Community Project

Alright, so update! The LPI ended up going fairly well... I passed the necessary requirements to be able to swear in to become an official volunteer, and before they decided to bump up the scores from the other tester's group because her questions were putatively harder than my tester's, I had the best score in my village! I felt pretty good about that.

This past week we've been working on our community project. We had very little time to prep for it, so we've been scrambling to get things together, but we've been able to decide on three primary projects. The first is sort of the equivalent to a "Career Fair" in the states, with various people from our community of different professions coming to talk to the kids at the high school about what they do, what made them decide to do it, and how they got to where they are today. It's cool because there are all kinds of different people who will be talking: teachers, a school director, a mechanic, a mid-wife, the lady who just opened up an internet cafe in our village, a construction worker, a forester, a tailor, and a cosmetologist. So it gives kids ideas about a lot of different career options to look into, not just those which require a lot of education, and the means to acquire it.

Our second project is a trash clean up at our market. Our market is filthy; it's actually known in other villages for how disgusting and unkempt it is. Basically, the people who live around the market don't want to pay the 5,000 riel a month (just over a dollar) for the district governor to excavate the trash when it needs to be taken care of (that's supposed to be his job), so there is two years worth of trash that has slowly accumulated within. There are piles and piles, and two pot-bellied pigs that live in the midst of it all... So what we've done, at this point, is bought three large cement barrels to put by the heaps of trash, in hopes of teaching the community how the trash, when dry, can be concentrated within the barrels and burned so it doesn't pile up. Not the most environmentally friendly way to take care of trash, but since Cambodia has yet to have an adequate trash system, it's what works for the time being. Tomorrow we're going to the market to talk to people about the barrels, and will hopefully have a demonstration in the coming weeks of how we can burn the trash to slowly diminish the piles, and eventually eliminate them.

Lastly, we made boboa at our health center with the mid-wives there, and many mothers from the community who we rounded up before hand at the market (you can't plan for these things ahead of time; you have to just talk to people in the moment and say, "Hey! I'm doing this thing right now! Come see.")  Boboa is a kind of rice porridge- it's pretty much all I ate when I was sick- that's made with rice and water. It's great for when you have diarrhea and can't stomach much else, but it's pretty devoid of any nutrition, and so not the greatest for growing babies and kids. So the boboa we taught the mothers to make is more balanced; we made a savory one with pumpkin, fish, and carrots, and a sweet one with banana, dragon fruit, and egg. They turned out to be delicious, and we had a great turnout!

Me, with a cutie Cambodian babe at the health center. I swear, I'm not trying to eat her fingers.

Learning the benefits of healthy Boboa!

So, that's about it for this week! Unfortunately, I realized that I left my camera charger in San Francisco, and my camera is now dead, so my posts may be kind of threadbare for a while, until I'm able to get another charger (Thanks, mom!), so I apologize in advance for that. To make up for it, though, here is a picture I got from Arnoldo, one of the PCTs I co-taught with during Practicum week, of our class! This was on the last day, I think during the last hour, when we pretty much just played games the whole time. Don't be fooled by the kids' seeming passivity... The moment competition enters the mix, these kids are relentless. 

Love from Cambodia! :)