getting to seim reap and the floating village

By the afternoon we pulled into seim reap and were dropped off at our guesthouse. We arranged to go to Angkor Wat that evening for sunset. Before then we hopped on a tuk-tuk and went to the floating village south of the city, which is on the tonle sap lake. The whole experience was not the most enjoyable one. Because it is dry season the lake was just a shallow mass of dark brown sludge with tons of litter and pollution. It smelled like rotten fish carcasses and sewage. We were taken by boat around the village but only to be dropped at specific places to either spend money or give money to the dozens of begging children and families. There were child-amputees in little round boats and mothers with babies trying to sell bananas. They would paddle furiously over to our boat with outstretched hands. It made us feel like horribly rich tourists being chauffeured around in our own little private boat.

It is still incredibly evident how they are still far from recovering from the kmer rouge regime which halted the development of their country by dozens of years and even made them go backwards by losing all of their crops, their educated, their culture…and a third of their population. It is crazy to think that anybody I laid eyes on in the country who was older than me was alive during that time and lived through it. It is the only country I’ve been to where such a horrific history is also so young.
There are lots of organizations in Cambodia which aim to help the poor and especially the children. Often young children are sold by their starving parents to pimps who make the children beg for money or introduce them to the sex slave industry. So when you give money to the children they often don’t see any of it and it just goes right back to supporting the pimps.