Picture Gallery
Kulen Mountain – 29.12.2009
It began with a casual conversation with the children. I was telling them about my trip to many Asian countries during the last few months. I asked them where they wanted to visit? As there were a lot of tourists and volunteers visiting the Chres Village School and Orphanage from various countries every day, and they always told the children about their home countries, I surely thought the children’s answer to my question would be that they wanted to go to some foreign countries…
But Sek Vises, one of the orphans, said that he wanted to go to Kulen Mountain! No one in this orphanage had ever been there before…. He said that was his dream. I didn’t know anything about Kulen Mountain, so I asked Fi, the director who was sitting near us, where Kulen Mountain was and if it was far from here? Fi said it was about one and a half hours by bus and that there was a big water fall and a big sleeping Buddha on Kulen Mountain. If the children had said that they wanted to go to a foreign country I wouldn’t have been able to take them soon, but their “dream” could be reached in only one and a half hours by bus. This dream I could make come true. Since I couldn’t spend Christmas with them, I thought could try to be like Santa Claus, and I decided to take all of the orphans to Kulen Mountain.
I had only few days to stay in Cambodia this time, so Fi and Dara, who was the Tuk-Tuk driver that brought me to the orphanage everyday and who became like a reliable brother to the children, made a lot of phone calls to find and reserve buses on such short notice. Finally they were able to charter two micro buses that would take us to Kulen Mountain. I suddenly decided to take the children to Kulen Mountain on the 27th of December, they manage to arrange the trip only two days later on the 29th of December. How nice they work?
When I arrived at eight o’clock, there were two buses, ten volunteers and forty nine orphans who were dressed up more than usual waiting to go. Then the sixty of us headed for Kulen Mountain. We prepared plastic bags and motion sickness pills for the children because many of them ware not use to riding on buses. As we had expected, some children got sick during the bus ride to the mountain, but they seemed to recover immediately as soon as we arrived at Kulen Mountain. All of the orphans were running around so I couldn’t tell which ones had been sick on the bus. First we prayed to the Sleeping Buddha. Then we visited a small water fall. The children didn’t seem to care about being dressed up as they proceeded to jump in the river near the water fall. They got soaking wet. I could tell that they were really enjoying themselves because their smiles were bigger than usual.
Then we went to a larger water fall that had a deep basin. There were many tourists swimming there. By the time I arrived at the basin of the water fall the children had already jumped in and were swimming and playing with each other. To tell the truth, I had tripped and fell into the smaller water fall, so I was soaking wet when I got to the larger one. The children looked like they were having a great time playing in the water, so I decided to jump in and join them. Talia, one of the volunteers, was also in the water having fun.
I really enjoyed this trip with all of the children. Coming here with all of them and seeing their smiling faces wormed my heart. The purpose of this trip was a Christmas present for the children but in the end it was me who got the present.
Thank you to the children of the Chres Village School and Orphanage.
I hope we will have the opportunity to take more trips together in the future.
KENGO KITAURA
Blog http://blog.an-jp.org (Japanese)
