Bathtub

This is Bong Dara. Bong is what we call a elder person with respect in Cambodia. She’s the boss of the guesthouse, who was more like a mother to us. On Friday, she came with the van to the village to see the place we were living at, the school, and meet the people we were talking about.

She insisted on cooking a feast for us before we leave.

This was the car that sent us to the airport. It appeared to be a normal car, but on closer look…

Don’t be alarmed, we didn’t do anything wrong. Bong Dara’s husband is some big shot in the police force and they insisted on sending us to the airport.

Bye Cambodia.

You had been wonderful.

On the last day of our school, we organized a sports day.

Some of the girls twisted their skirts in the centre and tucked the remains at the back, turning the skirt into a pair of shorts.

Saren’s sister

Saren’s mom

Saren

The highschool students prepared their traditional food, nom man zhok for our farewell lunch. Super duper to die for, taste like laksa. =D

Monni. She worked in Malaysia for a couple of years and could speak English. She’s Saren’s cousin, live opposite our house, and had been providing a lot of help throughout our stay. Over sentry duties the previous night, Tee Wei told me that Monni told him that on the night that I sent Hilda to the hospital, some people from another village came to our village to steal cows. They poisoned the dogs to prevent them from barking and was pulling the cow out of the house when the owner happened to come down from the 2nd storey and saw the thieves. The thieves fired some shots but missed hitting anybody. Shortly after, the police came and caught the thieves. Very very interesting. A few nights ago, we heard a lot of dog barking, a lot of motorbikes, a lot of lights, then suddenly the room was pitch dark. Haha… There were a lot of guessing, but in the end it was said that some married man in the next village disappeared and the whole village was looking for him.
Interesting Fact: During the trip to the hospital on Thursday, Eugene told me that the penalty for robbing a foreigner is twice in Cambodia.

The classroom that I was teaching in.

My favourite class

Primary 6 teachers, until I got kicked to the special class

The house we stayed for 2 weeks

On the way out to Phnom Penh, we faced some obstacles. We were told to get down and walked over while the van driver drove the van over. Trust me, the van ALMOST flipped over. Zzzzzz.

Reaching Phnom Penh, we went to the Sorya Shopping Centre for dinner & had $1.60 ice-cream sundaes at Swensen.

We went to stock up on some medical supplies before leaving for the village again. Outside the pharmacy were 3 money changers with different rates. Told you Cambodians are the most honest people around.

Ms. Hilda Chang. The casualty who looks more alive than the 2 first aiders who brought her to the hospital.

Esso petrol station.

About 5 minutes before reaching the bridge, Eugene told us to take out the camera and get ready to take pictures as it’s a magnificent sight. When we reached the bridge, he offered to take a picture of us.

Without the bridge.

As the school was closed for cleaning in the afternoon, we went to visit temples on top of mountains.

Don’t know which bugger dropped the pail into the well along with the rope attached to it. Must be our EO in red.

My new teaching partners.

Hilda had fever over 38 degrees, Eugene & I brought her to the hospital that night via a tutu. When we reached Phnom Penh, the tutu uncle turned around and asked Eugene which hospital. Before he fished the namecard out of the wallet, he caught sight of a billboard at the junction and pointed to it.

Talk about coincidence. The previous Saturday, Junbin was sent to the hospital to treat a burn wound from the exhaust pipe of Saren’s mother’s motorbike. Hilda wanted to check out the hospital & went along with them. When Junbin was lying on the bed, Hilda mentioned that she also wanted to lie on the bed as it looked very comfortable. She got her wish 5 days later. Anyway, Hilda turned out ok. Eugene almost had nosebleed from the hot & pretty nurse and doctor. According to him, if we visit the hospital with the same ailments for the second time (same person), we will be given 50% discount. Somehow the idea sounded very wrong. We spent a night in the guesthouse as it was not safe to travel back to the village at night.

Back at the village early in the morning.

With the potential threat & danger, we started to better equip everybody with information.

Sentry Duty. Freaking stupid 1am – 3am slot, but we saw 5-6 shooting stars and a whole sky full of stars that night.

News of us teaching English spread, each day, we had more and more students coming, and we had to open up more and more classes.

New arrangement.

Cows are a common sight in the village. They just randomly come into the house compound, the school compound, drink water from our vase, eat banana from the altar offerings, shit anywhere they like. We learnt to use tree branches to whack their backside when they steal food & water.

Fluffy, our well loved dog.

As I walked around the house taking photos of cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, I passed by the makeshift laundry line and saw a powerpuff girls bath towel. Sniggering to myself, I wondered which girl brought such a cute towel to Cambodia.
15 minutes later, I saw somebody folding the same towel neatly to be kept away.

Ah Tee is now my latest idol.

Grinding flour from rice is super super extremely shag.

We visited the Royal Palace & National Museum in the morning.

There’s a different colour theme each day of the week, so the servants and stuffs will dress according to the colour theme for each day.

At night, we went to a restaurant for dinner. The profits of the restaurant goes to NCCLA.

Roomie, the sweets that you bought for my birthday, they got it there too! Instead of selling it in pieces, the man takes some of the sticky thing and shape it into an animal.

