Life and Hope comes to Australia: Kerang stay

Venerable Somnieng arrived in Kerang after a 1 1/2 hour flight from Sydney and a 3 hour drive. We spent the evening on Sunday on the banks of the Murray River in the little town of Murrabit (an area that was devastated by floods last year). Members of the Rotary Club of Kerang came out to meet Somnieng and to listen first hand to his story about Life and Hope. The club has been involved in supporting Life and Hope for the past 3 years, but for many, this was the first chance to hear directly about the Association.

On Monday, we visited the 2 Secondary Schools that will be sending students to Cambodia in November/December to continue our work with Life and Hope. It is pleasing to see that this year, we have 50 students wishing to travel (30 from Victoria and 20 from Northern Territory). Venerable Somnieng assures us there will be plenty to keep us busy. During our visits to the Secondary schools, Somnieng had the opportunity to explore the 'technical' rooms. These are the rooms allowing students to participate in cooking, sewing, woodwork, metal work, engineering and automotive subjects. These rooms may provide some ideas for future developments of the Agricultural School at Angkor Thom. We followed this up with a discussion with the Regional Director of the Department of Education around the possible donation of equipment as local schools are re-furbished. This is a discussion that may lead to some donations of equipment to enable expansion of the Agricultural School to happen.

Monday evening saw a public forum where approximately 40 people attended to hear of Life and Hope's programs. Unfortunately technology was not on our side and we were not able to show Venerable Somnieng's video clip, but this link will be forwarded to all in attendance. One member of the community in particular has links to agriculture and he will be staying in contact with Somnieng around the development of the Agriculture School.

On Tuesday morning we headed back to Bendigo to meet Rebecca and Shaun who were transporting Venerable Somnieng to Melbourne for the next leg of the journey.

I would like to say that we learned much from Somnieng in his brief stay and we hope Somnieng has learned a lot from us, especially in relation to agriculture.

Visiting the library at Cohuna Secondary College, with the Principal Stephen Brain