The OESP team all met and decided to spend Sunday visiting the villages where Sos has been having fresh water wells drilled with donations made by members of OESP. This also gave all of us the chance to become acquainted with our newest team members from the Australian Firefighters International. Before calling it a day there was the quick trip to the Russian Market to scope out the latest buys and to pick up some needed items.

Sunday
Everyone was up early today and we headed southeast out of Phnom Penh. About two hours later, we were in the area of the villages Prey Vang and Svay Rieng, right on the Vietnam boarder. Sos visits this area often, helping out the villagers. Today we brought along about 500 loafs of bread, some soccer balls for the kids as well as school supplies brought by our Australian members and also gave out pencils from Oly Fed.

It was quite a day, spent visiting areas that wells have been drilled to provide fresh water, seeing and interacting with those in the villages. Getting to these areas was not easy and we spent about three hours going place to place on the back of motor scooters over paths and across rice paddies. We gave out five hundred loafs of bread mostly to children. As we would stop at a group of homes we would only see a few people and with in just a couple of minutes there would be upwards of fifty people, all-staring at the novelty of white people. I asked Sos how often would a Caucasian venture into this area and he would say “never, white people never come here”. As we traveled around it was difficult to see such poverty. The kids were so thrilled to have their very own loaf of bread and a pencil, we would find the director of the school in the area and donate a soccer ball and some school supplies. It was amazing how many schools there were tucked away out in road less areas of the rice patties, with several hundred to over a thousand students. I would think how can such a sparse area have so many kids, but then when we would stop they would come from everywhere. I kept thinking putting a loaf of bread in there hands is a very short term solution to a very long term problem. Our main objective for the day was to see the wells and we did. Most importantly we saw first hand how a simple well can make village life so much better. Without a well they may need to walk several mile to get safe water. The wells a simple drilled by hand 150 foot deep with a hand pump. I’m planning on having a couple drilled with the money given to me. Overall we all got plenty of fresh air, sun (even some sunburn) and obviously were much warmer than our families in the Pacific Northwest.

We briefly met with Lt Col Chanda and found out that we will be doing all of the training at the Police training academy located about 45 minutes southeast of Phnom Penh. Everyone put our heads together and began reorganizing the training schedules that had been developed. As always, the team is prepared to adapt to unexpected changes.


Monday
Let the training begin. Our trip to the training facility took a little over an hour this morning. Talk about rush hour traffic!! The roads are narrow and everyone is heading into the city for work while we are on our way out of the city. Upon our arrival, we met with the facilities commander before going in to the opening ceremony. After opening remarks by a multitude of individuals, the group broke into Fire and EMS groups. Since we were at a new training facility, we asked for a tour so that everyone could scope out where they might be able to do each of their classes. That made it break time for the students, which lasted about an hour and a half.

Once the tour was complete, the EMS guys spent time doing a review of materials previously learned while the Fire group revamped their schedule for the next two weeks. Oh, did I happen to mention that the non-police personnel scheduled for the EMS class can’t attend the class at the training center? They will be holding their classes at HOPE Hospital being taught this first week by our other partners from Northwest Medical Teams which are here with us as well.

When lunch time rolled around, we broke for the day and will begin classes tomorrow morning at 8 a.m. The Fire group went to visit the Fire Station to show the Australian team what equipment they will be using, while the EMS group went to visit HOPE Hospital. In keeping with the day, upon arriving at HOPE Hospital, we found out that no students had shown up for class this morning. However, it was confirmed that there will be around 20 there tomorrow to begin their training.

So ends Day One …. It has been interesting and hopefully isn’t setting the tone for the rest of our stay. Watch this space for more to come on this exciting trip.