Hello from Phnom Penh

---

Well, we've been here for two days now. Yesterday was exhausting after our long flight. We were greeted at the airport by our guide, "San" and our driver. After checking into our hotel --the Bougainvilliers--which is on the river, we then took individual cycle-taxis to a man-made hill where there's a pagoda. (I'm sorry, but I forgot to bring my notes with names to this cybercafe where I'm writing this from.) Then we did a river boat cruise, followed by dinner at the hotel. We began our day today with a visit to an association that teaches poor children how to do Cambodian dances and enjoyed a dance demonstration.We then visited PSE (Pour le sourire dún enfant), an association started by a French couple who saw all the children picking garbage out of the dumb and decided to do something about it. The association now runs a school for 2000 kids from nursery school till the end of high school and sponsors 4000 more in the public school system. We had lunch in the association's restaurant and were served by waiters and waitresses learning at their hotel school. Following that we visited the Genocide Museum, which is very impressive. Our last visit of the day was to the association of a French priest (Father Ponchaud) who speaks Khmer and who has written several books about the civil war and the situation here, one of which is called "Annee Zero" (Year 0). He really gave us a good overview of the history and tragedies of this country.
Our guide has also spoken a lot about this, esp. as he lost his mother and sisters to the Khmer Rouges. He was a former teacher who lost everything and only survived because his former students hid him. Very sad story, but he tends to go on and on and not really explain what we're seeing! And our bus driver got lost twice today. ah well. There's a certain charm to all this. The lack of infrastructure (sewage, garbage retrieval, etc.) in this city is really quite shocking. I don't remember the streets of Saigon or Delhi being this dirty. According to the French priest, it would be so much worse if the NGOs (around 120) weren't here, but he believes that they're also doing the work that the (corrupt) government should be taking care of. This includes education, health care, and so forth.Tonight, we had dinner in another restaurant belonging to a local NGO, "Friends". You would never know that the servers, who impressed us with their professionalism, were once actually street kids!
I'll stop here as I want to add some photos. Tomorrow it's the Royal Palace and the library lending bus delivering books in the countryside.
Thanks to those of you who sent comments.

---

Photos

APPA
children resting after dancing

Pour le sourire dún enfant
children resting after dancing

dinner at "Friends"
This is the restaurant of an NGO that trains kids off the street to be waiters and waitresses

Comments

[Ej]

Enjoy
Great to hear from you. Have fun and be safe. Ej Do you think you could also space out a bit more your text. It's made of big chunks that don't always make it easy to read...? Biz

[Marco]

What a day!
It seems like you had several days in one!! keep enjoying and writing, Big hugs..

[betty]

comparison with Thailand
Looks like Cambodia is a poorer and richer in monuments place than Thailand. Certain photos look just like Thailand and Burma and others do not. It must be a very enriching experience to get a look at the local work of NGO's which comes closer to the true picture of what's going on. Please continue your rich journal of experiences. Leila, the kids and I are thinking about going to some of these places so this is most interesting for me. Betty