Week 10

I went on my first home based care visits this week. I went to two homes. The first was the home of 4 children and their parents. One of the children and the two parents are HIV positive. I found the first home really sad. It was in a big block of flats that were still being built at one end. The flat consisted of one room with a tiny balcony and a small bathroom built into the room. The father is a motodop (scooter taxi) driver and the mother sells dried chilli. They are very poor and were both out at work leaving the children at home alone. The flat was a mess and very dirty and had just a double bed frame and a small TV. The Home base care worker Srey mom and I sat with the children for a bit and Srey mom spoke to the children about not being lazy about their hygiene and invited the HIV positive boy to our aids day celebrations on the 1st. The second home seemed much nicer, it was a similar size but had more furniture, (some deckchairs and cushions and matts that are used to sleep on) and was much cleaner. A family of a Tuk Tuk driver and his wife and daughter, they seemed like a really lovely family and they gave us cold water and jack fruit to eat, which I considered very generous. The mother and daughter had both been in a traffic accident but they were pretty much fully recovered.We spent more time with this family, I got a little bored as I couldn't really understand what was being said but it was really interesting to see the homes. At some point Bethany and I will start updating all the files of these Home based care children.
We have been doing some much more productive liaising with Lakina, one of the Cambodian Magna staff, about Aids day, this week. We have it all organized, Bethany and I will spend most our day doing hygiene related activities and playing games with the younger children. These children are very early on in the stages of disclosing their HIV status, so we are not doing HIV related activities.

Bethany and I have been finding living so closely together in the orphanage a bit emotionally grueling so we are looking for some outside activities. Bethany has found a christian home group which she is going to start attending and I am looking for a music group to play with as I (much to the children's and ma's amusement) brought my trumpet with me.
We made an English speaking friend this morning! She is doing an internship for the Phnom Penh post newspaper for 3 months and she is going to come to the cinema with us next week to see 'Breaking Dawn'.

Skin infection much better :)

2 Months

We split the classes this week, which worked really well. My slightly smaller class takes place in the hallway and Bethany's more advanced class use the desks to write, in the classroom. We did the first of out monthly mini tests, they generally performed very well, with a few extremes, one very clever girl amazed us with her speed and accuracy whilst Vicheka the boy who's memory was affected by meningitis remembered one flash card. He seems to absorb the vocab quite well in the class and I had hope that the meningitis hadn't effected him as much as anticipated, but it must be his long term memory that is the problem. He also seems to have problems with pronunciation in Khmer and English, which I would be interested to know the cause of.

Bethany went on the home based care visits this week, but she think we may not continue this as the families don't want their neighbors to find out that they are HIV positive, and having westerners going into their homes will make the neighbors suspicious.

We also had a meeting with the Cambodian hospital staff about International Aids day on the 1st. We found it slightly frustrating as the response to most of our ideas was telling us what they had done in previous years. It was nice however to find out that it was not our sole responsibility to organize the day.

I look a bit of a mess at the moment our swim in the reservoir in Siem reip has given me an infected leg, foot, fingers and face. Its really hard to keep wounds clean here as our feet and legs are so exposed, and due to humidity and sweat I assume, they don't scab easily. Gross I know, poor Bethany has to look at me all day. I have started taking antibiotics though so should be back to my gorgeous self soon.

