I visited the school in Beng Mealea, Cambodia, recently where the majority of our focus for project work is currently being put.  It was still very dry on the ground but rain had started on the previous afternoons, so it was looking as if the long dry spell, and inherent hardships, were finally coming to an end for the community.   We have at last lifted the roof off the left hand classroom at the school which was suffering from falling tiles due to a lack of cross-beams in the roof.  In order to put more beams in the whole roof was lifted off, old broken roofing sheets replaced, and then all put back together again.  The job took over a week to do and of course had to be done by outside contractors due to its  complexity and height.  Thanks to everyone who donated towards this part of the project.  Now we can really start to work on making the classrooms amazing places to learn from – I will keep you posted on progress.

The roof from the interior, showing additional cross beams and new sheets

The new roof from outside

First few courses of bricks laid for the new teacher accommodation block

The younger kids were doing their numbers, using small shells on the floor to write the number

 

Dubai International Academy’s (DIA) trip of Tanzania!

From the sand dunes of sunny United Arab Emirates to the muddy foothills of rainy Kilimanjaro.

I have never witnessed a group so excited about rain like DIA. We have been hosting many School expeditions over the years and one almost expects them to ask “where is the sun” when they arrive and the skies are grey. Well, it all came clear that this lot do not experience much rain, if at all any. It was great to see them celebrating with a little rain dance.

Immediately after exchanging pleasantries and the group had settled in, we took them on a familiarization tour of Mbokomu village and the school that they’ d be working at.
As the Swahili saying goes “Be a good host to your visitor on their first day, the next day give them a hoe to plough”. And so we did. Honeymoon was over, the Team was taken to Kiboriloni School to literally get their hands, shorts, t-shirts and faces dirty. They painted and drew murals on two classrooms in two days. With the short trips, students realize that they have very little time on projects and have targets to meet so what they tend to do is work their socks off on every activity that is thrown their way.

We changed the pace and engaged them in a typical Chagga (local tribe) cultural tour. The tour included helping a local lady with her daily chores such as; tending to her goats, fetching  water from the stream, and farming. Basically the students get to experience a day to day life of the locals. The tour is not considered complete unless everyone is wrapped in kanga’s (sarongs) and put in the mama’s smoky little kitchen to prepare lunch for themselves. Nothing could stop them from their cookery lesson, they were brave enough to stick around the kitchen despite smoke from burning firewood causing tears and sweat dripping from their eyes and faces!  Once in the village, you are considered one of them and you are expected to do what local people do including having your food while seated on a mat and using your hands to eat.

As we still had a bit of time left on our schedule, we  organized a football match with a group of local boys. Although the locals are used to playing all boys teams, they did not mind playing a mixed school and it was awesome to see boys and girls sharing the same playing field, which is a rarity in these parts of the world.

The day that needed everyone to be well prepared was here. The Kidia waterfall trek. It had rained through out the night and morning so the Team woke up thinking they had got away with it. You should have seen their faces when I announced to them that the trek was still on. Whilst we waited it off, they enjoyed a trip into town and spoiled themselves with Pizza’s at Indoitaliano restaurant followed by a supermarket run to get a few goodies before heading off to Kidia. In the meantime, the staff, and especially the local guide, were doing some Chagga rituals to the gods so that they could blow away the grey cloud that was hanging  over Moshi town. All the prayers and traditional chants worked. By the time the students had finished munching on their Pizza’s, the skies had cleared up and the sun was shinning.

The adventure ensued. The team had to take it slow and easy as the ground was still a bit wet and slippery and the trek was steep. With the help of the local guides, the entire Team managed to get down to the falls. Such an achievement and great feeling for the students as it was both fun and a challenge as some of them used their bottoms to climb down and the heavy rains made the waterfalls drop with such force. It was not just the trek down to the falls that took their breath away but the gauges, little farms, the beautiful, plentiful flora and fauna, greenery and the ever friendly locals who smiled and waved at the students whilst going about their daily chores.

   
The next day the group left bright and early to go to Tarangire National park for their safari. They saw loads of wildlife and enjoyed the game drives in their entirety.

