Building Walls and Scrubbing Classrooms

Once a month, Projects Abroad organizes a “Dirty Weekend”: a Saturday when any volunteer who is free takes the day and helps one of the organizations we work with to complete a project they have been working on. This weekend we were at VCAO, an orphanage and school in the dump outside of Phnom Penh, building a wall around the school yard and cleaning the classrooms.

I had a great time: I am a pro with cement an cement blocks (or bricks) after Honduras and Nicaragua, so I felt right at home. My friend Georgie and I were working together at one point, and we were pretty proud of ourselves when we had four perfect rows, one after the other. (A prefect row is a row where you don’t have to break any bricks to complete the row. It is a big deal when building walls).

I like the Dirty Weekend idea because it gives me a chance to see what conditions other volunteers are working in, and what conditions their students are living in. VCAO, like I said, is at the dump. And I don’t mean near the dump, or close to the dump, I mean right in the middle of the dump. There are roads through piles of trash, and the students at VCAO work in those piles, picking up trash that their families can then sell for a few riel (Cambodian currency). It is the same situation Amigos for Christ is trying to fix in Nicaragua with Villa Catalina, and it is just as sad and awful here as it is halfway across the world.

Then, out of all the trash and dirt, comes games and playfulness, and children being children: