Phnom Penh has high fences and lockable gates, even the Orphanage. I guess that just because we only met really nice Cambodians it doesn't mean that there aren't bad ones. van stopped the kids came flooding out and immediately started hugging each one of us in turn and saying hello in English. Now to the best of my knowledge they weren't expecting us, I believe this is they way they greet all visitors.
We soon meet Sophineth Yorn, daughter of the woman who runs the orphange (for some reason while I was there I thought I had heard she was the woman's granddaughter, but that isn't the case) and a volunteer from Munich, Germany named Emily (whose English is better than mine).
The kids school & dormitory is a thatched hut (fairly sustantial though!). The ground floor has a classroom area, a sewing maching, a computer, and a tiled area that the younger boys sleep on when it's not under water (which it was just a couple of days before we were there). The older boys and the girls sleep uptairs in the building. They have free standing kitchen and bathroom buildings (the bathrooms were my first introduction to squat toilets, check them out on Google if you want to find out more....). They have a paved area with a basketball standard and the rest of the area
Main building
I've referred to it as a "hut" but in reality it's a stong central building with a hut type palm frond covered awning. Emily is on the left, Kendal is with a group of childre, and Renee and Sophineth are talking on the right. is dirt. There was a small flock of chickens wandering around and they also have a small garden. All of this is enclosed in a walled compound in that we would consider an industrial type of neighborhood.
Emily told me that they group gets English lessons every day from a volunteer teacher and the kids who are old enough go to the local school in the afternoon. To get there the children must either ride bicycles, or walk, through the standing water outside, then navigate additional dirt roads (some fairly muddy) to get to the school.
After we had a chance to visit for a while, the leaders had the kids gather and the sang us some songs as a group, then the girls sang one, and then the boys did a Maori War Dance that they had been taught (it was obvious they really enjoyed this as much as we did). The they invited us to do YMCA, the German Chicken Dance, and the Hokey-Pokey with them. We had a blast!
We had brought about three dozen blow-up balls (think beach ball but a little smaller) to give to the kids. We had five of us
Visitors board
The kids have pictures posted of themselves and visitors. We've already sent them the one that we are posting on our site. blowing them up to give to the kids and couldn't seem to inflate them fast enough. Pretty soon there were balls bouncing and flying around everywhere!
Shortly after this two more volunteers arrived via Tuk-tuk, two very pleasant and attractive young ladies from Utah of all places. I know I was introduced but being old and feeble I have forgotten their names at this point.
The children at the Orphanage are from homes that are either too poor to feed them (I thought of my maternal grandmother's family when I heard this) or, worse, their mothers have remarried and the new step dads don't want the children from the previous family and beat/abuse them. These kids are the sweetest kids in the world, (when it was time to leave one of the older boys took me by the hand and walked me to the van, he seemed resigned to the fact that even though everyone was having fun, we would go and leave them. Yes, I cried when we left). They all want to be loved and to be made to feel special, when they saw us as an obvious family it seemed as if they all wanted
singing
The children had just finished one song and were waiting to start another. to be part of it in some way.
A small, rare, stroke of genius occured to me while we were there. I have been carrying a travel journal that is a class project for my cousin June Navaro's daughter. Her class in elementary school (in Cincinnati) has sent notebooks to people they know all over the country, each recipient is supposed to write a page about who they are and where they live, send the class a postcard to track the notebook's progress, then forward the notebook to someone else in another locale (think of Flat Stanley except with essays). My sister Jeri suggested I take it to Cambodia, so I did. At the Orphanage I decided to have each of the childre sign it and we would add the writing later. Sophineth suggested that maybe the kids in America would like to become pen-pals. To bring this story to a close, in the six days since I have been back, word has gotten back to the class in Cincinnati who unanimously decided to particpate in a pen-pal project with the Oprhanage children. Children can teach us so much if we let them......
Afetr the orphanage we drove
Game time
Kendal and Cameron batting balls back and forth with some of the children. to a nature preserve about an hour southwest of PHnom Penh on the main highway to Vietnam. Interesting road. Most of it was paved, but some significant sections weren't. Along the first unpaved section we saw a large group of people standing along side the road, Loy Bun Seak slowed down and asked what was going on, we were told that they had just found a body. Sure enough, just a little ways off the road there it was.
