A perfect goodbye to Cambodia

We ended our time in Cambodia with a bang. A bang so loud that it will will probably keep my ears ringing until I someday return to this country I have fallen in love with.

What I failed to mention in the last post was that Cha Cha's full time job isn't a tour guide. He is a teacher. And not in a local high school or grade school. You see, Cha Cha's parents were killed in 1978 by the Khmer Rouge, orphaning him at just 3 months old. As a result, he would spend the next twenty years a monastery where he was raised by Buddhist monks.

At the monastery, Cha Cha and other orphans got a rich education in math, history, and literature something that is priceless and uncommon in Cambodia both then and now. As an adult, Cha Cha left the monastery, taught himself English and Japanese (and a little French and Spanish too!) and started farming in a nearby community. But with him he took maybe his most important lesson of all: the compassion and motivation to make life better for others.

Cha Cha currently operates a school for orphans and extremely impoverished children in rural Siem Reap. There he teaches English to these children to better their chances of getting good jobs that will help pay their family's cost of living. His students range in age from four to twenty-four.

After spending nearly two days together, Cha Cha educating us on the history if his home country, town, and religion, and us educating him on important topics such as Nivana, Brangelina, and a variety of American slang, Cha Cha enriched our experience even more: he invited us to visit his school. And so, on our way to the airport on Monday afternoon, we stopped in to see him. Upon our arrival a woman in her early twenties met us at the top of a muddy lane. She had a severe limp that we would later learn was a result of polio years prior. Her English was near perfect and she was excited to chat with us on the 3 minute walk to the site of the school. We rounded a corner and went behind a modest Thai home raised up on stilts to find close to 60 children sitting classroom-style at wooden table on wooden benches, all intently listening to their teacher at the front, Cha Cha.

The kids seemed to all be between the ages of 5 and 13 and their smiles spread wide across their face as we walked up. Cha Cha said something to them in Khmer, presumably introducing us without our names. Suddenly hands went up in the air. One by one several of them asked us questions. "What is your name?" "Where are you from?" "Do you have any brothers or sisters?" "What are their names?" Then in unison, they spelled each of our names and ended it my saying "We like Sara and Megan." Chills ran up my spine and I looked over at Megan and knew instantly she had the same feeling. Next, all 60 sang us two songs... Two songs, in fact, that we could sing along to: If You're Happy and You Know It, and The Itsy Bitsy Spider. In fact they knew both better than Megan and I knew either.

The final bit of our too short visit entailed a photograph of the class, both with their teacher that we were so happy to have met (for his great guiding skills and maybe more so for the rewarding experience we had just had) and a picture with us.

Unfortunately I only have those photos on the Nikon and so I will not be able to upload until my return. However, here are is a classic-Sara photo we took together with Cha Cha at the top of the last temple we visited on Monday.