On their return to camp, we had prepared a barbecue dinner for everyone as their last meal in Camp Tanzania. The group appreciated it very much as it was a great way to end their expedition. After dinner, the speeches ensued and we had a chance to ask the volunteers to sum up their entire trip in just one word. This is what they had to say;

It was great to see all the activities that we’d organized completed and the students and Teachers taking on all the tasks with a positive attitude and enthusiasm.

We were honored to host you and thank you for a great effort!

I wanted to post a few pictures from the recent IB Conference in Kuala Lumpur.  We normally have a stand at these sorts of conferences, once or twice a year, and gives us a chance to speak with a wide range of International Schools from across the world.  Ann our International Sales guru was running the stand this time around and did a fantastic job of making it appealing and snazzy.  The star of the show were the amazing bracelets made by the women of Mantanani out of plastic washed up on the beach – they are now the must have item in all IB schools around the globe! 

I was over in Cambodia last week and spent a few hours in the school at Beng Mealea which forms the main focus of our project work there.  Usually when i visit the school the children have finished their lessons for the day so it was great to be there with it bulging with kids going about their studies.     Cambodia is currently very dry, so the school looked very brown and dusty, with most of the vegetation having died a few weeks back.

View of rear of school, past chicken sheds to the temporary classroom we have built previously

The picture above shows the level in the pond and really demonstrates the critical problems Cambodia suffers during the dry season.  The large water tank which sits between the two main classrooms is slowly depleting and soon the school may have to start using water from this pond for cooking with.  The picture also shows the roof of the main classroom – the right hand building needs the roof lifting and more supports putting in place to prevent the sheets falling down – you can just make out a few holes in the right hand roof.

The temporary classroom we have built previously being put to good use

Work on the library cum classroom has progressed a little but with the funds now available should be finished off in the coming weeks/months.  The initial beams and supports are now in place and it just needs the roof sheeting putting on and then plastering inside and out, painting and equipping before it can become useable.  This will then free up a classroom and mean less reliance on the temporary classrooms.

Main A frames and beams in place, ready for sheeting.

One of the projects which has become more pressing is the teacher accommodation block – here is the current classroom up to 6 teachers currently live in.

The exterior of the current teacher accommodation does not fully demonstrate the squalid and cramped conditions inside

We have this past week started work on the new teacher accommodation block which is estimated to cost around $17,000 and will provide 5 separate rooms for the teachers – whilst it is not luxurious the change in the teacher’s lives will be marked.  We have started to lay out and dig the foundations as shown below.

Initial work on the foundations for the teacher block

This work is likely to take us several months to complete.  Meanwhile life will continue in the school as normal.  While i was there i witnessed one of the teachers cooking on the infamous double open hearth open air oven – the food is provided by the World Food Programme and gives the children a hot cooked meal, for many of whom this will be the only meal of the day.  They certainly piled the food high on their plate and were very focused on consuming every last bit.

A teacher serves the chicken soup to go with their rice.

A little girl helps herself to some rice

Digging in to their food

Finally i want to give a massive massive thanks to everyone who has donated on the Just Giving page for Beng Mealea.  I have been overwhelmed by people’s generosity, raising GBP5,500 in just a few weeks.  Everyone’s donation is much appreciated, no matter how small or big – as i always like to say “lots of littles make a big” – i think this applies not only to donations but to the work we are doing at the school – slowly but surely we are making a difference in the school’s day to day life.  Thank you everyone who has been involved – i am truly humbled by all your efforts.

I have spent the past few days accompanying a school team from Gems World Academy from Dubai during their service project trip to Cambodia.  The team got stuck into several days of hard service project work at the school in Beng Mealea which they all enjoyed, despite the heat and the toil.

In particular they mentioned that the most memorable part of the trip was seeing the smiles on the students faces and having some of them working alongside them from time to time.

The team helped with cutting the joints in the woodwork for the beams

The team kindly bought several hundred dollars worth of pens and books which were handed to the school on their last day.  I could see that many members of the team were greatly moved and affected by their experience at the school which to me is what our trips are all about.

The team visited the classes including this one in the temporary classroom we have built previously

Thank you Gems World Academy – it was fun meeting you and thanks for your hard work and contribution to the school.

Cambodia’s rainy season is in full swing but that does mean that our camp at Beng Mealea is looking amazing with some fantastically colourful flowers and lush greenness and it has become a Tropical Gap Year Garden.

