The group woke up nice and energetic for a new setting: Kampot! As our jet lag started to ware off, we walked over to a restaurant where we would eat our last breakfast in Phnom Penh. It only catered to foreigners, so the cuisine was very familiar but certainly tasty. The car ride to Kampot was about four hours long. We stopped after only an hour of driving to see the killing fields where the prisoners from Toul Sleng were taken. There was one main temple in the middle of the museum that held over 30,000 skulls. While walking around the morbid fields where so many people were tortured, the student travelers met three kids: two 10 year olds and one 7 year old. They spoke very good English because they learned it in school. We gave each one of them a dollar, and when we asked what they were going to do with the money they said they would buy books for school. All of us agreed that whether or not the money would go toward books, it would be a big help. We finally arrived in Kampot by 2:30. Our first priority after getting settled into the hotel was finding a place to eat. There was another foreigner restaurant just down the street from our hotel. Unlike Phnom Penh, the streets are wider and much less crowded. We were all very excited to learn that for the next week we will be using bicycles as our source of source of transportation. It was a low key first day in Kampot, but the next day would be the opposite. We woke up nice and earlier: 6:30am. After a nourishing breakfast we biked down the street to Epic Arts (an organization like Cambodia Living Arts). Our mission today was to help a family build a house. The oldest lady of the house was 70 years old and could not walk because of her knee. The first task was to demolish the current house they were living in which was falling apart and infested with bugs- that was the easy part. We started to build the new home which is not done yet. In the middle of our six hour work day we took a walk through the village. It was beautiful. There was a perfect view of the tall mountains and palm trees sitting on the ground, making for a great picture. Before we left to take showers (which we were all anxious for) we stopped at a school. We sat at the tables where the kids were sitting and asked them questions. Not surprisingly, they all spoke very good English for their age. Tomorrow we will return to finish building the house. This is the first Watkinson has done housebuilding in Kampot. We hope to continue this for the next years.
-Haleigh MacCloy