Done Right

With only a week left of our stay on Otres Beach at Done Right’s cozy guest house, we are already making plans to return. It’s very hard to describe this place to anyone who hasn’t been here but we are going to try over the next few lines.

This is certainly no sad place, but there are definitely several small scale and large scale projects that need to be created or contributed to. Creativity and relaxation come unforced for the ‘barangs’ (us Westerners) living here, along with the spontaneous desire to contribute to the community. The Khmer people have this admirable capacity to give you a smile no matter what the situation and this makes you want to give something back.

From our experience of the last two weeks, it seems the worst form of desperation and poverty is not very evident here. However, this is clearly a developing country and what is needed now is improvements. And because of the positive and practical nature of the locals, these improvements seem to need not much more than some initiative to actually happen.

One of the main things we’ve been working with here is the so-called “can-kids”. Srenu, Da, Kumli and Nang are four of them. These kids run along the beach every day with huge rice sacks which are about the same size as them, collecting cans for which they get about 1 US cent per can. If they don’t collect enough cans in a day, they are likely to face consequences from home – exactly what, they don’t talk much about.

Clare from next door started this admirable endeavor with these kids spontaneously and we have been joining her. While us living here on Otres might not be able to bring about enormous change for all the children in Cambodia in a similar situation, we do what we can with the ones who are here. We teach a little english or any other useful skills we can and  we try to create a space in which they can be the children they actually are for a few hours a day. Dreamworks animations are a particularly effective way for us to bribe them to learn their ABCs.

So in our small way, we try to do something right; helping around the guesthouse and anywhere we can in the community. it is a comfortable chaos, down to earth and real.

Below is our workforce (OR not, thats kind of the point, Done Right, Red. anm)

- Felicia & Filippa

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 at 16:23 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.