When flying into Siem Reap you’d be forgiven for thinking the the whole area was flooded, but it is in fact just the padi fields stretching for as far as the eye can see with their intricate drainage systems designed to keep the water on the land and to make the most of this growing season. In just a month or two’s time, the rains will have moved on and Cambodia will be back to the long, hot, dusty days of the dry season.

Longhouse at Beng Mealea Camp.

Han and the team have been hard at work planting and beautifying making this camp fit for entry into a tropical garden competition. Huge blooming flowers, fruits and trees and cheeping birds give this place an extremely relaxing feel. The camp is looking great for our next group of Camp Cambodia Gap year students coming next month.

This makes the camp an ideal place to relax in between the very important project work going on around the community, building desperately needed facilities at the school, repairing desks and classrooms, repairing crumbling houses for the elderly, permaculture and much more.

Beng Mealea Camp Kitchen

Beng Mealea Camp Flowers

Tropical flowers on our Cambodia Camp

Camp Manager Han enjoying fresh coconut juice.

Jordey Logan is travelling to Tanzania in the summer of 2013 and began his fundraising in November last year. Since then he has managed to raise all the money for his expedition and is continuing to fundraise to help the other members of his team reach their goal too…

So far I have done a couple fundraising events, some with my school and other students going on the trip, such as a carwash which we in total managed to raise £200 earning me about £30, a year 7 stay awake raising about £400, raising me about £100. Things like this are a good idea as you don’t have to do it on your own and it will provide you with some money. But doing an event by myself has allowed me to raise a lot more money for my trip.

The first thing I did by myself was a sponsored head shave since I had been growing my hair for about 6 years, all the way through secondary school , changing it from big curly hair into dreadlocks. Resulting in most of my friends to have never seen me with short hair, helping me raise a total of £450, as so many people where determined to see me with short hair.

The best way of drumming up a considerable amount of money which I realised, are events that include the following two things; something that nobody else has done or something not many do, and things that make people question if you are able to complete it or not.

One event that I have recently done which included both of these things is something called the Everest Challenge, which involved me climbing 997 feet (304m) from Lynmouth to the highest point of Countisbury hill, 29 (and a bit) times continuously to make up the 29028 feet (8848m) to the summit of Everest, which I managed to complete in 26hours 47minutes. And as this event was something nobody has ever done, I managed to raise £3521.51. Meaning I have practically raised all the money required for my trip to Tanzania in 2013.

So from all of the events that I have done so far, I have managed to raise around £4101.51, meaning that I have raised over my target amount of £4000, £3840 for the trip and £160 for anything I require e.g. jabs. But as I still have just under a year left till my trip, I’m going to help as many of my friends going on the trip as best I can to make raising the money required that little bit easier.

One of the main reasons to how I managed to raise such a considerable amount wasn’t just because it was a remarkable challenge, but because of how well I advertised it/let people know what I was doing. A good way of doing this is to create a Facebook page, even though creating a website looks good, nearly everybody will check Facebook regularly unlike a website. Another good way is to put a write up about the event in your local paper and place posters and fliers around where you live. Anything that grabs someone’s attention while informing them what’s happening.

In case you are thinking that you wouldn’t be able to easily go up to people asking for sponsorship, or going into places and asking for them to put up posters and possible sponsor you. Don’t be ashamed as that was my biggest problem while fundraising, but what allowed me to overcome that problem was since I was determined to raise the money for my trip, even if it resulted in my going out of my comfort zone to achieve it. But I promise you now that even if the first time is hard it does get easier the more times you try.

The best advice I can give to anyone is; don’t set challenges which you know you can’t complete, make sure you let as many people as possible know what you’re doing (not just the event/challenge but what the money’s for and what you’ll be doing during your trip). Last thing I will say, which many people have told me, is that you won’t succeed if you don’t try.

I wish everyone else who is fundraising for a trip all the best and hope what I have said helps.

Over the past year, most of our gappers and teams at Camp Cambodia have spent some time working with our close neighbours, Teul Lich Primary Beng Mealea, the school being just behind our camp on the outskirts of the commune. Need to support Beng Mealea Primary School.

