All posts tagged: Cambodia

Just published in New Zealand

My work

Arnaldo just published a short article on  the role of Buddhist pagodas in dealing with poverty in Cambodia in the development magazine Just Change published in New Zealand. Buddhist aid: Pagodas reducing poverty in Cambodia This article tells the story of the Pagoda Association of Botum, a pagoda that has survived a devastating totalitarian regime to become a source of real poverty reduction in the community. Available in .pdf here (2.3Mb)

Pictures on the wall

Diary

I am sitting in one of the most beautiful flats I have ever been. I look out of the window behind this laptop screen: the cool wind of this ‘blueskysunnydaywinds’, the branches of a small tree moving softly, the green field where hay is waiting to be cut and stored for the winter time, the large trees of the forest one km from here (much larger pine trees than in Finland), the valley of Lausanne […]

Ming Yort Norng

Diary

We enter the pagoda compound with the car and stop in front of the sala (or dining hall). It is typical Khmer wooden building on stilts. I step out of the car and see Madame Yort Norng standing at the entrance of the sala at the top of the short but steep stairs that lead to the entrance. She see me great me with the typical smile that can be found only in the rural […]

The little child in Pursat

Diary

In never left a meeting with villagers with tears in my eyes. But today it happened. I am in the province of Pursat, on the west side of the Tonle Sap lake. In the afternoon I went with two other members of the team to a pagoda at 30 km from the national road to Phnom Penh. We thought he meeting was for ten to twelve people. We arrived in the pagoda ten minutes early. […]

Battambang – Cambodia

Diary

Battambang province. North West Cambodia. I am near the border of Thailand, in the commune of Samlot. The meeting just started. A young man who is 22 years old and three young women in their twenties joined the meeting. We are under a wodden house built on stilts. It hot. We are sitting on one of those large wodden beds that almost every Cambodia house has. Around us, bushes, no fields, the forest that is […]

Remember

Diary

As I just heard in the radio, almost everybody can remember where they were on 9/11/2001. Details, small stories, memories that contribute to the collective remembrance of that day. A day that has been described as the day that marked a change in history, a day after which the world was no longer the same. I was in Berlin. Attending the preparation training with the German Development Service as I was due to leave for […]

Answers to three French students

Diary

Julie, Marie and Victor are three students at ISA in Lille who joined the intercultural week about living and working abroad conducted by David Hoffman of the University of Jyväskylä (Finland). They have posed me few questions about living abroad that I am happy to answer through my Ubatuba blog. With my wife Katja and our daughter Olga we have just moved back to Finland after spending 4 years in Cambodia working in development and […]

On our way home: Bangkok – Colombo

Diary

“If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know who you are”. This is an old saying that I suppose has been coined by travellers long time ago. The need to keep a link with one own place, to feel roots and identity is in human nature. For some more than others, but it is there. I am thinking about this while in Bangkok, waiting for the taxi to pick us up and […]

On our way home: Phnom Penh – Bangkok

Diary

So we left Cambodia. In these four years I have often thought about an article I red while I was in the preparation course with DED in Berlin in the summer of 2001. The article was written by an Italian doctor who had worked in Battambang at the hospital of Emergency, an Italian NGO. He wrote about his feeling while sitting at the departure hall of Phnom Penh airport: relief. Relief after the hard work […]

Bicycle shop

Diary

Every morning, when I cycle to the office, I cycle along the laterite road on the Stung Sen riverbank. I pass the village; see the women working in the garden and watering the vegetable and plants, pass the kids in school uniform (white shirt and blue shorts) walk to the local elementary school. At the end of the road, just before turning left to pass the bridge on the national road that cuts through Kampong […]