It's been a hectic past couple of days.
Thursday - About 12 volunteers/ employees from New Hope took a caravan out to farmlands that New Hope has purchased. They have purchased these lands because the government is kicking out people in and around Wat Bo Village (pressumably for building up the area) and New Hope is looking to relocate these people to the farm where they can grow and sell agricultural products and maintain a self sustaining lifestyle. Very cool project in the works. From there we went to work, then went out to dinner, treated ourselves to massages and made it an early night.
On Friday we were woken up by Chris around 7am randomly to "go out in the field." The purpose of this mission was to examine a slum area behind the children's hospital that the government will be building a road on, thereby kicking out the people that currently live there. These are the people that will be relocated to the farm. We went there with doctors and the directors of New Hope to get stats (which are constantly changing) from each family in the area, like how many people live in the home, their income, illnesses, etc. They build relationships with the family and share their stories with others in hopes of finding other people to "sponsor" them as well since these people are well below the poverty line. This was the hardest day thus far. After that we got lunch we headed stright to work and after work we went to a local carnival/ fair that is almost all year round. I was shocked when one of my students (a 5yr. old boy) came running up to me shouting "teacher jilly, i love you!" and i immediately thought what is this kid doing here? Apparently many of my younger students (4-10 yrs.) are there every night after school begging for money and collecting cans and bottles. Thats the moment your heart breaks a little and you start to contemplate what kind of future these kids will realistically have. After having dinner at the fair we went out to pub street for a very boozy evening and stumbled in around 1:30am.
Saturday we woke up at 4:45am to catch the sunrise at Angkor Wat which was pretty spectacular. Angkor Wat is HUGE so we spent the day touring around various temples, came home showered and out the door again for dinner with most of the staff and volunteers at New Hope and then karaoke afterwards. We learned early on in our trip that karaoke here carries two meanings. The first, bad public singing. The second, a brothel. We decided to go to a newly opened club/ karaoke spot called Wonderland. We had a private room to ourselves for bad singing, but realized all the private rooms around us were being used for the other kind of karaoke. Needless to say we didn't stay very long and headed out to pub street for more drinks and got in at 4am
Sunday got up at 8am for a guided tour with people from New Hope to see a temple and floating village. At this point we are running on fumes or what I like to call travel adrenaline. Both sights were spectacular. We got back at 8pm and went out for dinner with NH people, and just got back in around 11.
Yes, I am completely exhausted, but having an amazing time and bonding with lots of great people.
Pic 1 - in between karaoke sesh
Pic 2 - me kissing Buddha
Pic 3 - lounging in the restaurant/ hangout area before class
Jillian aka Jilly, Jillypet, Jillybean, J-Bones, J-Dilla and sometimes Crab Cakes
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