Hattie visits Samrong!
Hattie from London visited Green Shoots Foundation and Children of the Mekong in Samrong for a week. Check out what she got up to!
From start to finish I had the most amazing time in Samrong. I arrived on a Monday morning with the plan to leave the following Monday but ended up extending my stay by three days!! I was actually really nervous to begin with but I soon realised I really didn’t need to be. When I first arrived Mr Noeum met me at the guesthouse and took me to the Green Shoots Agritech centre to meet everyone and show me around. There I met Mr Loun who works at the centre. Although he doesn’t speak any English(!) we managed to get by and he taught me so much.
My tasks while I was at Green Shoots was to help construct a path through the forest garden. We spent the first few days carefully setting up the earth-blocks where we wanted the path to go using string tied to sticks to make sure they were all in a straight line and the same height. My favourite job was cementing the blocks together though with a mixture of cement and soil that we made using soil from the fields and water from the water harvesting station. I wasn’t as skilful as Mr Loun was at mixing the cement so that it was equally distributed though! Then we ran out of earth-blocks so I helped make some more using the same mixture used to cement the blocks together. Using moulds first oiled down so not to stick to our blocks, we used sticks to ensure the mixture was in each corner and then smoothed them out. The blocks take 2 days to dry out fully so whilst we were waiting for them we filled in the path using soil from the plots. I wouldn’t be being totally honest if I didn’t say I had to take a few breaks at this point because it is hard work!
On my fifth day in Samrong, with the path coming along nicely (if I do say so myself!) I visited the Enfants du Mekong Centre just 5km from Green Shoots. The students at the centre are so lovely and very kindly let me join their football matches where I must admit I did let the team down as well as some competitive Uno games. As they had classes until the afternoon I’d spend the morning at Green Shoots and then head to Enfants du Mekong in the afternoons. I even helped with some English classes where we practised numbers and spelling.
When I wasn’t at either the agritech or at the school, I spent the evenings cycling and exploring around Samrong. There’s a beautiful lake in the middle which has lights going all around which is gorgeous at night. As well on the north side of the lake there’s a night market which sells amazing food and is brilliantly lit up with neon lights also. I spent most mornings grabbing breakfast and a coffee at this really cute cafe called Little One Cafe where the owner is lovely and makes a rather good coffee!
I loved my time in Samrong, at Green Shoots and Enfants du Mekong. And will definitely be returning in the future!!