We continued on with our journey, the paved sections of the road at this point were really bumpy. We turned off on to a side road, unpaved and headed down the last stretch towards the preserve. Soon we noticed old people, and significantly they were probably the oldest people we saw during our entire stay, just standing alongside this road to nowhere holding out their hands obviously begging. Just beyond them we came to a "nursery" being built by a local government official. (I've never seen a nursery with a clubhouse and a soccer field before.) Kendal, who has been here several times before, and had never seen the roadside begging (think of India...), guessed that maybe the government official
Group picture
The only person not shown here is Emilie, she was kind enough to take the picture for us. was due to visit and these folks had gotten wind of it.
The wildlife preserve is kind of a zoo, but kind of not. They have sun bears, wild ox/buffalo, wild dogs, macaques, gibbons (my favorites), otters, elephants, big snakes, a lion, two leopards and about 9 tigers. While the enclosures are securely fenced (and some, like the carnivores are electrified), it's easy to get bitten, especially around the primate & otter enclosures. Most of the habitats are real and except for maybe the primates, the animals seemed really comfortable & relaxed. Not cooped up in concrete enclosures like many American zoos.
Kendal went up to one of the gibbons and held his hand up (since they are tree dwellers they like to stay in the upper part of their enclosures), one of them reached out and put his long arm out so that his hand was by Kendal's. (I bet they were expecting to get fed). Kendal moved his hand so that their fingers touched.
It took us a while to find a tiger, when we finally located one laying in the brush he got up and walked towards us. We watched him for a while
Umm,....
This baby was uge, with no sign as to just what exactly it is. A type of Buffalo or wild cattle/ox? Whatever it is , it's HUGE! The top of it's shoulder was a t least 6'. and then he wandered off in his enclosure. Shortly thereafter a local guy came up and hopped over the first fence (about 4 feet tall) and went up to the primary fence and started calling out loudly. Tigers started appearing like magic. As they approached where he was (just in front of us) he stuck his fingers through the chain link fence and called to them softly. (At that point I was sure we were going to see what tigers eat for snacks....)They started grunting (I guess that's what you call that noise anyway) and rubbing their heads up against the fence so he could scratch their heads. By the time we had left we had seen 4 of the 9 tigers.
We went to go see the elephants next. Kendal had a fond memory of a small elephant (about the size of a Volkswagon Beetle) who used to 'dance'. When we got to the elephant area they had just taken all three of them out to go play in a nearby lake, so no dancing with elephants on this trip. We parked the van for about 10 minutes and just watched the elephants saunter down the dirt road
Sun bear
This guy was begging for coconuts. with their keepers. As we left the preserve we could see the elephants relaxing in a big lake. Not something one sees here in Utah!
The trip back to Phnom Penh was uneventul, after at least two hours the dead guy was still laying by the side of the road and the number of on-lookers had increased.
Kendal, Cam, and I were dropped off at the Russian Market to do some last minute purchasing and Renee went to go do an errand on her own. We tuk-tuked to the Olympic Market, and I finally saw where the average resident of Phnom Penh does his/her shopping for things like toaster, blenders, TV's etc. The other markets (Central & Russian) are really for us tourists.
As we were leaving one of the markets in the tuk-tuk Kendal overheard something someone on the street said and shot back a reply in Cambodian, causing everyone to laugh. He explained that he had heard the guy on the street say something about the 'barangs' (i.E. foreigners) in the tuk-tuk passing them. So he just answered back in Khmer laughingly saying something to the effect of " Foreigner, who me? No, you are
Shaggy bear
Different than the Sun Bears, bur with a profile that reminded me of a wild boar. And I just can't imagine how they deal with the climate with all that fur....... the foreigner!" His command of Khmer is so good that he gets the nuances across well and everyone seems to understand his exact intent.
That night the Lymans invited us out to dinner again to say their farewells to Kendal. We ate at the William Tell restaurant. German food in Cambodia, a very nice evening with good food and good company.
We finished off the day back at the hotel by energetically trying to pack all of the purchases into the luggage we had brought and the large backpack that Kendal had purchased today. The challenge was to guess whose suitcase was going to be over the weight limit. It turned out to be mine.
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