Angkor Tree Project

The flooded street leading up to the school

I'll start this blogpost with some facts about Cambodia I've found online.
Did you know that 22,8% of Cambodians live on less than 1.2 USD per day?
Did you know that 1,500,000 children between 5 and 14 years old (45%) are working to support their family?
Did you know that about 40% of primary schools and 35% of hospitals don't have any safe drinking water facilities?
Did you know that teacher salaries are often very low?

My first morning in Siem Reap I woke up to the sound of children's voices spelling English words: "What is this?  Pot.  How do we spell it? P-O-T.  What is this?  Spoon. How do we spell it? S-P-O-O-N."  At home this would make me grumpy for the rest of the day, but because I'm staying at my friend's place, who lives right above the school, I didn't let it ruin my mood and got dressed and went down to see the activities going on in the school.

The school gates open at 07.30 and the first kids enter at that time, they are served breakfast (which they mostly don't get at home) and at 08.00 classes start until 10.00, in the afternoon a second group comes and get the same courses.  Children are divided by their level of knowledge and once registered at the school they are obliged to follow classes regularly.

Friday is always a special day, because the second hour at school is movie time.  The children get to see an English movie or cartoon with English subtitles and they also get a sweet snack during the movie.  At this school they only get (free) English courses.  After their courses here they go to a normal state school for all other classes (as well as the low-quality English courses they get at the state school).  In Cambodia children only go to school for a half day everyday except on Sundays, so the project is a very useful way for them to fill up the other half of the day.  Otherwise they would be working to support their families or just be spending time outside on the street.

The importance of English knowledge in a country as Cambodia is not to be underestimated.  Most of the children coming to this school will probably have a good job later, thanks to their good knowledge of English.  They are the future of this country, it will be them building on the future economy to pull Cambodia out of its poverty.  Knowing English will help them in establishing international contacts and attracting investors.

Flooded volleyball fields across the school

The project works with local teachers, paying them a good salary, so to be sure of a good teaching quality, but also to be sure that teachers stay within the project rather than changing schools when a better opportunity presents itself.  The project will soon start up a free teacher training as well, as in many public schools teachers don't have the right knowledge to teach English.  They will be thought how to teach English as a foreign language (TEFL) and they will be officially certified upon finishing the course and passing the exams.  The only condition is that these teachers already have a decent knowledge of English as the course is about helping them on how to teach English, but not about giving them English courses.

Currently around 150 children attend classes at Angkor Tree Project.  All children live in the neighbourhood and there is no distinction between rich and poor, everybody is welcome.  This is a very local project and means a lot for the local community.  The school itself has 3 classrooms and currently there are 4 teachers (of which 1 foreigner who volunteers and 3 Cambodian teachers who are paid a fair salary).  The school also has good drinking water facilities and actually produces more drinking water than it needs, so it provides drinking water to the surrounding families who don't have access to drinking water themselves.

The entire neighbourhood of the school is currently flooded due to the raining season.  Some houses are flooded and water comes as high as just under the beds.  Still, the children come to school (sometimes they have to walk through knee-high water), because they are very motivated to learn English and they actually love coming to this school.

One of the classrooms

The school is quite modern, every class has a television screen on which exercises can appear, there are normal whiteboards and teachers have a laptop and use audiovisual content in their courses.  The project is very local and rather small, so it doesn't need huge amounts of money, still every cent is very welcome as there are the fixed monthly costs (such as the rent for the school building, teachers salaries, electricity, food for the children, ...).  There are also one-time and unexpected costs such as buying teaching materials, repairing defective school equipment, etc.

If you'd like to financially support this project, please visit the website www.theangkortreeproject.org.  Gifts starting at 40 euro are tax-deductible in Belgium, which means that for a gift of 40 euro, the Kingdom of Belgium will refund you 18 euro via your income tax declaration (only for Belgian citizens and money should be transferred via the account of SOL vzw - instructions on the Angkor Tree project website).

Note: I decided not to make any photos with children on them, as this is a serious school, not a zoo for tourists.

