Oh wow Cambodia

After a week in Vietnam, my family and I went to Cambodia. How do I describe it - beautiful palm trees in the middle of farm land where water buffalos are grazing in rice-like paddies. Huts built on stilts to avoid floods during the rainy seasons. And lilies bursting with bright blue skies laying as their background.

Beautiful country with utter devastation - we visited a water town - I mean they drink, urinate, cook, and travel using the same river supply of murky yellow water. The only thing I could think of throughout the whole thing was, they don't know. What I mean is - I saw a kid drink from the river, actually take a bowl, scoop some gritty dirty water and drink it. And you turn to the shores and there are kids, with their ingenuity, selling tourists plates with the tourist's pics on them (they snap a picture of you and then develop them and paste them on plates right away).

So I began to think. How could I help? If I give the beggers money it will only encourage them to beg. If I buy the kid's products it will encourage them to depend on tourists, what happens when the tourists stop coming? That's when I realized what I once realized before - education. Education not on ABC's, but the importance of clean water. But not just that, of how to build things to clean water. And so that was when I started looking around the village and realized that there were NGOs there doing just that. It wasn't a relief but a direction, a realization that hey, when I get back to Canada, I am either going to donate my time or money to these NGOs to help this country devastated by war.