Saren’s sister, the girl that we shared room with every night, runs a coffeeshop next to our house. On a particular morning, we went to the coffeeshop for some cold drinks, and saw a couple of uncles at the next table eating the above beehoon soup. I attempted to point to the next table and showed a finger (the index not the middle) to Saren’s sister, but she could not understand my gesture. Then I walked to the cooking area, took up the dried beehoon & a bowl, and showed the finger again. This time, I managed to successfully get my order through. This is by far the biggest fulfilment of my stay in the village, coz the beehoon soup is TO DIE FOR!!! From then on, I had the same beehoon soup for 5 mornings, until it reached its diminishing marginal utility, and I refused to touch it again for the last 2 days in the village.

The iced coffee in our coffeeshop codenamed Starbucks. I call it the coffee-flavoured milk. Each day, the amount of condensed milk at the bottom varies, some days it’s half, some days it’s a quarter. Mingfeng figured that as they don’t have a fridge, they must finish using the can of condensed milk. If you ordered 2 mugs, the amount of condensed milk will be half of the mug, and if you ordered 4 mugs, the amount will be quartered. We do not wish to imagine how would it taste like if we only ordered 1.

This is Hwee Ming. My bedmate, (mosquito)net mate, eating mate, la-liang mate. As she displays EO qualities like Eugene, we are now cajoling her to join NTU NPCC. Throughout the day she’s often caught snacking, we sometimes wonder if she has 4 stomaches.

This is one of the funniest stunt the villagers had did to us. We were sitting at our usual la liang spot la liang-ing away, when 2 villagers next door shouted for us to go over. From their gesture, we figured that they wanted to move the table to somewhere. We thought that they were trying to pass us the table to form a bigger seating capacity and thus rejected the offer. As the villagers carried on the gesture, we later figured that maybe they were just trying to ask us to help them move the table to somewhere. Ruibao & Mingfeng then went over to help them. Thinking that the destination was the coffeeshop, they naturally put down the table. In less than 5 seconds, the villagers signaled ‘up’, so Mingfeng & Ruibao followed suit, thinking that the destination is probably the school. In the end, they finally found out that the destination was the pagoda even further down the road. So much for thinking initially that the table was meant for us.

During debrief last night, Eugene told us that several motorbikes with about 10 men stopped outside our house looking at us over dinner, and he noticed that Saren’s facial expression changed. After the debrief, Eugene gathered all the guys into the room and came up with some plans and sentry duty for the night.

During class, we’ll hold mini competitions between the boys & girls and get them to come to the blackboard to spell words that we taught them. On one occasion, I saw 1 boy looking at his palm after writing every letter, and decided to whip out my camera to capture this sight.

There were some celebrations going on at the pagoda. To my knowledge, it’s something like our qing ming festival, and it only occurs once every 3 years.

The hotel van came to pick us up at 5pm back to Phnom Penh for the weekend. Can finally bathe in clean warm water and sleep on the bed. Happiness.

As Eugene could initially only go for half of the trip due to his reservist, Junbin got his friend, Jocelyn, a past YEP leader, to take over Eugene’s duties for the second half. She always unknowingly gets very dirty, thus codenamed dirty girl. As I know she will be reading my blog, I’ve decided not to say anything nice about her so as to irritate her. Nevertheless, Hwee Ming & her would be part of my fondest (and dirtiest) memories for the trip.

The local police came over to copy our names (in khmer) & passport no. to keep as reference. According to Eugene, the villagers are very happy that we came all the way here to teach their children English, and they will do their best to protect us from danger. As much as we were staying in a safe village, there were gangsters (with guns) in the other villages near us. Then we were told to give the local police USD10 as “protection money” as the village culture does that all the time. At that moment, I seriously pondered who were the real gangsters.

The children. It still puzzles me as to why some of the children are in school uniform and some aren’t.

Tee Wei.
Ah Tee is by far the most interesting person I’ve met throughout this trip. After the 1 x stunt he did to the girl in our class, he performed yet another spectacular stunt in class today by spelling Elbow as Albow. He’s now officially known as Mr. Albow. To the long time readers of my blog, you must have remembered a certain interesting character codenamed Ah Huat from my MinorE. Interestingly, both Ah Tee & Ah Huat are from NJC, thus I’ve declared that all NJC students display interesting characteristics.

As it was the Queen’s birthday, all classes were conducted in the morning, and we had time to go for some recreation activities in the afternoon.

Renting a lorry (and the driver) for USD10, we went to visit a Angkok Wat-alike temple down the road about 15 minutes away.

Saren’s friend, a highschool teacher, invited us to his school to interact with the students. We had a short chat with the students, who could speak and understand English pretty well. We also got them to come over to the primary school to help us with the English lessons translation.

We woke up at 5am to plant rice. The farmer was pulling out the rice seedlings to be replanted at a bigger field. Out of every 10 stalks that I pulled out from the mud, I broke 2 of the stalks’ roots. After about 50 stalks, I figured I had better not carry on destroying the crops.

Bliss was when the ice-cream man drove past the village. At 9am, the weather was like 11am.

Kids playing skipping rope using vines.

Neighbour washing clothes by the well.

I stayed in the command post as the first aider for the day and developed an arcade game with Ruibao. Up till date, I’m still the top fragger in the team, all thanks to my handy-dandy multi-purpose A4 whiteboard. During class, I wrote words on the whiteboard and throughout the day, it was a fan and a housefly weapon.