Day 4 - 10th September - Culture Shock

Today was when the reality of life in Cambodia really hit home.

We had our breakfast at the Sydney - at last I got to have my fruit salad, muesli and yoghurt - and then met Solomon, the director of community projects at the Shinta Mani Hotel. Solomon was concerned that because it had bucketed down with rain all night long, we may not be able to make it to the home of the people for whom our water well was built. We decided to go anyway, and hope that we could clear this hurdle if it appeared (which given our GREAT run of luck on this trip, was not likely!).

The trip took us back through Angkor Wat to the Angkor Thom province.

Cambodia is separated into a number of provinces (like states) which in turn are divided into smaller districts. Each district is made up of a combination of towns or smaller regions called communes. A commune is like a village, but in farming areas, the communes are wide spread due to the distance between houses on farming land.

The further you go from the cities, the greater the poverty levels. The family we visited live only 45 minutes from Siem Reap, so are not so far away, yet they have almost nothing. One, maybe two, sets of clothes, cooking implements and some basic farming tools are all this family, consisting of a husband and wife and their five chilren, possess. The water well we have provided is a poly-pipe plunged 20-30m underground to reach the cleanest possible water, with a plunger type pump - a smaller piece of poly-pipe inserted into the opening of the pipe with a rubber seal on it to create the vacuum required to draw the water. The water is pumped into large buckets which sit on a concreted footing to assist with hygiene and to stop the area getting so muddy.

It will help them to have clean drinking water, as well as allow them to be able to water their crops - sugar cane, pumpkins, chillies, oranges and other local fruits. Unfortunately there is no infrastructure to allow for the irrigation of rice paddies, so at this point, only one harvest of rice is possible per year - during the wet season, as rice only grows if it is submerged, and it would be impossible to bucket enough water to submerge the two or three acres of rice paddies this family has.

The people were obviously extremely grateful. There was much bowing and thanking, although they spoke no English, we had a number of translators from Shinta Mani to help out.

The pigs had arrived, too. This family received two females, which at nine months will be mature enough to mate and breed their own piglets. There is a male pig nearby who will be brought to the farm to mate with the sows.

I could spend forever explaining the amazing sights (this place is so far removed from our safe, clean and excessive Australian lives) but you'll just have to ask one day, because there is too much to say. The culture shock was massive - an amazing eye-opener which is not experienced by many (although our well is the 900th built!) and will not be easily forgotten by our little troop.

Sophia and Felicity were obssessed by a small ground cover plant that, whose leaves, when touched, fold away like a fan. This plant has leaves very similar to those on a young wattle - they look kind of like a feather, and flowers like a melaleuca (paper bark). I wish I knew what it was!

We were then taken back to the Shinta Mani Hotel to have a quick tour. Everyone decided that this would be the place to stay. It is beautiful, it has a pool, a spa and the hospitality school attached is providing young Khmer with the chance to gain some skills and get good jobs.

At 2.15, after another mouth-watering meal, we departed Siem Reap on the road to Battambang (it's pronounced Battambong, if you haven't heard it said before).