• Society

Tonle Sap Festival Aims to Keep ‘Inland Ocean’ Clean

• By Teng Yalirozy
• June 14, 2023 9:46 AM

SIEM REAP – Cambodia is about to host the first edition of the Inland Ocean Festival, a public gathering held at the Kampong Phlouk floating village that aims to raise awareness of the need to protect water resources and reduce plastic pollution.

On June 17 and 18, the fishing community located in the Siem Reap province’s part of the Tonle Sap Lake will celebrate the lake’s natural resources with a river praying ceremony, a parade of puppets and a tree-planting ceremony.

A total of 1,000 trees will be put into the ground while between 2,000 and 3,000 participants are expected to attend the festival.

Sea Sophal, the director of NGO² Bamboo Shoot Foundation and organizer of the festival, said that puppets are made by the children of the community, who started to work on them a month ago.

Now that everything is ready, he and the organizing team are only waiting for the day to come.

“This is the very first event in which we merge everything together. In addition to raising environmental awareness, we organize a village clean-up, tourism activities, and a traditional religious ceremony,” he said. “We put it in one single event to celebrate Cambodia’s inland ocean, which is the Tonle Sap Lake, and its beauty.”

Sea Sophal is an environmental activist and director of NGO2 Bamboo Shoot Foundation who leads the festival. Photo provided

The Inland Ocean Festival will include traditional dance, music, floating lanterns, cultural activities, and a clean-up competition.

Through his NGO, Sophal has been promoting plastic awareness and cleaning up plastic waste along the Tonle Sap Lake for five years. He hopes the festival can boost the citizen’s awareness of plastic pollution in natural spaces.

Environment favors tourism

While Sophal has already hosted festivals to honor the river and discourage the dumping of waste, he wants this new gathering to be different from its previous versions.

Choosing to host it in Kampong Phlouk, a small community about 20 kilometers away from Cambodia’s tourist capital Siem Reap, has come as a way to restore the once-vibrant tourism activity in the village after it had decreased dramatically because of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

“This event will be a new chapter of our [story],” Sophal said with enthusiasm. “Through this festival, the community can be more inspired to continue cleaning up their waste. Our main goal when creating this event is to bring economic benefits to the local community. We want those people, especially the fishing community, to earn direct income from tourism.”

In 2021, the COVID-19 outbreak severely affected the Kampong Phlouk community as a whole. Many of the hundreds of boats that were formerly used to ferry visitors were left abandoned on the shore.

That same year, the community was also crippled by the plunge of fish catches. Lower tourism flow and the decline in fish stock heavily deteriorated the livelihood of the local people.

But if the community wants to live from tourism again, Sophal knows that it must first make an effort to clean up its banks.

For ecotourism destinations, rubbish is the biggest enemy,” he said.

Festival links rituals, reward promotes commitment

Sophal said that he spent quite some time encouraging people from all walks of life in the community to partake in making this festival possible.

“If we want to bring people to appreciate and honor the lake, we need to dig out the past,” he said. “Thirty or Fifteen years ago, they used to have this kind of ritual festival to honor the lake before they moved the settlement from the lake into the village [on the mainland].”

“We don’t only dig out [this festival] to preserve the tradition but also convert it into a tourism product.”

To convince every family to stop dumping waste into the river, the director of NGO² BambooShoot Foundation came up with a new challenge. Called the “Clean Contest Challenge” it consists in rewarding families who clean up their house with a certificate and a 10-kilogram bag of milled rice.

“This movement will convince the entire village to become a clean family. Our team will visit every household,” Sophal said.

Residents at Kompong Phlouk village are cleaning up plastic waste at the Tonle Sap Lake. Photo provided

Pushing people forward

Sophal confessed that he had to understand people’s beliefs and habits while trying to shake their consumption lifestyle in which plastic has taken a huge part.

“We have to make sure that citizens take ownership of the project,” he stressed. “We need to give them a sense of pride and belonging.”

This type of community relies heavily on its environment for fishing, tourism, agriculture, or handicrafts, hence the importance of preserving it, Sophal added.

The Inland Ocean Festival is celebrated to honor both the seasonal change in water levels, as well as the UN’s World Ocean Day and World Environment Day which took place on June 5 and June 8 respectively.