Approaching the New Year

1 April 2016

April 13-15 are the official dates for the Khmer New Year in 2016. Those are the usual dates for this, the biggest celebration of the Cambodian year. The students in DDP's Education Project will be gone on holiday at that time, however, so on this the last day of school before the break, they had a small celebration at DDP.

 

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Playing a New Year's game

 In an earlier, simpler day in Cambodia, there was no such thing as boy friends and girl friends and dating. And even today it is mostly in the cities that girls and boys can be together and can have relationships. The rural areas still celebrate the new year with many of the traditional games that allowed boys and girls to interact with each other in a way that was forbidden in daily life. In this game of the DDP students, a team of boys waits while a team of girls prepares to designate one of the boys as "it." The boys then have to guess which of the girls picked the one who is "it."
The losers--the girls--dancing for the boys

 In this round, the girls lost, and for losing they had to dance toward the boys with the traditional dance gestures and steps that are part of Khmer culture. There is no skill or talent involved in the game. It's purely a matter of guesswork with the punishment (or is it payoff?) that the losers get to get close to the winners in a socially acceptable way.

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