【彭蒙惠英语】出一趟远门，观光又助人 (1/2)

Doing Double Duty (1/2)
Take a “volunteer vacation” and benefit others
 

It doesn’t take much to get across the basics of hokey-pokey, which turns out to be just as big as a crowd-pleaser in the poorest thatched-roof villages of Cambodia as it is in the manicured suburb near Chicago where Andrew Krupp lives.
With the ever-energetic Krupp occupying the kids, his five traveling companions are free to grab hammers and saws and get down to the real task of the morning: building new eraser boards for the rural school’s ramshackle classrooms.
It’s a lot of work. It’s also their vacation. Krupp and the others have signed up to visit Cambodia with GlobeAware, one of a growing number of organizations that design vacations for people who want to spend as much time helping in the destinations they visit as they spend seeing the major sites.
A scene from a Dickens novel
In Siem Reap, the region’s tourist hub, the tiny, run-down orphanage houses 23 children in two rooms---one for girls, one for boys. Many of the kids are barefoot, their hair a mess, their clothes stained --- a Cambodian version of a scene from Dickens novel.
Like the thousands of other tourists arriving each week in this low-lying region of rice paddies and rural villages, famed for its 1000-year-old temples, GlobeAware participants spent a day or so of their one-week trip exploring the legendary ruins of Angkor Wat and other remnants of Cambodia's ancient Khmer empire.
In addition to spending time at the orphanage, the group takes on at least one, sometimes two, more volunteer activities each day. On one morning, the group assembles wheelchairs for some of the war-ravaged country’s thousands of landmine victims. Before dinner, the [----5----]s help teach English to locals, many of whom hope to become English-speaking tour guides at the nearby temples, a relatively high-paying job in the region.

Vocabulary Focus

hokey-pokey (n)--- a certain dance, usually for children, in which a circle of people sing out instructions for movements that everyone performs at the same time
manicured (adj)--- referring to something that is well cared for and looks very tidy
ramshackle (adj)--- badly or untidily made and likely to break or fall down easily
low-lying (adj)--- describes land that is at or near the level of the sea