Exciting news

We have had some of the best news of the year this week. The woman we met at the swimming pool has contacted us as she and another want to do some work with Sothy. The arrangement we have agreed on couldn't be more perfect. The woman called Debbie is American and has experience with working with deaf blind children. She will come to the orphanage two to three times a week to work with the staff on how to communicate and help Sothy, she will be in Cambodia indefinitely, so I hope will form quite an attachment with Sothy and become a long term mentor. There is also a university student who is taking a year long break in Cambodia who is looking for volunteer work.She is deaf herself and is willing to volunteer full time doing activities and teaching Sothy sign language (through touch). Amazing that we managed to bump into Debbie! I was very worried for Sothy and his future prospects but I think Debbie and Holly  will be able to make a big difference to his quality of life. I am very very happy for Sothy.

For Project Trust we have to do a community study. I am doing mine based on the trial of the Leaders of the Khmer rouge regime. I have been having some interesting conversations with various people about the trial and Beth and I went to visit the court. I found the visit to the court surprisingly interesting and enjoyable. The court is made up of a mixture of international and Khmer people which means that french English and Khmer are all being spoken at the same time. Everyone wears a headset tuned into a channel so 3 languages are flying around the court which I am pretty sure was causing some problems, but I was very impressed with the system. The session I watched was the giving of evidence by a man that had run various communes, he had clearly spent years justifying what he had done to himself and was desperately trying to convince the court he had treated those in his commune well. This man will never go on trial though so I don't think the court were very interested. Through talking to Cambodians I have discovered that the interest in the trial is very low and suppressed further by the fear of talking about politics.It does seem that putting so few people on trial especially as they are so old is slightly futile, but the main thing I learned at the court was that it doesn't matter what the convictions are, the trial is very important for extracting information on the regime. I think it is so important that the Khmer people are educated on what happened during the regime and the trial is discovering lots of useful material. The court (I expect the UN section) is keen to increase awareness of the trial amongst the Khmer so offer group visits to the court with costs covered, we are really hoping to be able to arrange a visit with some of the older children before we leave in a month. The court is on a break until the 16th of July though so it will be tricky.

We took all the children to a small water park last week which they loved. We stayed all day and had the whole park to ourselves which was nice. It was much less stressful than you would imagine as the swimming pools were like giant paddling pools so not too deep. The children only left the water for lunch in an 8 hr day! A few of them have consequently had sore blistered noses and to their great indignation they all turned black and have extreme tan lines.

Thats all the main events of the past couple of weeks. Other news is that we have finally got a delivery of money from unicef so we have been working on budgets which I find very boring. We have now got a routine for when the children will recieve new clothes which will be good but sadly we won't be here for the first installment. Beth and I are finding it rather sad at the moment, as there are quite a few things we are discussing and initiating which we won't be here to follow through with or see the results, it will be nice for the next volunteers to arrive to some intersting activities though.