The Green Gecko Project

(click on the logo to visit Green Gecko's website)

Suas'dei! Greetings from Siem Reap, Cambodia. I've been in Cambodia for a few weeks now, and last week started my volunteer work at Green Gecko Project. I didn't really know what to expect, I thought I would just turn up and do what they needed me to do, i.e. helping dish out meals, supervising the kids while they play, taking them on field trips, sweeping the grounds etc. but it turns out that I am going to be more of a schoolteacher; planning, preparing and giving lessons. Is that the deep end? Oops, guess I just fell in!

Green Gecko is a shelter for ex-beggar and street children, often from abusive backgrounds. It provides a safe home where they receive food, shelter, love and care. The kids go to Khmer school every day and receive supplementary lessons from volunteers.

Please visit the website (www.greengeckoproject.org OR click the logo above) to read more about the project.

Check me out - wearing my official "Green Gecko Crew" t-shirt and aladdin pants - this is pretty standard dress in this climate.
The kids each wear their own gecko t-shirts similar to mine but in a colour corresponding to their house. They're divided into 6 houses: Elephants, Snakes, Monkeys, Frogs, Bees and Crocodiles, they eat meals and do chores in their house groups but are divided into age/ability groups for lessons.

Kim Khoun - one of the more extroverted kids. You can't help falling in love with them!

The main office building and library (upstairs)

The lunch huts and rice field (the rice field is a football field in the dry season)

Green Gecko is a very organised, structured kind of place. It's not the kind of orphanage/children's shelter where kids are just running amok all day long, they have scheduled activities (run by us) and go to school every day. The older kids go to school in the morning and we have the younger ones for activities including library, Me & My Planet, Computers and Art. They all come back for lunch and siesta, and in the afternoon they swap - the younger ones go to school and we have the older ones for activities. They have dedicated homework time in the evenings, sports & music on the weekends and regular field trips. It's a very rich programme that covers a lot of different areas. Each volunteer that comes has something different to add - for example I'm giving photography and film classes for the next couple of weeks and have planned things like photographic treasure hunt and filming their own music videos. Watch this space!

Me taking English library with the younger ones

Lunchtime meditation at assemblyA visitor comes to Gecko and meets Srey Nich and Pichet


The topic for last week's activities was American Indians. We made teepees and coloured in Indian clothes with the little ones
Lunchtime assembly - the kids seated in their house groups

On Thursdays they have a martial arts teacher that comes in to teach them Boxkator (pronounced bock-a-tao), an ancient Khmer martial art similar to Muay Thai. Boxkator was introduced into the programme about 18 months ago as a non-academic activity; many of the kids have never been to school before joining Gecko even though they're teenagers, and this gives them something to be good at outside academics.

Last Friday the kids were invited to perform at Hotel de la Paix for a group of important Malaysian businesspeople. Here are a few snaps from practise:

Watch this - you will be amazed!!

Luckily I'm not volunteering all on my own. I've got a good bunch of people with me; Sally (UK) started at the same time and is staying 1 week longer than me. We're staying at the same hostel and go to work together on bikes in the morning. It's a beautiful 10-minute bike ride through the countryside to get there. This week another guy from the UK and 2 Australian girls joined, so it looks like we have more volunteers than we really need but we can divvy up classes and take shifts. And really, the more the merrier!

OK that's probably enough for now. Hope you enjoyed this intro - do have a look at their website and keep checking back here for updates!

Love
May Lee

Final day of temples, Cambodian kids performance

Hi everyone,

It's been a while since I posted anything, I've been so busy for the last week or so! Mum has gone back to NZ, she left last Wednesday. I'm now living at the Siem Reap Hostel, a place much closer to Green Gecko where I'm volunteering. It's very nice - I have A/C and cable TV in my room, there's a swimming pool, TV rooms, day beds and buffet breakfast every day. Mint! I'll be living here until ~14 August when I finish volunteering and head to Vietnam.

Here's an update on the last few days that Mum was here.

Mum and I did a whirlwind - yet comprehensive - tour of the Angkor Wat historical park with good doses of Cambodian countryside thrown in for good measure. Last Sunday night we went to see a traditional Apsara dance performance at a kids orphanage (just around the corner from Green Gecko, it turns out), and since then I've been getting stuck into my volunteer work - more about that in the next post.
We hired a tuk tuk and driver for the day to take us to a few outlying destinations. Banteay Srei is a temple about 30km out of Siem Reap itself (compared to Angkor Wat which is 7km away). This temple is known as the 'jewel in the crown' because of its intricate carvings' also known as the Citadel of Women because they say the carvings are too fine to have been done by a man. It really does live up to its name, the carvings are so beautiful and really well-preserved. It definitely looks different to the Angkor giants, I can't remember the exact historical timeline but it was build during a different period to the big temples. There's a lot of reconstruction going on, they have restored some of the garuda/monkey/bird statues guarding the door (see below) but the doorway carvings are all original.





Just outside the temple we heard some traditional music coming from the forest. There are groups of musicians everywhere, it adds a nice bit of ambience when you're visiting temples and they're actually quite good. This guy was playing a tune on a leaf!!

