Making a “World of Difference” in Cambodia
“Helping the people of Cambodia was a real eye opening and humbling experience for me. It made me really appreciate my life. Teaching English and interacting with the children was a real highlight for me. I cannot wait to go back in the future and help some more!”
- Kynon 18
On the 5th of January 3 families set out on World of Difference’s “Family Humanitarian Tour” of Cambodia. This year the World of Difference tour provided us with the opportunity to visit and work in many remote villages throughout Cambodia where you don’t get to visit on your standard tourist holiday. During these visits we saw how Rotary is making a World of Difference in health, clean water, hygiene, education and sustainable development.
More importantly we got to work and play with the Cambodian villagers as well as:
donate 32 pushbikes to 32 school children who usually had to walk more than 10 kilometres to and from school every day
donate 200 school books and pens to the monks who taught in one of the remote schools
donate 22 laptops to a NGO school in Battambang
teach the school children some English
challenge the local school children to a game of soccer and volleyball
supply medicine to 3 medical centres
drill for water and install a water bore pump
donate $500 to the Wildlife Alliance Cambodia who rescue and reintegrate back into their natural habitat wildlife in the Southeast Asian tropical belt
donate $1,000 to one of the ethically run orphanages
In addition to the humanitarian work we had the opportunity to immerse ourselves in the Cambodian culture, visiting many of Cambodia’s beautiful sites,including seeing Angkor Wat at its best at sunrise, the Phom Kulen holy mountain where we visited the huge reclining Buddah, were blessed by monks and swam under the waterfall, we travelled too Battambang and witnessed a million bats fly from their cave at sunset, wevisited Cambodia’s dark past - S21 and the Killing Fields - which was emotionally draining and confronting, but important to see and consider, we visited the inspirational Wildlife Alliance where we met and fed Lucky the elephant as well as many of the rescued resident animals – the chatter of the gibbons was a classic - and we finished the tour with a bit of R&R on the beautiful beaches of Rabbit Island.