Engaging Cambodia

While in Cambodia, you witnessed an event of international significance as the Khmer Rouge trials unfolded and heard personal accounts of survivors as well as insiders’ perspectives from ECCC personnel. You also met a member of the Cambodian royal family, two of Cambodia’s leading religious leaders, social activists, and specialists in various fields. Importantly, you got a rare glimpse of daily life in Cambodia through a village homestay and interacted with diverse Cambodians as you explored Phnom Penh with local students/teachers, worked alongside monks and students to build a bicycle shelter at Peak Sneng Junior High School, and taught as well as played with local children in a classroom environment and in informal settings. Trusting that these experiences have provided you with multiple ways to “connect” with Cambodia and Cambodians, we would like to invite you to share some of your more enduring impressions, discoveries, and new insights gained through your participation in the program.

Aloha Everyone,

Now that the Engaging Cambodia program is coming to an end and you have returned to Honolulu, we would like you to reflect on your experiences and share them with us. Please include your first impressions on daily life in Cambodia, reflections on your homestay visit as well as your overall reflections of the program.  Feel free to respond to other people’s posts with questions and/or comments.

This weblog is a place where we can share our Cambodia travel experiences, post reflections and observations, discuss teaching insights and implications, and share resources.

To begin our collaboration and dialogue, please introduce yourself using “COMMENTS” at the end of this post. Do include something about yourself, your school, and your motivation for undertaking this program. Please also share with the group topic(s), theme(s), or issue(s) related to Cambodia that, at this preliminary stage, you are interested in learning more about while in Cambodia. As appropriate, feel free to include links to resources that you have found to be particularly informative and useful in preparing you for this program.

As a helpful tip for navigating this weblog, please take notice of the “Teachers” and “Students” links under the Discussion tab on the right hand side of the page. This is a filter function that will become useful as we start our discussions shortly. When we post a new discussion topic it will appear on our home page in chronological order, with student and teacher discussions mixed together. Simply click on the appropriate link (e.g. if you are a teacher, click on the teacher link) and you will see only the postings relevant to you. If you would like to see all postings again, simply click on the “home” link at the top of the page.