Written by Linden McHenry March 2012

Our village is called Tropeang Trea. 

It’s about one hour south of Phnom Penh on a poorly air-conditioned, karaoke music saturated bus. One of the pros of the bus though is that holding a ticket entitles you to transport as much luggage as you can get to the bus station.

This is sometimes problematic when you’re forced to ride in one of the small buses and everybody is keen to take some bulky loot from the city back home.

Even more so when either gravity or the driver has decided to put a truck THROUGH an integral bridge, and the stretch of highway you need to travel on is no longer accessible.

When we do get there, we tell the bus driver to stop at Psar Che Trop (‘Psar’ means market, I think it might have its root in ‘bazaar,’ but nobody has confirmed this for us yet).  We then haul all of the things we’ve collected back to our house.

It’s pretty decently sized. Actually, it must seem ridiculous to every other person in the village – two people living in a huge house when most families sleep in one room.

We have a kitchen and a bathroom towards the back, then a sort of ‘dining room,’ which isn’t really serving any purpose at the moment. Two bedrooms run off this.. At the front of the house is a huge open foyer filled with desks, seats, shelves hammocks and bicycles. There are also some stairs leading up from the foyer to the attic, which is divided into several sleeping spaces. 

Our yard is inhabited by many new "friends" – there are five dogs, and at least three mother chickens escorting their little chicks around in search of food. There is usually a cow handling the gardening for us, and we’re visited inside at night by frogs, toads, and lizards ranging in size from “oh, isn’t it cute” to “oh god, I think it could swallow my hand.” And then there are the insects.

We go to the market every day to buy fresh vegetables, and rice if we need it, and cook it all up for our meals. Occasionally we indulge ourselves with delicacies we’ve brought back from Phnom Penh – I think I’m doing quite well with the rural Cambodian pasta sauce.

On our street there are two schools - the public school, and Sorya’s Tropeang Trea school. This means that several times a day, streams of students will pass our house on bicycles and motos, all wanting to say hello and get a look at our house (and what we’re doing inside it). I think it was for this reason that Zoë erected a barrier in our foyer when she practises dancing.

Our house is about five houses from the main road - and three houses from Sorya in the other direction.  We teach three dance/art/life skill classes there a week, and I teach two English classes a day (Monday to Thursday) whenever I can.

We’re starting to form some really great friendships with the students and the staff at Sorya, as well as a relationship with the community.

I think we’re beginning to see the difference between just partnering with an NGO, and partnering with a community as a whole. This is assisting to grow Mayibuye here and our own personal journeys. 

Posted by Danae Lekakis 2012

Posted by Linden McHenry - February 2012

Mayibuye Cambodia has just begun its first week of classes - so that seems like an appropriate milestone to publish our first blog post. I think we should start from the beginning.

The first thing you notice flying into Phnom Penh airport is that Cambodia doesn’t look very developed. The second thing you notice, as you’re riding a rickety tuk tuk into the city, is that ‘Phnom Penh traffic’ can be accurately translated as meaning ‘all-in chaos made of metal and wheels,’ as opposed to the more placid ‘orderly progression of motor vehicles’ we’d have at home.

The third thing I noticed is that you’re very quickly persuaded to fall in love with this country.

Travelers, volunteers and expatriates I’ve met in Australia all talk about Cambodia VERY fondly - but I didn’t understand why it had claimed such an exclusive place in their hearts until I’d actually traveled here myself.

If I were pushed, I think I’d have to say that it’s the people here. I’m willing to risk being a little bit cliché to say they’re the nicest I’ve ever had the pleasure of dealing with on a regular basis.

Secondly (a very close second), for me it also comes down to the food. My fears of it being difficult to survive as a vegetarian in Cambodia were dashed quite quickly, and replaced with a fear of having far more choice than is healthy.
Some less than satisfactory hotel breakfasts aside, I’ve been amazed by the variety and quality of the cuisine that Phnom Penh has to offer.

It’s the little things like this that make being away from home for so long bearable. Oh yeah, the little things. I almost forgot. The kids. They are loving the classes that we’ve run, and I think we might have a few dancing stars on our hands in ten years. We’ve only taken the junior class so far, but we’re really excited to start with the seniors (teenagers, not pensioners) this afternoon.

Setting up the program hasn’t been all easy though. First off, I would say the biggest challenge that we’ve had to overcome is that communication is quite difficult here – and not always because we can’t speak the language. Things just work differently, and at a different pace.

For this reason it’s been pretty hard to try to iron out a timetable for our classes. I think it was also the poor communication that directed us to turn up at the local high school expecting to observe a class and have a friendly chat, and then end up taking a two-hour English class. We seem to be overcoming this though, or rather, learning and adapting to the way things work.

I think the timetable problem could be pretty easily overcome by showing up to the school and starting up the music whenever we feel like running a class - the kids always come running when we arrive.