 DAC books find its way to the town of Svay Rieng near the Vietnamese border. |
With the headmaster and teachers of the temple school in Svay Rieng. |
 Me, Jeen and Elaine in Wat Opot with Kiwi volunteers and 2 of the residents |
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Dhamma
Aid Cambodia
August 2009 Update
Dear
friends of Dhamma Aid Cambodia,
Hi,..Here's a quick brief on a recent trip I
made to
Cambodia together with Jeen Lim and Elaine Tan to meet up with the
Singaporean Buddhist humanitarian group "Firefly
Mission".
This organisation is quite praiseworthy, possibly
the only
local Buddhist humanitarian group ( if we consider Singapore to be
local) doing work
stretching from Indonesia across several countries in S.E. Asia to Sri
Lanka. Presently, most of their efforts are concentrated on Myanmar.
Please visit the Firefly
Mission website to learn about them.
A
quick summary of places visited
With Phnom Penh as our base, we visited several local humanitarian groups operating near the city. Among these are:
Brahmavihara,
run by a Jewish Zen nun with a team of staff members who visit, counsel
and care for AIDS victims,
Wat Opot,
an orphanage run
by an unlikely team comprising a Buddhist layman and a ex-Christian
missionary, caring for sixty HIV+ kids, vulnerable children and
orphans, to integrate them back into society,
Salvation
Centre Cambodia, an NGO which has teams of monks and nuns
working with people living with HIV and AIDS, vulnerable children and
the marginalised in several cities across the country.
Other Travels in the South
We travelled out of Phnom Penh to research projects currently contemplated by Firefly Mission heading south all the way to Svay Rieng, a town sitting on the border with Vietnam. This place was really out in the sticks and we had to travel for hours, taking in a ferry crossing and passing miles of padi fields and rustic villagers before reaching our destination, a school in a village temple. What was particularly pleasing to me was when at this temple, the Venerable Yous Hut, the monk we were travelling with, reached into his bag and pulled out a stack of books to be distributed to the teachers and village heads there. I instantly recognised them as books Dhamma Aid Cambodia printed recently. Yaay!!DAC books find its way to the town of Svay Rieng near the Vietnamese border. |
With the headmaster and teachers of the temple school in Svay Rieng. |
Me, Jeen and Elaine in Wat Opot with Kiwi volunteers and 2 of the residents |
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