Meeting the real Cambodia

Went with my friend to visit her family, her mother lives in Phnom Penh with the extended family, her father stays in the family village in Kompong Khan Province working on their fields.

The difference between the rich and the poor in Cambodia is at times really hard to deal with, to visit the family we took a Tuktuk (motorbike taxi that has a covered trailer on the back) down one of the main roads in Phnom Penh, we drove down a dirt rode for a cpl of minutes then turned down an old railroad line, the rail isnt used anymore so families have built shanty towns along the tracks. (the buildings are really basic, but because they are on public land the families can live there. These families couldnt afford to live in a city apartment.)

I was welcomed in and met both her son and his cousins, the kids were really excited to have a visitor with a camera and had fun posing for pics all around the house.

The hospitality was lovely but couldnt hide the fact that poverty was pretty close to the surface. The water to drink has to be boiled (there isnt running water) and the ice slabs used to cool it is sold by a guy who delivers them on the back of a cart. We shared the glasses that they had as we ate a meal of beef soup, cockles (collected from the local river which is incredibly polluted), frogs deep fried and rice.

The reason we had come to visit was to give David, Amum's son a present. He had been asking for a Kong (bike) for a long time and so we bought one at the local store. The look on his face as he saw it was fantastic. He rode around the inside of the main room with his cousin jumping on and off the back (the area out the front of the house is too bumpy to ride on)

We took the camera down to the local photoshop and blew up 10 of the pics into A4 colour images for $15 (believe me, there is a crazy difference in price between NZ and here!)

We then went to the local Khmer market and got some wooden frames which we took back to the house and sat with the family as they all put the pictures into frames. Each kid had at least one photo of themselves.

I know how much the kids at school used to love seeing themselves in video or photo and they were from a culture rich in media, the look on the Khmer kids faces as they carried a big portrait of themselves around was very very rewarding.