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.
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