Auschwitz in Cambodia

A peaceful pond... with still many corpses inside

My second day in Phnom Penh was very disturbing.  I visited one of the Killing Fields (the ones in Chhoeung Ek), where the Khmer Rouge killed about a quarter of the Cambodian population between 1975 and 1979.  Before describing what I saw there, I would like to introduce my readers a little bit into the history of Cambodia, starting at their independence in 1953.  Before 1953 Cambodia was a French protectorate within the Union of Indochina (together with Laos and Vietnam).  From that year on, King Norodom Sihanouk became the head of the independent state.  When in 1955 the Vietnam war broke loose, Cambodia decided to stay neutral, but North-Vietnamese Vietcong troops settled on Cambodian territory so they could attack South-Vietnam more easily from there.  King Sihanouk didn’t really respond to that as he preferred to stay neutral and thus effectively allowed vietcong troops to operate on Cambodian soil.  He also allowed them to use the port of Sihanoukville for their logistical support.  The United States became quite annoyed with this situation and started bombing Vietcong bases in Cambodia.  King Sihanouk opposed to these US bombings, but at the same time complained to the US about the Vietcong bases on Cambodian territory.  Because of this contradictory message, the US didn’t want to overthrow king Sihanouk (as they considered him loyal to them), but just kept on bombing the Vietcong bases in Cambodia.  In 1960 internal opposition against king Sihanouk began to grow and the Khmer Rouge under leadership of Pol Pot started a guerrilla war and slowly got more and more support from the local communities.  During the elections of 1966 though, right-wing parties won and General Lon Nol formed a government.  This government was rather against the monarchy and as King Sihanouk was tilting away from the US and towards China, the general got a good reason for a coup d’état.

Clothes of the victims

In 1970, when the King was in China, the general did his coup and overthrew the king, thus creating the Khmer Republic. He immediately allied Cambodia with the US and demanded that all North-Vietnamese troops would leave the country immediately.   Hanoi refused and the Americans sent military support and material to help the new Cambodian government.  At the same time North-Vietnamese troops launched armed attacks on Cambodia and handed the territory they won to the Khmer Rouge.  The Khmer Rouge received military support from North-Vietnam and at a certain moment the army of the Khmer Rouge grew stronger than the Vietnamese army.  Also, around that time King Sihanouk declared his support for the Khmer Rouge and that caused many more Cambodians to support the Khmer Rouge as well.  By 1973 the Khmer Rouge was fighting without any foreign support and controlled 60% of Cambodian territory and 25% of its population.  At that time North-Vietnamese troops were winning more and more territory in South-Vietnam and were not focussed on Cambodia anymore.  The US continued its bombing campaign on Cambodia until they completely withdrew from Cambodia in 1975 (after a decision of Congress).  5 days later, on 17 april 1975, Khmer Rouge troops entered the capital of Phnom Penh and the government of the Khmer Republic surrendered.  Democratic Kampuchea was declared as the new country.  Initially there was much support for the Khmer Rouge troops and they were received as heros freeing the capital of the US bombings.  But then, only 5 hours (!) after entering Phnom Penh, things changed radically as they evacuated the entire city and sent all population to villages on the country side to start working on the fields.  The ones that refused to leave the city were killed instantaneously.

Killing tree against which executioners beat children

The Khmer Rouge were supported by the Chinese, whereas the Vietnamese communists were supported by the Russians.  This started to create tensions and the Khmer Rouge began attacking the south of Vietnam.  In all territories they controlled (Vietnamese as well as Cambodian), they created detention centres for all political opponents.  And this was a very large group, to them everybody who was educated (doctors, teachers, or even people wearing glasses, …) was an opponent.  Pol Pot once said that it was better to accidentally kill a friend than to keep an enemy alive.  People were kept in detention centres and tortured until they would admit to crimes they didn’t commit.  They then signed their declaration and were sent off to one of the killing fields, where they would be executed.  Of course they were told that they would now be reaccomodated to a new house to make sure they wouldn’t refuse to go on the transport towards their death.  An estimate of 25% of the Cambodian population (including men, women, children) found its death during this period.  Nobody was trusted by the Khmer Rouge, not even their own members or army men, everybody could finally end up in a detention centre.  When there was the slightest doubt of you not being allegiant to them, they would send you to a detention centre to be tortured and executed.  During this entire period King Sihanouk was placed under house arrest in Phnom Penh by the Khmer Rouge.

