Happy New Year from Angsoeng!

It’s New Year in Cambodia and Lor Chandara sends greetings (and photos) from a celebration at the Angsoeng Library.

Earlier this morning, the Year of Monkey was out, and the Year of Rooster came in for another year. According to a fortuneteller cited by The Cambodia Daily as saying, those born in the Year of the Rooster should take care of their safety or risk serious conflict. It sounded a real good advise, I think.

Besides the New Year's fun time, for new friends who know Cambodia little, this week is the most important and maybe sad event that everyone of us are reminscent of the day the Khmer Rouge came to power on April 17,1975. From 1975 to 1979 under its genocidal regime, the Khmer Rouge had more than one million Cambodians killed and starved to death.

My poor older brother died of starvation; my cousin Journalist Vong Sokheng's both parents were killed during the regime. Now, the process of establishing a UN-assisted tribunal for Khmer Rouge leaders is underway, let's watch on if they bring us real justice.

As a journalist in post-war Cambodia, it was my luck that I joined you all in our effort to make this country and this world a better place to live in. As a very very small contribution to the reconstruction of my village and Cambodia in the area of education, I have nearly five years founded and run a charity library outside Phnom Penh to help build the country a more vibrant and informed participatory democracy and people's full access to information and books. I collected a number of books from individuals and organizations, and will continue to collect more materials in Khmer and English especially Children's books as the top of the wish list. If you have books that you no longer used, please send me your donation.