Birthday party

Channa and I had a pretty relaxed morning - I actually managed to stay asleep until 8ish this morning, which was lovely. I played with my host brother and I washed my clothes.

At about 1.15 we got to the office for the social today. 
It was basically a barbecue and some party games, with a Hawaiian theme. Cheyenne and Socheat are in charge of Socials, so Cheyenne did most of the organisation and a few different people made decorations. We borrowed the smaller barbecue from Zaynab and Sokmeng's host home and finally got it lit and hot enough to start cooking the food at around 2pm:

 Connor, Alex and Heng while we tried to get the coals to light

The food 

After we had all eaten we taught the Khmer some traditional UK party games - it's much easier to explain musical chairs than rounders!
 Musical chairs

Musical statues 

After that we had cake:
 Cheyenne, Alex and Olivia

 Tim, Alex, Liv and Cheyenne

Liv and Cheyenne cutting the cake up 

Group photo with the cake

Overall, a pretty nice time. Decent food, fun games, good company.


Besides these positive things, there have been a few things that have made the office a little tense. A lot of it has to do with one of the host homes being a difficult place to live. It made some of today a bit more difficult, as there's a lot on people's minds.


After our time at the office for the social, Channa and I cycled home and had this for dinner:

Sorry about the quality of the photo. The pot has boiled rice in, and with the rice there's meat and fish and mushrooms. All types of bits of meat as well - I definitely had some liver and intestine in mine. You eat it with bean sprouts and bread, which you can see in the plastic bags next to the pot. I actually really quite like it. If you don't think about the assortment of meat that's in it, its very savoury. 
We ate the same thing at the festival we went to a few weeks ago - they seem to serve it at festivals. 

 And this is another lizard. I stood on the 'dinner table' to take this photo. The small lizard is the usual type that I see - around 4 inches long.


Today, the 12th of March, marks one month until we come home. Although all of the coronavirus news makes us wonder if that might change.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

First social

Image
Working in community as I mentioned we get sorted into three subteams. We also get sorted into several sub-committees. These have different roles including Socials - organizing what we do on our day off per week together, Media - they collaborate with the wider ICS/VSO media team and make a video of our time here, or Farewell Event - they organise our 'leaving party' with our host families and other community members. I'm on M and E, looking after making sure all the paperwork and reporting we have to fill out is in order - I wanted a consistent workload. Cheyenne and Socheat are our Socials team, and today we had our first social. It didn't go amazingly - the plan was to go to a local pagoda/temple at 10 am. We didn't leave till 11.30, by which point it was pretty hot and most people were pretty frustrated. And then when we got there, the pagoda itself was locked so we couldn't go in. But it was pretty: After that we did a tour of each others ho...
Read more

Pancakes and Tea

Image
The last couple of days have been much better. I've felt more like myself, I've been getting the hang of the team dynamic, I've eaten better and our sessions have gone well. Here are some photos of our sessions: We have been teaching about CVs this week. Something that surprised me on this project is that so many Cambodian youth have no idea what a CV is, or what it's for - one of them asked us the other day if they are supposed to write it themselves or if the company they apply to will write one for them. Also, they are supposed to write their CVs in English if they want to get noticed at all, even though a lot of them don't speak English beyond "hello". We do a few different activities with them to help them understand CVs: the content, the format, the details, what's right and wrong. Then hopefully next week at least with the older groups we'll be able to help them write up a draft, in English. There's a baguette shop tha...
Read more

Pottery

Image
Today has been a Social day - Socheat and Cheyenne are in charge of organising them. We can't have weekends off because so many of our students are only free then, so we have Wednesday and Thursday. One of those days is for doing nothing much and taking a break, and one of them is for Socials. So today Channa and I left the house at around 9 to get to the office and get tuk tuks to a local pottery. It's a pretty amazing place. From what I could tell, it's a family business. The men do the firing and selling and the women do the moulding of the cups and bowls and jugs and tea pots. They keep their babies with them. The kind of thing I'd have liked to make (highly unrealistic!) Kilns The workshop We got to make some creations of our own. Make is perhaps a strong term! We took turns at sitting at the wheel and having our hands guided by the ladies - and our mistakes corrected by them - until we'd made a shape that was ro...
Read more