Graves were dug open after the discovery of the killing fields

In 1979 Vietnamese troops stroke back and captured Phnom Penh, declaring the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, driving the Khmer Rouge regime back towards the Thai border.  King Sihanouk fled to China in a self-declared exile.  The Vietnamese army installed a puppet-government which was faithful to Russia and Vietnam (not to China as the Khmer Rouge was).  This started the Cambodian civil war, where communist Khmer Rouge troops would fight the communist Vietnam-backed troops of the government in Phnom Penh.  As at this time the Cold War was at its ‘coldest’ point, Western governments and the UN recognised the Khmer Rouge and its allies as the official government of Cambodia, though they didn’t control much of its territory anymore, but at least they were opposed to Russia…  This situation lasted until 1993.  In that year the UN finally intervened in Cambodia and created a new democratic state, organised elections and effectively transformed Cambodia into a democracy (with King Sihanouk reinstated as its head of state).  It would take until 1999 before the Khmer Rouge disarmed and completely surrendered so peace would come back to Cambodia after more than 35 years of war and hostilities.  An international UN-Cambodian tribunal was created in 2004 and the Khmer Rouge leadership was put on trial as from 2008 for the genocide of 1975-1979.  Pol Pot died in peaceful exile in Thailand in 1998, so he was never put on trial and some of the other leaders were already too old to be able to complete their entire trial for health reasons.  Until today Cambodia is still infested with landmines dating from that long period of war (tourist zones are safe though).

Skulls found on the premises

So back to me visiting Phnom Penh.  The killing fields of Chhoeung Ek (actually a former Chinese graveyard) are a very, very cold, macabre place, you can feel death there.  It feels just like a visit to Auschwitz in Poland.  Mass graves were discovered here, as well as in many other parts of Cambodia.  Millions have found their death during the reign of the Khmer Rouge.  The bones have now been dug up and placed in a stupa, but until today, during raining season, bones, teeth, skulls and clothes come floating up out of the ground and are collected by the ground keepers to be placed into the stupa as well.  Many of these bodies will never be identified, though mostly they can identify the way they died by examining their skulls.  The killing fields were no detention centre as Auschwitz was, the killing fields were places were people would be sent to be executed brutally.  As bullets were too expensive and made too much noise, prisoners were killed by a stump on the back of their heads, by decapitation with a machete, …  and all this with loud propaganda or music on the background.

My tuk-tuk driver

This used to be a school: detention centre S-21

After my visit to Chhoeng Ek, my tuk-tuk driver drove me back to Phnom Penh, to an old school, known as detention centre S-21 (Tuol Sleng).  This former school became a detention centre right after the Khmer Rouge evacuated the city of Phnom Penh.  If there was a minor doubt on your allegiance to the Khmer Rouge, they would lock you up here, torture you (but keep you alive) until you admitted to crimes you didn’t commit.  You then had to sign a document to declare your crimes, so they would have a valid reason to execute you.  Cells in this complex didn’t have doors, but you would be cuffed to the ground with your feet so you wouldn’t be able to move, nor to even turn around in your sleep (if you would be able to sleep at all).  In the current museum huge boards with pictures of victims can be seen.  These pictures were made by prison staff, mostly young uneducated boys from the country side.  As with most dictatorial regimes, everything was very-well documented.  This was a very impressive day for me and in the evening I didn’t feel like doing anything anymore, I had the same bad, empty feeling again as I had after visiting Auschwitz.  Things like this should never ever happen again and all human beings should visit a place like this at least once in their life.

The throne hall of the Cambodian King

For the next day I booked a bus that was bound to leave for Siem Reap at 13.30, so that gave me some time to visit the one place in Phnom Penh I hadn’t visited yet: the Royal Palace.  This is a magnificent place and reminded me a lot of the Royal Palace in Bangkok.  During my visit I saw the beautiful throne hall as well as the Royal “Wat” (a wat is a temple complex).  There was even a miniature version of the big temple of Angkor Wat, which actually wasn’t a temple but also a royal palace.  As in Theravada Buddhism the king is revered as a god-like being, calling the king’s palace a temple wouldn’t really be very wrong.  Considering your king as a god-like being is actually not a real Buddhist principle, but is inherited from Hinduism, where kings are considered as beings send by the gods to control peace on earth.  In Thailand this is still a basic principle in the royal reverence, which became very clear when the very popular King Bhumibol died last year and was cremated this week after a full year of mourning.

