The first post from the Cambodia Trip!

Hello from Phnom Penh!!!!

Here’s a real quick blog post and apologies that I couldn’t get many up during the trip so far. We’ve just had such an action packed schedule of visiting various different NGO’s and other cultural activities. Can’t wait to do more postings when I’m back.
It’s been a couple hot days of cycling since we’ve arrived in Siem Reap, but the journey has been epic! As our Global Agents for Change group is smaller, we joined up with a larger group of riders in the city called Battambong a few days ago. It’s now our last day in Phnom Penh and we are off to Chuuk before our finally destination Kep, where we’ll stay at The Vines eco lodge. The ride days are usually just over 100km and while it’s hot, we’re get many chances to stop for coconut juice, cane sugar juice, and even palm sugar juice!!! They’ve been the perfect energy drink while riding in temperatures of up to 41 degrees Celsius.

Today being our last day in Phnom Penh, we took it easy and slept in until 9:00am. Our previous ride days begin with breakfast at 5:45 and taking off at 6:30am in order to ‘beat-the-heat’. We had lunch today with Loung Ung who wrote the book “First They Killed My Father”. I haven’t had a chance to read her story yet, but through chatting with everyone, she has endured a lot. She survived the Khmer Rouge and was adopted by an American family at a young age. She returned to Cambodia to be involved in a variety of international development projects. Loung is super inspiring and has a lot of interesting insight into development in Cambodia. She said today that with any form of community development, NGO’s must have a foreign exit strategy in place. Her NGO originally started with almost 100% foreign staff and now almost all staff who fill the current roles are local Cambodian. The goal of development ultimately is to achieve sustainability within communities without dependence on foreigners. After all, it is the local community that knows best the needs of its people.

Well, it’s off to dinner and then an early night before the 130 km cycle to Chuuk tomorrow. Sorry for the lack of posting friends! It’s been a bit of whirlwind but I hope to catch up on more of my insights into Cambodia over the next week and when I return to Canada.

Farewell from Cambodia!
Christina