thewills'wanderings

Finally the day came for us to meet Samreth, our sponsor child. We were all a bit unsure about how the day would go but were excited to meet her and see the area that she lives.

We were picked up at 7.30am by the World Vision staff and driven 2 hours out of PP to the Takeo province. The area where our child lives has about 1500 children sponsored, all by New Zealanders! We arrived at the World Vision office in the village and could see Samreth and her parents waiting to meet us. We had a brief explanation about the work being done in the area and then we had the formal introduction. It was all a bit awkward, not really knowing what to say and with it all being translated, but it was a very special time. The parents were really excited to meet us and had apparently been excited for days. It was hard to tell what Samreth thought. She seemed completely overwhelmed and shocked and didn’t really smile or show any emotion which was quite hard. Both Tim and I felt a bit concerned about her as we’ve met so many Cambodian children who are so warm and friendly. She just looked really traumatised. We’re going to e-mail our concerns just in case something’s not right and she needs some help in some way. We all sat around and asked each other questions about our lives-kind of hard to compare the lives of subsistence rice farmers and a family like us travelling the world! Samreth had never ever seen foreigners before and all of them were very interested in our looks, especially our beautiful, pointy noses!

After chatting for a while we were then taken for a 20 minute drive to the nearest town for lunch at a local restaurant which was very basic and local food. We had to cover the cost for everything on the day, including the lunch for our family and Samreth and her family. It cost $2.50 per person and it was so nice to be able to take them out to lunch. They had never been to a restaurant and it was a huge treat for them. It was a huge buzz to see them enjoying lunch so much. I kept telling them to eat more, knowing it was so special for them. Again, it was hard to communicate because of the language but they seemed to enjoy it and I think our girls got a lot out of it.

We all headed back to the village and took photos together and we gave some gifts to Samreth. We bought a 50 kg sack of rice and gave that to the family as well as a ball and some stationery for Samreth. They seemed totally overwhelmed by the rice, it should last about six months, so we hope it will be a huge help to them.

We then went on a bumpy, muddy road to check out a pond that World Vision are building in the area but there was a huge afternoon downpour of rain and we couldn’t get there so had to turn back. It was then time to say our goodbyes and head back to Phnom Penh.

Overall, it was a great experience. It was nice to see where our money is going and from now on be able to picture the village when we get updates. We were pretty pleased with the work being done by World Vision. Sometimes we’ve wondered how much money gets to the right place with these big organisations and there is no doubt that a lot does get wasted in administration and other things, but they do get big development projects done and we could see how they have made a difference in this area.
It was a long exhausting day but one we will never forget!

This entry was posted on Monday, August 24th, 2009 at 10:40 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.