Where were you? Kampot, Cambodia
How did you get there? Night bus from Chiang Mai, Thailand to the Thailand/Cambodia border where we walked across the border. Bus from the border to Siem Reap, Cambodia then bus from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. Our contact picked us up there and drove us in a van to the village of Kampot.
What did you do there? We taught English to students at the compound and at a nearby public school.
Accommodations? We lived in a village with the locals, slept in a large room with many bunkbeds for all the girls, with a separate room for guys. Mosquito nets, squatty potties, and showers from either the buckets of collected rain water, the pond out back, or the shower in the bathroom that pumped in water from the pond out back.
Currency? USD and Riel, $1 US = 4,000 Riel
Anything you miss from America? It was a very simple life in the village, but I loved it and wouldn’t trade it for anything. Except maybe wifi…
What was the best moment? One of my favorite things to do in our off-time was to lay in the hammocks in the bamboo-hut area and listen to the chickens/cows/pigs/dogs roam around us, surrounded by rice fields/coconut trees/banana trees. Being one with nature and able to relax in true silence.
What was the hardest moment? Being woken up at 4am by loud Buddhist chants played on loudspeakers throughout the village that lasted all day.
Top 3 foods? We didn’t have a lot of variety, but what we ate was pretty good. Lots of rice, noodles, pork, chicken, eggs. I can tell you the 3 most interesting/different things I tried: Snake, Dog, and Tarantula. Yep.
Bottom 3 foods? There were these treats that were made of sticky rice, some red banana type thing, and wrapped in a banana leaf – that wasn’t my favorite. Most of the other food was really good though. Except the tarantula. That was gross.
Language(s) spoken/learned? I learned very basic Khmer. Hello = swasidee or something like that, I can count more-or-less to 100, and I can tell students to “write this down” and then ask them “are you ready to continue?” (Sawsay! Hainow?) Like I said… we taught all month 🙂
Biggest time you saw God show up? The faith of the people who work in this ministry was incredible. We were also able to raise a large sum of money for our Thanksgiving celebration, and had enough left over to pay for one of the girl’s plane tickets back to India to visit her family and to continue to bless the ministry here in big ways.
Anything else? Teaching is not for me. But this month I was able to see some of the strongest faith I’ve ever encountered. I can’t wait to keep in contact with this ministry because I know they’re going to be doing HUGE things in the future. Also, my computer broke this month, and we didn’t have internet at the village, so that’s why you don’t get more blogs from this month. Sorry.