In rural Cambodia the poverty and harsh farming seasons add extreme pressure on families to restrict education for their children so those children are available to supplement income through working on the family land or in other roles, yet there is still great enthusiasm for education from the younger generation. The high school at Beng Mealea caters for 600 children a day with 300 attending classes in the morning and a different 300 in the afternoon, but the facilities within the school are extremely poor and unable to cope with such large numbers, especially with a planned increase in students attending the school.

Currently food for the students is cooked by the teachers either in a small basic shack (shack being a generous term) behind the school or one of the classrooms and the students eat in the yard or in the classrooms if it’s raining.

There are only 2 working long drop toilets, which you can imagine with that many students isn’t nearly enough. Ironically (and annoyingly) a private company has built a toilet block opposite the school, only a matter of 50 yards away, with 40 (yes, fourty!) gleaming spotless western toilets to accomodate tourists that come through to see Beng Mealea Temple, however only a handful of tourists actually make the journey to see the temple from Siem Reap, so that many cubicles is complete overkill. However, despite them being generally unused the students at the school are still not permitted to use the toilets.

As with the rest of the area, the school is greatly affected by the seasons, with flooding during the rainy season and little clean water for cooking, drinking and washing during the dry season. Water management on the whole is fairly poor in the area with only traditional stone pots used to collect water, which may be OK for a family of 4 but is entirely inadequate for a large school. When we first arrived at the school we were heartened to see a large 20,000 litre concrete catchment tank attached to one of the roofs, but were not that surpised to learn it had long since cracked and leaked so badly it was no longer used and the NGO that has originally funded it had ceased to exist. So the only source of water for the school was a large deep muddy pond dug into the grounds behind the school which was full during the rainy season but soon became nothing but a muddy puddle during the dry season, though the students still dutifully filled buckets from it every morning.

With 2 of the 8 simple classrooms given over to stores and accommodation for the faculty who have to travel long distances to teach, the school can at times feel more like a refugee camp than a place of learning, especially as most of the classrooms have some large structural defects.

So alongside our work in the comunity, Camp Cambodia started a long term program of improvement at the school, which has kept our volunteers busy for the past 18 months, with plenty of work still to do. The most obvious improvement, thanks to our younger International School teams, has been the general look of the school, which, with a lick of paint, now resembles a school. Our groups joined in with the students from the village to produce gleaming white walls, nicely landscaped grounds and a volleyball pitch.

Our very first task at the school was to repair the unused water tank, which meant breaking a hole in the roof, cleaning the insides and repairing the the large leaks before the tank was resealed and re-attached to the roof guttering. However, this is only the start of the watercatchment system with plans to intsall a further 4 large tanks which should provide a significant amount of water to see the school through the dry season.

We are currently almost halfway through construction of a new kitchen repalcing the tumbledown shed currently used. It’s aimed that we will finish the kitchen with the help of our Summer UK Teams this summer. After the kitchen we will concentrate on creating a new ablutions block to increase the number of toilets and add sinks for hand washing and there are plans for a new accomodation block for teachers as well. So there is plenty keep us busy over the coming months and years, but on meeting the happy children at the school, who all just want the opportunity to learn, it becomes very obvious why this sort of work is necessary.

This week, I spent 5 hours sat on an express bus/van travelling down from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh.  It’s a journey I have done many times now and whilst it is 5 hours crammed in a small van on a white knuckle ride, it never ceases to stir my emotions as I speed through [...]

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In the build up to our first ever Summer Team Season in Cambodia next year, we recently hosted some of the teachers who will be bringing their students to spend a month in Camp Cambodia. It was a whistle-stop tour of Siem Reap, 4 seperate Temples, Floating Villages, Silk Farms,  Camp Beng Mealea, the community, the projects, Phnom Penh, the Killing Fields, some amazing food and a fair bit of shopping at the Old Market in Siem Reap town, all in the space of just 6 days.

It’s difficult not to arrive in Cambodia without some sort of expectations, afterall Angkor Wat, Khmer Rouge and Killing Fields are all terms many will have heard of, even if they are not sure of the history, but this trip was an eye opener even for teachers who had spent time researching before their arrival.

The Community at Beng Mealea were massively warm and welcoming, the Old Town in Siem Reap Charming and the trip to Phnom Penh a stark reminder of Humanity. And all of the teachers were in agreement that they just couldn’t wait to bring the stundents next summer. I’m looking forward to seeing what they think of this amazing country.