VSO
Cambodia/International Citizen Service program (ICS)
A short brief
of VSO-Cambodia/International Citizen Service program (ICS):
VSO/International Citizen Service (ICS) is a volunteering
experience for young people who want to make a real difference in some of the
world’s poorest communities. In Cambodia, ICS runs projects in the
North-eastern part of the country. Twelve Cambodian youths will spend three
months working alongside twelve youths from the United Kingdom (UK) in a team
to tackle issues that really matter to the local community (for this circle we
are working at Stung Treng and Ratanakiry province. (Source from VSO’s page)
For more information about how to apply this program:
Or
This is my experiences during
the ICS for the second cycle (started from July 18th, 2014 to October
08th, 2014) in Stung Treng province, however, for those
who went to Ratanakiry is the third cycle. The training from July 18th, 2014 to
July 18th 2014 for Cambodian and Uk’s volunteers. The first day, Cambodian
volunteers prepared stuffs to welcome UK counterparts for their arrival in
Cambodia. We, Khmer volunteers, sang Khmer song, danced, we did a great job, to
welcome them and UK volunteers were very excited, yet UK volunteers said Khmer
words, Chom Reab Sur, means how do you do to Khmer volunteers; we, Khmer, also
excited for their their speaking Khmer words! --A day after, both Khmer and UK counterparts
were trained together in the Karitas's office, in Phnom Penh, for a week. During
this training we did learn many things about ICS program, learned how to adopt
the other culture. Khmer-UK volunteers learned how to live with indigenous,
community people. Being told that some host families could not even speak
Khmer or English (some families are Kreung, Jaray, Tom Poun...), we still felt well
with these challenges. We also had many activities such as energizing to break
our bad feeling that we felt sleepy because of the long days training, some
were exhausted, and some got sick. Yet, we enjoyed it. For breaking time,
either Khmer or UK talked to each other about its culture, studying, and
experiences and so on. After a week training, on July 25th, 2014 we,
except me, leaved Phnom Penh to Stung Treng(2nd cycle) and Ratanakiry province (3rd
cycle) to know our host family in which
we live, NGO which we will be working with to start our project on Awareness
Raising in Stung Treng and Training in Ratanakiry.
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| Welcoming UK volunteers arrival |
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| Activities during In Country Training days (ICT) |
