Nina Cole

Six of Team 1 arrived in Siem Reap, Cambodia last Monday evening and were met by group leaders Jim and Joanne Stewart, as well as BTC founder Ronnie (Ran) Yimsut. Two other group members had arrived earlier from a trip through China.

Tuesday was spent recovering from jet lag and the speaker at our evening meeting was the top government official for education in Siem Reap province who told us how much progress has been made since the collapse of Cambodian society during the Khmer Rouge years in the late 1970s.

We started working on Wednesday by painting three rooms at the BCI orphanage. It was wonderful to see the children being so well cared for. That evening we heard from Bill Morse, director of the Cambodian land mine museum. He gave an excellent overview of the improvement in the land mine situation in Cambodia over the past decade or so and provided a brief history of the land mine museum founded by former child soldier Aki Ra.

The following two days we headed out to the land mine museum and painted the four museum rooms. It was extremely hot and humid, and the term ‘sweat equity’ described our experience perfectly.

On Thursday night we heard from Mr. Togh, a former monk who is establishing a school for children living at the Siem Reap dump, and Friday afternoon we visited the dump. Families were living under tarpaulins tied to sticks in the ground. A group of boys played with a soccer ball they had found and a woman cut up some watermelon that had been thrown out.

We also visited the nearby school site and viewed the frame of the building we will help to construct on Tuesday. Almost 350 children from the dump and the surrounding area have already showed up at the school.

This weekend is the huge water festival across the country, but the Siem Reap festivities have been cancelled.

Six of our group headed off by boat to Battambang, the next closest large city, to see the festival there.

The rest of us are taking in the many sites around Siem Reap Angkor. Monday is also a holiday, so we are getting an unexpected long weekend.

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