Cambodia's Hope

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The first night in Phnom Penh we went to Cambodia’s Hope orphanage somewhere right in the heart of the city.  I wasn’t really sure how that was going to go – I was afraid it would be kind of like the orphanage visit in China, which wasn’t really so hot, and we kind of felt intrusive.  This one was founded and run by some Semester at Sea graduates.

 

Anyway, it was dark by the time we got there.  We got off the bus and started walking down a long and pretty dark alley toward the orphanage, saying hello to people as we did, and suddenly we hear screaming, and these four little kids are just running up and down our huge line of SASers giving us high fives and shouting hello!  Hello!  And then they ran all the way back down the line and sat on a bench and smiled real big and some people took pictures.

 

The director of the orphanage gave a very quick speech when we finally got to the gates, and then we were allowed to play with the kids.  I brought my Rubik’s Cube, and a few teenaged guys had already taken an interest in it.  I didn’t know how much English they spoke, but I thought it would be pretty interesting to them anyway.  When the director was done, I solved it once.  Then they took it and played with it a little bit, and then gave it back to me because I think they gave up on solving it themselves.  I went a little bit more slowly this time.

 

The one guy that stayed with me the whole time was named Vichay.  He was 21 years old.  His father had died when he was two months old from some sort of disease – I think he may have known what disease it was but probably didn’t know the English word for it.  His mom died when he was 14 years old because of an accident at work – I think he said that she fell, but it might have been that something fell onto her.  Anyway, he says that he’s finishing high school at the orphanage this year, and then hoping to go to medical school.  Apparently kids from the orphanage really do have fine chances of doing this and kids have done it before, and they even send some kids abroad to study for the entirety of medical school in some cases.  That seemed pretty exciting and awesome.

 

I taught him how to solve the first layer of the cube.  He had a little bit of trouble – the way that everyone does – but it seemed like he was kind of getting the touch for the first layer by the time I left.  I tried to teach him the second layer too, but I really only do that layer by muscle memory at this point, and I kept messing up when I tried to slow it down, so I couldn’t really teach that to him.  I was sad about that.  But I gave him a piece of paper with the word “Solve Rubik’s Cube” on it and told him to google it (I wrote that down as well), and gave him my email address in case he wanted help.  He gave me his email address too.  I had never heard of the domain named but it sounded free and English.

 

When I said goodbye to him, I let him keep the Rubik’s Cube.  I’m pretty sure he wanted to keep it anyway.  Honestly, who wouldn’t want a free cube?

 

A lot of the younger kids, while we had been talking, formed a huge circle and did some song and dance.  Vichay actually said that he had been on the ship yesterday to perform – apparently he was one of the orphans that came to Vietnam for the day.  I remember seeing them dressing up and they looked incredibly ornate.  I didn’t see them dance, though.  I heard it was pretty great, but that the best part was just talking to them afterward.

 

A lot of my friends had some of the kids just grab their hand or grab their arm and not let go the entire time we were there.  I don’t know if that’s something that people just do in Cambodia, or if it’s just something orphans do in general, or if it’s something that they told these kids to do, but it was pretty adorable.  An 18 year old girl grabbed Jen’s hand from the beginning and walked around with her and showed her pretty much the whole place.  At the end she walked into the show room with her – where they display all the pottery and other crafts they make – and showed us a pot that she had made that morning.  It was definitely a good pot, you know, like you would expect from a senior in a high school art class.  I think Jen sort of felt bad taking it for free, but the girl made it, and she offered without Jen even asking, so she took it.

 

Kids from SAS are very welcome to apply to volunteer at the orphanage.  Apparently they plug you into a pre-existing schedule and try to use your talents the best they can.  So for someone like me, that’d probably include teaching math, English, and music.  You’re also allowed to lead creative activities and field trips for a certain amount of time every day, so you can play sports or go to a river or make stencils and things like that if you’d like.  The minimum sign-on is three months, which is just a summer, so it’s really not too bad at all.  You don’t get paid and you have to arrange your own travel, but you get free room and board and you’re even allowed to turn on air conditioning when you’re close to having a heat stroke.  In either case, I’m very seriously considering going for the summer after I graduate.  How awesome these kids were, and how amazing Cambodian people seem in general, I’d love to have a chance to live there.  However, it all hinges on how effectively I can teach myself some basic Khmer – just to speak and listen – in the next year.  But we’ll see.