Most of you may be aware that we have been hosts for Helpers Exchange for a number of years now.  In a nutshell, we provide accommodation and meals in exchange for a set amount of hours work per day. This arrangement has proved to be a good experience for our girls to meet and interact with people from around the world, and of course a fantastic opportunity for those who are travelling (one that I wish had been around when I had been backpacking 15-20 years ago!)

In late May, we met Lara, a 23 year old French girl who stayed with us for a week.  She was brilliant with sorting and then packing of the first boxes for storage in our shipping container.  At the time, I was just starting to look seriously at our itinerary and had decided that more time was needed in my beloved Asia when Lara told me about the time she had spent in Cambodia last year, volunteering at a school in Siem Reap and about the country and its people generally. So thanks to a very flexible itinerary (I had only booked the one-way ticket to Bangkok at that stage) I added in Cambodia and Laos.  Between our second and third visit to the Travel clinic in Bangkok it left a three week period for us to do a trip into Cambodia. Lara mentioned after she was leaving Australia she was going first back to Vietnam where she was meeting her boyfriend Teddy and together they would be going to Siem Reap and serendipitously we would be there at exactly the same time!

Our time in Siem Reap would not have been half the experience had it not been for Lara – her suggestions, her invitations and introductions to some wonderfully inspiring people that she had met during her last visit. Thank you Lara!

We spent a day with an amazing group of volunteers cutting vegetables, cooking rice and whisking eggs for omelets before making food parcels and soup to deliver to outlying villages around Siem Reap.  We joined ‘Touch a Life’ founder Mavis Ching and a group of about 15 volunteers at 8am in Mavis’ simple home along a dirt track in Siem Reap. Walking through her home we found ourselves in a covered open air kitchen at the rear of the house where bamboo stools were placed around tables with cutting boards and a tin of knives of varying degrees of sharpness sitting at the ready and baskets of produce fresh from the markets on the floor.  Beyond the tables was the cooking area with two large gas burners and smaller charcoal burning earthen pots in the corner which would be used for cooking the omelets.

We took our positions around the tables and spent the next 5 hours cutting up onions, runner beans, and carrots for the omelets, and then tomatoes, winter melon (a type of gourd)and pineapple for the Khmer style sweet & sour soup, while chatting and exchanging information with our fellow volunteers. Linda a lady originally from the Sunshine Coast who has since her first visit decided cash in her superannuation and to return to live in Siem Reap, Aline a delightful French lady with grandchildren similar ages as our girls, who has been returning to Cambodia for several years now for a couple of months at a time.  Our two girls were eager to help and spent a number of hours chopping veges until Phoebe cut her thumb with one of the sharper knives and needed to lie down!  Pots and pots of rice were cooked on the open flames and then the packaging into parcels began. A packed down bowl of rice was tipped onto a rectangle of greaseproof paper with a triangle of vegetable omelet placed on top. This was tightly folded into a parcel and secured by a rubber band before being placed into rows and counted into bags of fifty a piece (the girls were in charge of sorting the rows into tens and keeping count) until we had reached 490 parcels.

We stopped for a brief lunch of the same fare at 12.30pm before starting up again and measuring out a cup of soup into plastic bags and securing them with rubber bands and again counting out and placing into bags.

At 2.45pm we pulled out – a party of 14 of us.  The inaugural trip with the newly purchased larger tuk tuk packed with bags of food followed by two motorbikes and us in a tuk tuk with Phoebe and Imogen holding the medical provisions and a box of shoes to distribute.

It was their job to administer the medicines (under the direction of Mavis) – panadol, tablets for coughs and stomach-aches, worms and diarrhoea as well as patches and bandaids and drops for eyes. The first stop was in Siem Reap before heading out into a more rural area down rough and bumpy dirt tracks stopping on the roadside to hand out our provisions to the group of (usually) women and children.

Food to all and medical provisions to those that needed it like old ‘Grandma’ a 80 odd year old lady confined to a wheelchair (purchased by Touch a Life) who today ironically also received a new pair of Mary Janes! Her toothless grin was priceless. In another village the children had drawn pictures with some practised English words like the one handed to the girls that had ‘I loev you’ crudely written next to pictures of a princess. As we pulled up children would come running with the widest smiles but they all waited patiently and politely.  The Khmer people are really friendly, respectful and warm and ‘softer’ than neighbouring Asian countries. Today they were also extremely grateful. At one stop a Khmer women came up and touched Immi on the face (she has had more attention due to her freckles and fair skin but usually just polite looking and smiling so far), so when Mavis rebutted her for doing so she was extremely remorseful and kept bowing and apologising for taking liberty, so far removed from other countries where the girls have encountered being picked up pinched and squeezed.

On and on we went down dusty and muddy rutted roads getting further and further to the rural living of grass huts, no electricity and one water pump in a central spot for all to use.

It was an unbelievable experience and one that made me tear up at the poverty and realness of it all.  What an invaluable day for the girls to not only see but really be involved in the preparation of the food right through to delivering and seeing the benefit to these

children that comes from these wonderful NGO’s (non-government organisations). It does take a village to raise a child but here it also helps when you have an army of volunteers….

If the girls didn’t have a big enough day we knew that tonight was the only opportunity to go to the Beatacello concert, held every Saturday night.  Dr Beat Richner, a Swiss paediatrician and accomplished cello player has dedicated the last twenty years to raising money and building the Kantha Bopha Hospitals in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh.  Peppered throughout his speech about his hospitals and the plight of Cambodia and specifically its children he played his beloved cello.

We spent a sobering but inspiring hour and a half here before going out for a very late dinner and finally getting the girls to bed close to 11pm! We were justly very proud of the way the girls approached and responded to each situation – it was a hugely educational and rewarding day for us all and one we shall remember forever.