About Us

Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Hello! We are a team of volunteers for the University of Leeds. This summer we'll be embarking on a project in Tonle Bati, Cambodia, spending two months in rural Cambodia, volunteering at the Seametrey Bilingual and Residential School, the first of its kind in Cambodia. The trip is the first international volunteering project the University has carried out. We'll be using this blog to follow the trials and tribulations of the coming months, and to give you a taste of our Cambodian experience. If you want to volunteer with the University, visit the new volunteering hub at http://volunteering.leeds.ac.uk, We'd also like to thank all of our supporters; we'd encourage you to take a moment to give them a look by clicking on their logos to the right of this page. Thank you to Santander Universities, TD Travel Group, the University of Leeds and Leeds for Life, who has all offered valuable financial and professional support to this fantastic project. The views expressed in this blog post are not necessarily that of the University of Leeds or the project's supporters, they are the views of the Leeds-Cambodia team.

Friday, 16 August 2013

Tacky tourists, tie-dying and trapped frogs

We’re now enjoying our last week in Tonle Bati, and we certainly welcomed it in with a bang! Saturday was Helen’s birthday and at last we were all healthy and ready to make the most of Phnom Penh.  The day got off to an ideal start with a trip to the market where we bought waffles and bananas before setting up camp in the best ice-cream shop in town.  Our theme for the evening was ‘tacky tourists’ so an expedition back to the Russian market was in order to buy a selection of very embarrassing (or amazing, depending on your point of view) tourist shirts.  With all of our new personas perfected, socks pulled right up and sandals firmly strapped on, we were ready to make an entrance. Somehow we managed to surprise Helen with a birthday cake which went down a treat, there’s not a lot of cake around here! Through the night we managed to develop some level of fame in the area – on more than one occasion we were approached by people asking if we were the tacky tourists they had heard about.

Sunday already and we piled into Muoy’s sweat-mobile for the very last time.  Despite the normal anti-mosquito routine and the fact that most of us had our faces pressed into someone else’s sweaty shoulder we were all pretty sad to begin to say our first goodbyes to life here.  It’s now Wednesday evening and the week has been going well – it’s been pretty encouraging to see that the children have actually remembered what we have been teaching them.  Lessons are building on each other and it’s so rewarding to hear them improve!  Still every day is eventful – just today we moved on from chicks falling into the pond to having a child wander straight in.  Another student was so keen he turned up to class on a drip while this afternoon saw 30 highly competitive 16-25 year olds rampage the school on a large scale treasure hunt to help them remember vocabulary and places. A big house clean also showed us that Gabby had been holding a frog captive in her bag for the past 3 days.  Every morning we chat about how loud the frogs are, and how it sounds like they are camped out in our beds at night – the unfortunate frog must have snuck in one morning but it had certainly been calling to be let out for a while!


As I write Sophie is cooking rice over an open fire, some of the group are tie-dying clothes, some are playing down at the lake, there is an intense papier-mâché exercise going on and Kat is trying to learn how to ask for 6 eggs in Khmer ahead of a trip to the shop.  We really are settled in here and it’s going to be with mixed feelings that we head off to the beautiful Siem Reap early on Monday morning.  
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