Once more we're back at Smile guest house in the capital city. After a couple of days relaxation, because we needed it after lazing about on the beach for a week, we went to visit an orphanage that we'd seen a notice for in an internet cafe, asking for volunteers and donations. Written by a traveller who'd spent 3 years working there. On the way we asked the moto driver to take us to somewhere to get gifts for the kids. 20 minutes later we were armed with 120 pencils with rubbers, 10 packs of crayons, 10 pencil sharpeners, a huge pad of plain paper, and 30 school books.
On arrival we were greeted by the manager and tons of kids who quickly got out a table, laid it with a table cloth, and sat us down in front of a stage in the middle of the court yard. The kids were going to put on a show for us to say Thank You! The manager was delighted with our gifts and explained a bit about the place to us. There are 114 orphaned children that live there and 80 very poor street kids that get fed and watered there every day. They rely on Non Governmental Organisations and random people to donate money and they have 25 staff. The main thing that the orphanage is excellent at is teaching traditional Khmer dance, to which Rich and I were going to be treated to.
The manager told us that it was a shame they didn't know we were coming as they'd have prepared for the dance with the proper costume. We said we wanted to come back the next day anyway to bring rice and anything else they needed and he told us we would be in for a treat! The dance was spectacular without the costume, we were looking forward to tomorrow!
We really weren't expecting this, we felt like royalty, sat there watching children perform a traditional dance just for us!
Sonita, one of the stars of the show, who is looking for sponsorship so she can study Traditional Khmer dance at university, adopted me as her Godmother and we promised to write to each other and I promised that we would sponsor her when we got back home.
We said good bye and promised to endeaver to get as many people from the guest house back the next day for the show.
We managed to get one other girl to come with us and on the way we bought 3 gigantic sacks of rice to give them plus a huge tub of sweets and some dollars.
The dance was so beautiful, we felt so honoured to have seen it. At times it was the most graceful movement I have ever seen and at other times it was hilarious. The Fishermen's Dance was so funny. We didn't quite understand what was going on, but it involved boys verses girls, each trying to steal some baskets from each other, and the boys tormenting then seducing the girls who were acting all coy and giggling. They put on 5 dances altogether and each one was totally different but such great fun. Cambodia really needs to market their traditional dance for tourists.
Afterwards we gave out the sweets which was nothing more than frantic mayhem and utterly impossible! All I could see were a hundred hands all grabbing and pulling at my arm. A few, I'm sure, didn't manage to get one and some sneaky few managed to get a pocket full! Maybe next time we go back we'll teach them how to queue in hight order just like when I was at school!
Then we were shown around the place and left having had an amazing time.
We were going to get the bus from here to Bangkok tomorrow, but as its slightly quicker going up to Siem Reap again and then getting a bus the following day to Bangkok from there, we have decided to go and see Mato, Tong Hat and Tangly again. Hey, more frog's legs for the veggies!!
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