Basketball & Laundry

I promised I’d update and here I am!

I forgot to mention last time how tall I am compared to your average Cambodian woman. This is emphasized to me every time I go to step down from the second floor and hit my head on the ceiling. Luckily, I’ve gotten used to ducking, but sometimes I am painfully reminded that I have forgotten. Haha.

Did I mention all of the farm animals that walk around my yard? We have tons of chickens and one pig in a pen. I am awoken every morning at 4am by the sound of the rooster, which wakes the babies, who then proceed to cry. I’ve learned to sleep through it. This morning, however, I woke up before the rooster to the sound of crunchcrunchcrunch, part of my mosquito net falling, and then the currying of tiny feet. I am about 99% sure that my visitor was a mouse, as I don’t think scorpions or newts bite wood and plastic.

All of my homestay parents’ children are back in town for the election, and they have a daughter who speaks pretty good English, so last night, I got out all of the pictures I brought of my friends and family and talked about them. I tried to speak in Khmer as much as possible, but it was nice to have an English speaker to help me. I was able to accurately explain everything except sororities. Aww well. Then my mai (homestay mom) brought out some pictures of one of her daughter’s weddings, and it was gorgeous. She gave me one of her and my pboke (homestay dad).

Oh, I also had a giant cockroach in my room last night before I went to bed. I watched it with my bug zapper for about 30 minutes, hoping it would only stay by the light, but once it started to go onto my clothes, I knew I had to get it. Next time it landed on a wall, I hit it. It fell behind my trunk, and I was too scared to check to see if it actually died, so just keep your fingers crossed for me!

Today, a few of us Trainees played basketball with some Khmer teenagers. It was a lot of fun although I forgot how tiring basketball can be. The running back and forth up the court plus the sun plus the humidity had me exhausted after an hour, but I kept playing anyway because I spend the rest of the week sitting in a classroom. After football, three of us went to the p’saa (market) to get some coconut water to restore our electrolytes. I like going to the market for it because the coconut ladies give us the water for free, since they don’t use it for anything anyway.

After I got back from that, I had lunch and then did laundry. Laundry took me an hour and a half, and I had less stuff than last week, when it only took my homestay sister 15 minutes to get through all of my laundry. I will hopefully get much faster.

I’m also really happy I got to Skype with a few of you yesterday. If anybody ever wants to Skype, I’m on every Saturday morning (for me) from 6:30am – 7:45am, which is starting at 7:30pm Friday for Eastern US time. I’m also available all day Sunday, which is Saturday night and Sunday morning for those of you in the US reading. I’d love to Skype with any and all of you!

One last thing I wanted to mention was that if you are going to send me stuff, please don’t use USPS. Anything else is more reliable to Cambodia.

Talk to you all soon!