Detail of the roof of the throne hall

I spent about an hour and a half at the Royal Palace and then returned to my hotel to pack, have a last drink at the bar and wait for my pick-up to the bus station.  The ride to Siem Reap went quite well, a large part of the road was highway.  It took 6h to finish the 320km from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap.  I safely arrived at Siem Reap after dark and met my friend Mark at the bus station.

The royal temple

Busticket to Siem Reap

Bus to Siem Reap

Discovering Cambodia’s capital

Wat Langka

On my first day in Phnom Penh, I slept until 10 am, as I was really exhausted after my very early 14h long bus ride from Bangkok the day before.  I had some breakfast at the hotel, took a shower and felt fit enough to make a big walk through the city (14km).  When I arrived at Phnom Penh yesterday, I noticed that it was very different from the rest of the country.  It actually looked more prosperous: the roads leading up to the city suddenly became highways with 2 lanes in each direction, shops were better equipped, there was less visible poverty, …

Independence Monument

I started my walk at the Independence Monument and the nearby Wat Langka. Wat Langka is a Buddhist temple where tourists can train in the art of meditation. This is only on certain days of the week and it happened to be just those days of the week I wasn’t in Phnom Penh.  There wasn’t actually much more to see as in any other Buddhist temple, so I walked on to the Independence Monument and the statue of King Sihanouk. I noticed that the independence monument is not aligned straight with the square where King Sihanouk’s memorial is placed. Is there a reason for this (no straight-forward democracy for example), or is it a coincidence? Maybe Cambodian history can teach me!

Memorial of King Sihanouk

Vietnam-Cambodia Friendship monument

I continued my walk via the revolutionary styled Cambodia-Vietnam friendship monument, taking a look inside the nearby Wat Botum and arriving at the Royal Palace... which was closed at that moment.  I decided to visit it later and continued my city discovery.  Walking through the streets of Phnom Penh, you can clearly see that the French have been here before, just like in Vietnam baguettes are sold everywhere on the street: filled with eggs, vegetables and/or meat.  My walk continued via Wat Ounalom (the name reminds me of a James Bond villain in 'The Golden Eye'), which is the temple where the leading monk of Cambodian Buddhism resides.  This importance reflects clearly in the even bigger than usual overdose of gold used in this temple.

Wat Botum

Wat Ounalom

The riverwalk next to the Tonlé Sap

The next stop was another temple, Wat Phnom, located on an artificial hill in the middle of a roundabout.  I arrived there by following the board walk next to the Tonlé Sap river.  From here I had a clear view on the confluence of the Tonlé Sap and Mekong.  I wonder if Mekong doesn't mean something like 'mother river', mee meaning mother and khlon meaning canal/waterway in Thai.  Wat Phnom is located in the middle of a roundabout in a city full of noisy traffic, thus you would expect not to find any peace nor tranquility in this place.  But guess again, the trees surrounding the hill effectively stopped noise from going up.  When you get to the end of the stairs leading to the top of the small hill, you don’t hear any city noises anymore.  The temple had some nice Buddha statues and behind the temple building, a monk was giving advice to locals.

Wat Phnom

After a short meditation session at the temple, I descended back to the ground and started walking back towards my hotel.  Phnom Penh actually is a very busy city and walking around isn’t easy.  Sidewalks are in bad shape and cars are parked all over them.  At every corner of the street a tuk-tuk driver is waiting and offering you his services (sometimes in a rather aggressive way).  Traffic in the street just doesn’t seem to follow any logical flow or rule.  But then I saw a building behind which I knew for sure a straight, logical traffic flow would exist, no chaos but good organisation: the train station.

Train station

The train station has been built by the French and that is clearly noticeable in its colonial style.  It is a quite simple white functional building and when I got to the platform behind it, it reminded me a lot of the now defunct train station of Tirana (Albania).  Trains only run a few times per week, so I got the chance to thoroughly examine the rolling stock.  The Cambodian railway company is called Royal Railway, in honour of their king.  They’ve got fairly modern renovated passenger coaches and their locomotives operate on diesel.  While I was examining the rolling stock parked at the platform, my attention was suddenly drawn away by something that was standing near the staff parking: there was a very beautiful steam locomotive, built by the Société Franco-Belge (aka a Belgian-made locomotive, because Franco-Belge mostly means 10 French guys looking how 1 Belgian builds it).  After spending quite some time here, I returned to the hotel and freshened up for my Cambodian dinner.

Carriages

Diesel locomotive

Old steam-locomotive