Ok, fine.

I've been pestered for a new blog post for a while now, so I'm going to try. The problem is that the longer I wait, the more there is to write about! But some of you are very persistent, so I'll give you a brief summary of the events that transpired since my last post.

Two weekends ago, we (Andrea, Jeff, Jen, and I) went to Phnom Tamao Wildlife Sanctuary. This is the most bizarre zoo I've ever been to, for several reasons.
1. 18-year-old boys with coconuts strapped to their bikes follow you around. Every time they throw a coconut to an animal (ie. a bear), you have to pay for it after watching the animal consume the fruit.
2. Some of the wildlife (namely about a million monkeys) are not caged.
3. Those animals that are caged seem a little bit too close for comfort.

4. There is no female leopard yet, so the male leopards are a little bit too intimate. The management is looking for a female, so maybe there's hope.

5. When you get hungry and stop for lunch, the only option is a whole chicken (fried, grilled, or roasted--your choice). It was tasty, but a bit difficult to eat.
As strange as the zoo was, it seemed to be well-managed, and probably a better alternative than the animals' previous lives. Most of them have been rescued from poachers. One of the monkeys apparently used to smoke.

Then there was work. Last week, among other things, we held a meeting with the Village Development Committee members, a group of village volunteers responsible for overseeing the construction, installation, and monitoring of BSF filters. They shared how they monitor, the problems they encounter, and the requests they had for AOC.

The interns from the Philippines came to visit (well, for work...but we got to see them!). We took Lydia and Danielle out for some tarantulas. They seemed to enjoy them, as the picture below illustrates. We discovered that they faithfully follow our blogs (perhaps excessively), so I feel obliged to include them here. I imagine they will make excited hang-waving gestures and squeal while reading their names. Yes girls, you are famous! Come again soon!

 
Last weekend, Lydia, Andrea, Nicolette, and I headed to Battambang (a northern province) for 24 hours of fun. Said fun involved a ride on the bamboo train--an illegal, but very exciting, platform that races along the track until it meets another one coming the opposite direction. The platform with the least people gets taken off the track, and then put back on when the other platform has passed. Here's ours (minus the driver). We shared our platform with a Dutch guy, and his accent made me think fondly of home and biochem class.

 

Our time in Battambang also included aerobics with hundreds of Khmer people along the river, a trip to a temple with a beautiful view, some awesome fruit bats, and the killing caves. A pretty good weekend! The bats were a highlight for me--I've never seen bats that big, and they were just hanging out on the trees!

And work this week was busy, with a big health promotion meeting that I taught part of (with translation), and some home visits. Here's one boy showing me how he uses the BSF to get clean water:

 

...And a shot from our health promotion:

A-howie! (That's all)...for now.

From Victorious Christian Living to a Spider on my Boob

As the title of this post suggests, I’ve had an interesting week! Last Friday, I got to teach the final lesson in a training series for a group of church leaders from villages in Lvae Em district. After I got over the rather pompous-sounding topic title (“Victorious Christian Living!”) and some of the hilarious analogies suggested in the curriculum, it was a fun challenge. It was my first attempt to speak with a translator for a long chunk of time, and it was a great learning experience. Here we are playing a quick ice-breaker game before I began the lesson:

After the lesson was over, I hopped on my bike to pick up my bag before heading out for the weekend. But my commute took a bit longer than expected because I ran into this on the way home:

Ah, Cambodia! Gotta love wading through thigh-high, debris-filled, murky water! Trying to decide whether biking or walking through it was a better alternative, I hiked up my 40 cent raincoat, and balked (that’s bike + walk + a synonym for cringing—clever, eh?) my way through.

Once I had gotten my bag, I met up with Andrea, Jeff, and Jenn (a Samaritan’s Purse visitor from Niger), and we headed down to Kampot for the weekend. On Saturday, we took a tour up Bokor Mountain. This consisted of bouncing along in the back of a pickup truck, then getting out and hiking the rest of the way through the forest—a really fun hike. A guy with a gun led the way in case we ran into any loggers or tigers. Both sounded rather fearsome, but all we encountered were butterflies.

The top of Bokor was really cool—literally! There was a rolling, foggy mist that made the climate bearable and made the abandoned casino and church appear very mysterious. 

We stopped in the coastal town of Kep on Sunday morning to eat some delectable crab on our way back to Phnom Penh.

I left at 4 am the next morning for the northern province of Steung Treng with a group from AOC. We went to meet with NGOs and government officials there to discuss options for a new water and sanitation project. I learned a lot on the trip, and enjoyed seeing more of Cambodia on the 7 hour drive there.  On the way back, we stopped to see one of the most endangered species in the world: a dolphin that inhabits a small stretch of the Mekong. At a pit-stop later in the day, I was accosted by a bunch of women trying to sell me food at exorbitant prices. After one of them put some spectacular spiders on me, I gave in and bought bananas.