Week 8

We have had two little traumers this week at work. Sayha, the little boy pointing at the camera in the picture of the tuk tuk, fell down the stairs and had to spend a couple of nights in hospital, we couldnt really find out how he was hurt because of the whole translation issue, but hopefully he will be back at home bouncing about, when we return on Monday. Thearak, a girl of, I think 9. Has a recurring scalp condition. Therefore she has had her head shaved a couple of times. She had gorgeous ringlet hair to her shoulders but it was shaved of  at the weekend. It has really knocked her confidence, in the lesson she didn't want to join in and she has been very clingy. I feel very maternal and extremely sorry for her.
Group Home 2 had a bit of a roof mallfunction this week. We had extremely heavy rain and then our lesson was interrupted by water gushing through the ceiling. We had to do some frantic 6 man mopping and pushing water on to the balcony before it went through the floor, so that was quite exciting.
We also had Sorn, our supervisors leaving party, which consisted of really yummy food. We had beef kebabs and stripped vegetables with bread and chicken curry wth rice. I enjoyed it a lot, I even ate some of the beef.
We have spent Wednesday to Sunday on holiday in Siem Reip visiting Gabby and Katie, two other project Trust volunteers which has been really nice. Siem Reip is really lovely. It is cleaner and smaller than Phnom Penh and quite quaint. The French colonial influence in the architecture is very prominent here. We decided to wait  to see Ankor wat and the temples, when our families visit. We visited Gabby and Katie's project, I think we have it a bit tougher than them, they have a lovely big ensuite room a short picturesque cycle ride from the childrens home. They provide their own breakfast, so no rice. They have alot of short term volunteers that come and go which must be really nice to add a bit of excitement and much needed effortless  conversations in English. Seim Reip seems very western compared to Pnom Penh, and they often go out and weekends to bars and restaurants where they meet other westerners.They also have internet access at their accommodation. I do prefer our project though as we seem to be involved in more aspects of the NGO, I prefer our children and I just get a better feeling from our project,  but then im probably biased.

Week 7

I've been a little bit homesick mid week this week. I think it was because I was getting a bit bored. The lessons are great but in between I have about 2 hours spread out of just playing with the children which gets a little bit tedious. However we had an educational meeting on Friday and we have built some more into our schedule.
After the water festival we are going to start doing Home based care visits on a Friday afternoon, we will visit the homes of HIV children on the Magna program but not living in the orphanage, so as to monitor their health and the taking of their treatment. This means that we have had to shuffle our schedule leaving us with less free time, which makes me much happier. We are also organizing trips swimming at a hotel with Sothy the deaf and partially blind child, and an arts and crafts club on a Thursday morning. Application for materials has to be made a month in advance though so it can be put in the monthly budget, so the arts and crafts club wont start for a little while, its very strange and a bit frustrating not being able to have materials and stationary on demand. We have  been asked to set monthly mini tests for our English students, write reports on the kids every 3 months and update the children's files and send reports to the sponsors every six months. Hopefully this will all keep me sufficiently busy.

The very young children started pre-school this week  which means that we are left with the slightly older ones for the morning lesson. I am happy about this as the children left in our class  are old enough to learn some English, and some of them are behind in their education due to time spent ill or in hospital so it is nice to give them extra attention.

This week I was taken for dinner, by a couple of the staff to a street cafe serving what they call porridge. It ][you either couldn't taste or got overwhelming amounts of in a mouthful, strips of a vegetable which tasted like ginger soaked in sugar, eggs which at first I was pleased to see but I think they were pickled and in the very early stages of growing a chick, served with stuffed intestine and stomach. I don't think i disguised my horror very well and ate very little under the excuse that I find rice incredibly filling. I went home however to find the mas had cooked my favorite of their dishes, a spinach and chicken and sauce stir fry thing. Which I ate with delight. We had our first Cambodian deep fried battered banana, it was sooooo yummy, but I think contained enough calories to last a week. I am getting used to the orphanage food now and enjoying it, though I still pick around the meat.

I received parcels this week! I had to wait 5 days before I could go to the post office and pick them up, I am pretty sure I was more excited and probably more grateful for those parcels than I have been about Christmas presents in a long time.

We only have two days of work this week and then we are going up to Siem Reip as we think there will be some celebrations for the Water Festival, and we are going to visit two of the other Project trust volunteers, I am very excited. 

Going back home now to see how well our mattress is drying out, we had a massive downpour in the past 12hours, so we came in for lunch today to find the home surrounded by water and a huge puddle in the middle of our room and our mattress was sodden.

Jum reap lear