Tonle Sap is in Cambodia, but is home to hundreds of Vietnamese floating villages fully equipped with educational, social, political, and economic infrastructures.
Kampong Chhnang is one of Cambodia’s provinces, which is heavily populated by the Vietnamese. Like this PPP report, the Vietnamese are here to stay and to multiply. Many came to Cambodia illegally and being treated better than the native Khmers.
The native Khmers in Kampuchea Krom, would be in heaven if they were given the same opportunity to live where they wanted, would be able send their children to learn Khmer in Khmer School and to practice their religions, etc.
If Cambodia needs to clear out Tonle Sap to make way for clean environments or to save this Great Lake, will the Cambodian government evict these Vietnamese as it is doing to those poor Khmer families in Beoung Kak?.
When I traveled by boat in Kampong Chhnang a couple of years ago, I needed to hire a translator to go around the Lake. No one understood Khmer. It made me think, "whose country was Cambodia anyway?"
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Teaching Vietnamese boat children
- Friday, 13 May 2011 15:08
- Mark Bibby Jackson
The blackboard behind him is covered in Vietnamese. This could be a scene taken from anywhere in rural Vietnam, only Lien Huu School is in the floating village of Chong Koh, Kampong Chhnang province.
“None of the lessons are in Khmer,” says Tran Minh Tri. “I can’t teach in Khmer.”
Born in Vietnam, Tran Minh Tri came to Cambodia 20 years ago to trade fish. He started teaching at the school five years ago because he “believes in Jesus”. The cross above the school gives away the religious nature of the school.
Photo by: Hector Bermejo
The children of boat people play at a house in the floating village of Chong Koh on the banks of the Tonle Sap, in Kampong Chhnang province.“The children are good,” he says. “They live around here and come by boat.”
The overwhelming majority of Kampong Chhnang’s boat people are Vietnamese.
Huon Vorn, the village chief for neighbouring Kandal village, estimates there are about 360 families in Chong Koh, of which maybe 30 are Khmer. In his village only 40 out of the 474 families are ethnic Khmer, including his own.
Like most of the structures in the floating village, the school is built on buoyant pontoons. Most of the houses in Kandal village are built on stilts.
“The main problem is when the big storms come,” says Tran Minh Tri. Then houses can come loose from their moorings.
With an average class size of about 50 students, Tran Minh Tri admits it is tiring work. He also has no cover. “When I am ill there is no school,” he says.
According to Huon Vorn, Lien Huu is one of two floating schools in Kampong Chhnang. Neither teaches in Khmer. The few Khmers who live on the water send their children to school on the mainland. The Vietnamese children also go there once they have completed Grade 4.
“We try to teach Vietnamese to the children first and then they go to the Khmer school afterwards,” says Tran Minh Tri.
However, change is on its way.
“A primary school is being constructed on the land near the Vietnamese pagoda,” says Huon Vorn. “The funds for the new school have come from a Vietnamese association in Australia. It will be completed by the time the floods come.”
The village leader adds that there are plans to move his villagers voluntarily from the water to dry land, although precise plans have not yet been presented to the villagers. “The majority of them do not want to go anywhere,” he says. “This is where they work.”
INTERPRETER: RANN REUY
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