Cambodia Blogs

Elena Omura returned to Cambodia for the first time in eight years - revisiting familiar project sites that once shaped her early work at HOPE and seeing them through both new eyes and a filmmaker's lens.

From late March to early April 2025, I visited Veal Veng District in Pursat Province, Cambodia, to conduct a field survey for the Integrated Community Development Project.

Where HOPE works in rural areas of Cambodia, many families depend on agriculture for their livelihood. They live in a harsh environment with few resources, making it difficult for them to obtain sufficient food and income.

This month's newsletter is a mid-term report on the projects implemented this year, which we informed you about in the January 2024 newsletter.

YIS and HOPE Cambodia have a proud history of working together on direct and indirect service initiatives. Yokohama International School prides itself on having an excellent, student driven service program that allows students to learn about a variety of communities home and abroad.

The HOPE Study Tour is called UNION, an acronym for Understanding Needs In Other Nations, and the tours include project site visits that are designed to help participants "learn about problems faced by people living in poverty in developing countries and to understand their needs.

Our projects in Cambodia began in 2002 with the building of a well near the center of Pursat Province, where HOPE Cambodia’s office is located. The first well was just a dot on a map, but with successive projects, it became a line, and now our wells cover a large area providing clean water to more than 10,000 people.

In August 2022, when our HOPE Cambodian staff visited Oeun, she was hard at work in the fields under the scorching sun as usual. Oeun met with HOPE about 20 years ago.

HOPE-JP exceeded our goal in the crowdfunding campaign raising money to build a school for Cambodian children. The amount raised was in excess of 3.5 million Yen.