AN UPDATE: APRIL 2024
A lot has been happening! The new Boat has arrived and is in service, much to the delight of the children!! Grateful thanks to all the generous people who funded the last £400.
However…there is a structural problem with the safety of the kindergarten itself, necessitating urgent repairs. Because it’s so important to keep the school open [otherwise there’s no point in the new boat!] Support Cambodia and Aylsham Rotary Club have joined forces with Ely Catholic Parish to help fund the repairs. Huge thanks to Aylsham Rotary and to three private donors for their wonderful generosity. These are the ‘before’ pictures…we await the ‘after’ ones.
The Tonle Sap Lake near Siem Reap, is the largest fresh water lake in South East Asia. In the dry season it covers 2,700 square kilometres rising to 16,000 sq k during the rains and is home to over 1.2 million people living on floating houses which change location according to seasonal water levels. These people are, in effect, ‘water gypsies’ with many of the problems that tend to affect itinerant communities.
All services and amenities [food supplies, school, garage, church, beauty salon, phone repairs, community centre] are floating and, like the community themselves, are spread over a wide area. Access to everything is only by boat, including getting to school!
One of the many floating communities on the lake is Prek Toal where the [floating] Kindergarten is moored alongside the [floating] Catholic Church[see picture above].
The church, which also runs the kindergarten, provides a boat to take children to and from school as well as helping to keep the community in touch with each other. This is a vital service without which the lake children would not receive any education at all and many of the older people would have little or no community support.
The boat currently in use is old, increasingly costly to maintain and with the rise in numbers of children, takes the boatman several journeys to deliver everyone on time.
A new boat is clearly needed!!! and SUPPORT CAMBODIA have agreed to pay for it!!!.…. courtesy of a recent and quite unexpected bequest made to the charity. Ely Catholic Parish, with whom Prek Toal are twinned, have also generously agreed to pay the boatman’s wages for 6 months. Grateful thanks to them.
THE BEQUEST
The wonderfully generous bequest of £2,000 was left to the charity by long-time Aylsham resident, ANNE LEGASSICK when she died in May/June 2023. We have no idea why she chose Support Cambodia and sadly, we never had the pleasure of meeting her.
But according to those who did know Anne, she would have wished the money to be spent for the benefit of children and, we are told, she and her late husband actually had a boat on the Broads at one time!! So the Trustees felt this was an appropriate use of the money.
The Boat is currently being purchased and we will bring you news as soon as we have it. In the meantime, a few pictures of life on the water…..
