Basically, every volunteer is asked to bring in their own idea. We currently want to expand our network to other, more remote villages.
If you become familiar with our place and the things we are doing, we would appreciate if you become manager in your own franchise project.

About Our School:

We believe, that the only way of making our people understand that we have to preserve natures treasures, is to educate the next generation.

We have set up a school that is independent from the government school. Although we offer a variety of classes from Khmer and English to math and art to students from 3-23. We do not have the teachers or funds to provide sufficient education daily. Many students attend both the state school and ours but for the children who cannot afford to attend the state school we want to be able to offer more class time.

The number of pupils varies between the seasons, while in dry season we have 300 pupils, in the business of the rainy season our number goes down to 125. A lot of parents are forced to use their kids on the rice paddies. We are currently trying to find a system to offer after hour education for those kids.

The school week is 5 days, a day in school is from the 8 to 6, sometimes longer. We ask the parents to pay 2000 riel (0,5 $) a month to cover running expenses like electricity, water and food. Often this is not possible to afford, but in this case it does not matter to us, kids are invited to join the school for free in this case.

Botumsakor District

Here we list some of our ideas and how you can be involved as a volunteer:

Teaching:
In our school, you can teach English, sports and art. You can feel free to choose the age of your students or work something out with us. Therefore, you do not need any experience.

Organic Farming:
You can help us setting up and expanding our organic farm, we want to grow vegetables, fruits and rice for our kids. We desire to show the children different and efficient ways of growing organic food.

We would like to increase the amount of livestock in our farm. We have cows already and want chicken and pigs. All types of help and experience with farm animals it welcomed.

If you interested in biology, we want to start experimenting with cross spread to help make the local farming more sustainable in a natural way.

Environmental Activities:
We are currently working on a waste management system for our community. We organize rubbish pick up days. That means we go out with the kids, villagers and monks to pick up the endless number of plastic pieces from the nature.

To further this rubbish removal system we want to have an exchange program. People will be able to swap picked up rubbish for biomass briquettes. These biomass briquettes are made out of compressed, fermented old leaves that are everywhere. We are currently producing briquettes right now from the many types of leaf in the area including mango, cashew nut and acacia. Promoting this efficient and sustainable cooking fuel we hope to encourage our people to stop logging trees for firewood and start collecting rubbish or dried leaves for briquettes.

Also we have set up one small biogas system. In a very simple way, dung from live stock is converted into methane, which can be used for cooking and as a light resource, because electricity is very expensive in here. Cooking with biogas is also an alternative to wood, but small systems are not sufficient for a full day supply.

Tourism Activity
Also here there are a lot of different activities to do. We try to help travelers experience the potential of eco tourism in the Cardamom Mountain Rainforest area, where we are located. We want to promote the value of our region and the national park to the world.

This involves several activities like setting up home stays, building signs, and working in the forest to help build paths and make the thick, undeveloped rainforest suitable for tourists. In this matter it is very important to help the area gain another income source, but also control the development to avoid the usual negative effects of tourism as much as possible.

In total we can say, everything you will do here is for the benefit of the nature, from education to tourism, mother earth is a gift that our focus is aimed on.

Khmer, English

Volunteers have a few choices in where they can stay. We offer you to stay in a private room in our school, where you will have a bed and a place for your belongings. We have bucket shower and toilet, as well as a mosquito net for your convenience. If you prefer to be in the nature, you can set up a tent in the backyard, where there is plenty of even surface and trees to give some shade. Also the local way of sleeping is available, we have a place where we can set up a hammock, the gives you a pretty authentic experience of Khmer ways to relax.

We are located in Andong Tuek Commune in Koh Kong Province.

Buses, minibuses and taxis all leave from Phnom Penh (and other cities) and travel to Koh Kong City. Therefore travelers must request to be dropped off in Andong Tuek along the way to Koh Kong City.

From Phnom Penh bus/taxi stations to the Andong Tuek where we are based, takes approximately 3 AND HALF HOURS. There is approximately 105 km from Phnom Penh to the intersect point of No. 4 Road and No. 48 road. Take a right and continue along the road no. 48 to a village called SRE AMBEL. The last step get to the project, takes another 40 kilometers to get to Andong Tueks bridge, from the bridge take another 600 meters right up to NGO on the left hand-side and you will see a sign called (TOURIST INFORMATION CENTER)