Monday, 22 July 2013

Sakhoeun, Micah, and Raza (left to right) in the MKK Village, currently under construction.

            Monday, the director of BSDA’s Mekong Kampuchea Kids Project (MKK), Mr. SAY Sakhoeun, took us on a tour of several communities helped by MKK.  These are some of the poorest of the poor, where there’s a recurring theme of families being relocated from fertile riverside land to small, infertile plots in dredged lakes.  One community was what Sakhoeun called a “rubbish community,” which has an especially uncertain future: this group of landless families collects cardboard and tarps to be sold in Vietnam, where there is recycling.  The community builds their homes based on whoever will let them live on their land (often temporarily).

            Despite these very difficult circumstances, all the communities we visited were incredibly welcoming, and very eager to help themselves rather than wait for various NGOs to come along.

After visiting these communities, Sokhoeun took us to the fascinating MKK Village.  Set to be finished with construction in 2016, this is BSDA’s self-sustaining master plan for the NGO’s headquarters.  Two residence halls will house 140 students, and there will be office buildings and a hostel.  There are multiple hectares for BSDA to manage its own agriculture, which dovetails beautifully with the vocational training program for cooking, and the market provided by the Smile Restaurant.  Additionally, there’s a building filled with looms for BSDA’s vocational training in sewing, a program where students are already making crisp clothing for export, as well as for BSDA’s own staff.  There’s also a solar-powered water pump, to boot!

We finished the day with a trip to the so-called “monkey temple,” where we fed peanuts and bananas to, well, monkeys!

Raza feeding peanuts to the most vicious female monkey.