Your home base is Battambang, the capital city of Battambang Province in northwest Cambodia, the country’s second largest city (pop. over 250,000) and a main hub for the entire region. Our first two days in-country will be in Phnom Penh with where we will visit the National Museum and Royal Palace, explore endless markets bursting with delicious fresh fruits and buckets of lotus flowers, stroll along the Mekong River, and more.

Then on to Battambang where we all live together in a small guest house with beds, bathrooms, showers and separate rooms for guys, gals and leaders (staffers). Five days a week, after breakfast, we head to the orphan center outside the city for our projects that mix construction, gardening and landscaping, and volunteering with the children. We typically work about five hours with short breaks and an hour or so for lunch. We are back at home base for dinner most days. You will be a member of a crew that rotates through duties including keeping our living space clean, shopping for fresh foods, helping set up meals and clean up afterwards.

After work is time to kick back, to play soccer, laze on the banks of the Sangker River and explore tranquil settings along its banks. We visit marketplaces and farms, tiny “makeshift” coffee cafes and “tourist” coffee cafes in Battambang, and inevitably have spontaneous dance nights with the children and staff at the center. Several evenings each week after dinner, we set aside time to meet as a group of volunteers. This is a slow-down time for us to speak and listen to each other, share reactions to our day or iron out occasional issues that may arise. You’ll have the opportunity to call and/or email home once a week.

Opportunities to mix and mingle with Cambodians are continuous, from very young children to high school and college students, from teachers and farmers to engineers, shopkeepers, laborers, craftspeople and many others.

Weekends will be eye-opening. We visit Kampong Luong, an entire village of Vietnamese who live their lives on Tonle Sap Lake created by the mighty Mekong River. A school, shops, church, temple, homes, all are on the water. Another long weekend awaits you in the Angkor region in Siem Reap Province. We will stay in and explore Siem Reap city and its famous Night Market. Tourists from all over the world fill the streets. Minutes away is magnificent Angkor with its astonishing temples. Angkor, renowned as the most sublime mix of art and architecture on the planet, was the seat of the Khmer empire that flourished for six centuries. We also will visit a silk worm farm where you will see and learn about silk worms, their care and harvesting, and very stage of silk production to its transformation into beautifully dyed strands of shimmering silk.