Next stop was Kbal Spean, 'the river of a thousand lingas' (that's the cultural word for boy-bits). They often used a linga to represent Vishnu and how powerful he was. Typical. Anyway, Kbal Spean is a series of carvings in a riverbed about 2km from the parking lot. It was a very sweaty 2km climb to the site, but totally worth it. Gorgeous waterfalls and lush green forest (including hordes of giant red ants) and best of all, not crowded. Not many people can be bothered coming out this far, so we had the place pretty much to ourselves.

(turns out it was worth schlepping the tripod all the way from Chiang Mai)

On Sunday night we visited the Cambodian Children's House of Peace, a children's orphanage/shelter that puts on a performance every Sunday. The kids performed traditional Khmer dances for us, after which they invited us to join them on stage and it turned into a freestyle breakdancing session!!! An awesome night, and very impressive to see tweens performing the traditional dances flawlessly. Here's a link to the organisation's website and some photos & video from the performance.

Click on the logo to visit their website

Next post will be about Green Gecko. Stay tuned! And leave a comment!

Love
ML

Out-takes & observations

Just wanted to post a collection of the more amusing things that I've seen in Cambodia so far. Enjoy!

eating bbq fish

ASSUME THE POSITION. IT IS TIME TO TAKE A PHOTO.

Hongi-ing with the Buddha (or King Jayavarman, historians are as yet undecided)

mum doing her daily brain trainer sudoku and a local khmer lady wants to join in

Laundry day in the room. this is the undie tree

just what are they carrying?

5pm traffic on main st

Japanese narcolepsy's SE Asian cousin:

carrying chickens on a bike
sawing a plastic bottle in half. why? I don't know, but the dog looks happy.
colgate make smile!
phnom penh becomes a swimming pool after 1 hour of rain
no parking.

Angkor Wat, Khmer cooking and an incident involving police, a boat and a machine gun

Well it's certainly been an eventful few days since leaving Battambang. We're now in Siem Reap, most famous for its proximity to Angkor Wat and the ancient temples in the area. It's a fabulous town, very happening, lots of tourists and very Western downtown area with pubs & restaurants coming out your ears. It's definitely more expensive than the places I've been so far, and local/street food is harder to find. I think I'm putting weight back on here :( But it's so nice to have mum travelling with me and to be living in relative luxury for a while!

This latest chapter of the adventure starts with a 6am wakeup in Battambang to catch our 7am boat departure. The Stung Sangker river would take us across Cambodia to the Tonle Sap and a floating village on the outskirts of Siem Reap. The water levels are so low since it hasn't been raining, the boat trip took 9 hours. It's a beautiful trip through floating villages and countryside. Only about 20 people on the boat so not too crowded.

The trouble begins around lunchtime. We were passing through a floating village when suddenly we heard a shout and saw that there was a guy clinging to the side of our boat. When we looekd back, we saw bits of wood floating in the water, turns out we'd run him over and destroyed his little boat/raft thing. Luckily he was sitting on the back or he'd have been mince meat. The drivers looked a bit panicked, didn't quite know what to do, we dropped the guy off at one of the houses and carried on, didn't think much more of it. But mum spotted the guy getting out his cell phone to make a call...

Sure enough, several hours later we were crossing the Tonle Sap (Cambodia's largest lake, which at this time was literally only ankle deep, another sign of the missing rains this year) and we hear a powerful boat coming up to us. A policeman carrying an AK47 jumps out onto our boat, followed by the guy and his entire family (even granny). After much shouting and pointing, the engine is turned off and they all sit down for a powwow. More shouting and pointing ensues, none of which any of us tourists could understand of course. We played a few games of cards instead. After about an hour, the poor guy who'd been driving got up to open a storage box and pulled out a pretty good-quality-looking sleeping bag. A trade, perhaps? In lieu of money to pay for the destroyed boat? Nope, after that he went out the back to get a clean pair of undies and a change of clothes, and was taken away by the policeman and angry mob. We can only imagine where he is now.

Here are some pictures of the boat trip (sorry, didn't take any of the policeman or the mob for obvious reasons)




So we arrived in Siem Reap later that evening, checked into our guesthouse and hit the town. The following day we did a Khmer cooking class and learned to make banana flower salad, mango salad, amok curry and mango sticky rice. Of course we got to eat it all!


The cooking class wasn't as thorough as the one in Chiang Mai; it was shorter but still lots of fun. Khmer food in general is quite mild; they don't like their food spicy and they use a lot of coconut cream so most dishes are sweet & creamy.

The next day I decided it was time to get mum up before the crack of dawn to see the sun rise at Angkor Wat. It was a difficult 3:30am wakeup but we were in place by 5am and watched the whole magical experience from our front-row seats.


That day we did the main circuit: Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, Bayon, Ta Prohm (tomb Raider temple). I'll post another series of photos of the temples next time, but here's a taster for now.

The bayon

Fat ass monkey

The south gate into Angkor Thom

Apsaras (heavenly dancers)
Ta Prohm
Ta Prohm (Tomb Raider filmed here)
The Bayon

The Bayon

Tomorrow I start my month at Green Gecko project. Mum is coming along for the first 2 days before she flies home. It's going to be really hard to say goodbye but I'm so thankful that she's been able to come and travel with me for a while :) I'll be in good hands with my new gecko family so hopefully I won't feel too lonely.

Until next time,

Love
May Lee