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.








