Angkor Wat Bike Race 2012

The past weekend, 17 members of Team Anjali (also nicknamed ‘Team Zebra’ by our students due to the matching zebra shorts the team wore) took part in the 100km Angkor Wat Bike Race. It was an early start for everyone, with the students and teachers meeting at the Young Adult House at 4am to eat a meal of fried egg, pork soup and rice prepared by the Young Adult Boys. After a quick briefing on ‘stretch, drink lots of water, stick together’, everyone rode to the police station where we were met by the truck which was going to transport us to the bike race. At that point we realised we had already lost two students, so the older boys formed a search party and warmed up on their bicycles whilst looking for our students who had gone astray.

After we had finally located the students, it was time to head to Angkor Wat! It was a squashy truck ride, as 17 bikes combined with 17 people makes for little moving room. The students, despite the early hour, were excited for the ride as we saw many people also travelling to Angkor Wat. When we arrived and unloaded the truck, we split into our ‘Fast’, ‘Medium’ and ‘Slow’ groups, however due to the crowd, most of the team were split up straight away.

After a ‘Gangnam Style’ flash mob held by the organisers, the race began, with the most competitive people getting a big head start. The students also raced ahead, most of them in ones of twos, as they tried to catch up with the fastest competitors. The first lap went fairly fast and smoothly, however a couple of students ran into trouble on the second lap. One of the boys was kicked by one of the fast cyclists who was trying to get him out of the way, resulting in him falling of his bike and hitting his head. Luckily, as he told the teachers later, “I was wearing my helmet, so I was OK”. Then, another student fell off his bike and scrapped his face and arms. Once again, the trusty helmet saved him. Then a third student went over the edge off the road as the ‘professionals’ tried to push him out of the way, however he managed to jump off his bicycle before it hit the ground.

Three students finished after lap two (50km), due to one having a broken bicycle and two others being tired. After the third lap, 13 more students finished (75km), as many were tired from riding so fast, or, despite the endless amounts of water they had drunk, were dehydrated. Only one student made it to 100km – small boy. Small boy is the 13 year old cousin of one of our students who had joined us for all the training sessions. He has an incredibly amount of energy, is always polite to his team members and never gives up. We were speechless that out of all the strong students who participated in the race, the youngest, and skinniest, was the one to complete the whole 100km!

In the evening, Team Anjali went to Tonle Mekong Restaurant for a buffet dinner. The students kept piling their plates high with food, with the winner being Pheaktra, who ate no less than seven full plates of food. After the dinner, the team went to 60 road where they jumped on the trampoline (surprisingly with no food coming back up), drove the dodgem cars and rode the rollercoaster. It was a magnificent evening to celebrate the end of three months of training for the bike race. We are SO proud of our students and the physical and mental growth they have shown over the past few months. When we started this project, we knew there would be some changes in them, but we had no idea that it would be to this extent.

Thank you to Janet and Allen for supporting our bike training, Kristy and Grant for also being part of Team Anjali, and of course, our sponsors who enabled us to raise £3,360 for our ongoing running costs. We couldn’t have done it without you!

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Bike Race Training Update: Week Two

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Last weekend, Anjali team of bike racers went to Bakong District for practice. There was a few changes, from the week before. We had four more people join with our great journey for this week. There were three volunteers from Belgium and a small kid called Sok Kunthy, but he was pretty lovely, and he was riding very fast and some of us couldn’t reach him. Do you know what we had for breakfast, and what did we do? Let me tell you something about our practice.  We had some bread and bananas. These kinds of snacks are very good for us to have, and especially they also gave us more energy and power.

When we arrived at the Pure For Kid’s NGO, we stopped and we went into the pagoda and looked around. We took some pictures with the great views in the pagoda. After that we went ahead straight to Bakong District and along the way there we saw a lot of houses had been flooded and people were not happy with the flooding for this year. Do you know why they were not happy? Because they could not go to school, could not do some works in their fields and also the flood could damage their houses and their crops. The funny thing to have floods the little kids because they loved playing in the water with their group of friends when there are flooding every year, but it is also a dangerous thing for them to do.

We arrived in Bakong village then we stopped and we looked to the sky and we saw the sky was very dark. We thought that it would rain soon so we all took out the raincoats and wore them and continued. A few minutes later the rain was dropping down but it was fine for us because we had raincoats with us. Anyway even though there were a lot of obstacles for our practice, but we determined to continue to reach where we had to get.

In conclusion riding bicycles is a part of exercise to get fit and it will give you good health and you will live a long life.

Lastly we love riding bicycles and we can see and meet many kinds of things that we have never met before. We really enjoyed it for this week.

Written by Ry Sauroun

Bike Race Training Update: Week One

Last week on Sunday morning, a group of Anjali kids went to Tonle Sap for bike training. There were fourteen kids joining for the bike race training. We left from Young Adult House straight on to Tonle Sap way. On the way some of us were happy , excited and also we took some great pictures. Along the Siem Reap River to Tonle Sap Lake , we saw many Cambodian people were working very hard with their farms , selling and some people just stayed home and relaxed with their families.

When we arrived at the Tonle Sap Lake , we stopped at a place in front of the boats. The boats were pretty beautiful and there were many boats stopped at the cliffs of Tonle Sap lake.

We stood on the cliff in front of the nice boats and we looked down to the lake and we saw a lot of tourists were riding in the boats. Five minutes later we left that place and continued going to see another place and we saw a woman who sold a sugar cane juice , then we went there and bought a packs of sugar cane juice for each person so after they had that juice they said that it was really nice , cold and sweet. They said ” They loved it” .

On the way back we rode around the mountain and we also climbed up the mountain and Sally was very very scared. Vireak’s bicycle was broken and we stopped to fix his bike. When we got back to Young Adult House we all got a little bit tired ,but we were having fun and excited for the first day of Bike Race training to Tonle Sap.

Finally we would like to say thank you very very much to the people that supported us some money , especially for Sally that she spent her best to try and helped us to find fund. We think that if you were not here we would not be able to do the bike race for this year. You are the one who gives us a great opportunity to join the bike race for this year and we promise that we will try to be good people and students for Anjali House and also for Cambodia!

Written by: Ry Sauroun

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And then there were four!

The Young Adult House has been a bit quiet as of late, with only four boys currently living there.

As many of you would know, Pheaktra is now a certified electrician thanks to his training at Grace House, which sees him earning a stable income. In addition to this full time job, he also has an evening job at a local guesthouse, where he is responsible for general maintenance and being on the reception desk from 5pm – 10pm.In order to save his money to buy land for his family, Pheaktra decided it was time to move on from the Young Adult House. Although we are sad to see him go, we are very happy that the house has served it’s purpose – as a transitional home. Throughout his year and a half at the house, Pheaktra has learnt a trade, he has discovered how to live independently and healthily, his confidence has increased dramatically, and his relationship management is much better. Following in Sophal’s footsteps, Pheaktra is now the second student to graduate from our Young Adult House. This isn’t the last we will see of him, however, as he is in training with the other young adults for the Angkor Wat Bike Race!

The second student to move out is Ruon. Given that Ruon is only heading into Grade 10, we have decided it is best for him to live with his Aunty who lives only a few hundred metres from the Young Adult House. We aim to keep our students in a family environment, and work closely with those families to educate them and support them with any issues they might have. When he reaches Grade Twelve, Ruon will be able to come back to the Young Adult House, where it will continue to serve its purpose as a transitional house from teenagehood to adulthood. Although it was a bit hard for Ruon to understand that this decision was in the best interests of him and other potential Young Adult House students, he now understands the reasoning behind students not living there until Grade Twelve.

We are currently discussing ways to help students from other NGO’s at our Young Adult House, but these things take time. So, for now, it is just Rith, Sopheak, Seut and Sandy left for now!