How to identify an American...

Yesterday we went to Prey Toe Toeng, a village I had never been to before. They have around sixty children involved in the nutrition program. Savan and Bora drive the truck to the village twice a week. They do some English lessons, Bible classes, and health education. Each child gets a piece of bread and a glass of milk. The milk is made from a Nestle nutritional supplement, sugar, salt, and distilled water. Troy and Tabitha have been working with Savan and Bora to develop the curriculum, but the guys took the initiative to start educating the kids. Troy and Tabitha are also working with the village leaders to develop drip irrigation vegetable gardens. If the fields work for the village leaders, perhaps others in the village will try them as well. So far they’re struggling, but the rainy season begins this month, so maybe things will start growing. As it is, the kids in the village live off of rice and bread, with occasional fruit if they can find it. Meat and vegetables are almost unheard of. Please pray for rain this year so people can afford to eat more than rice.

Today, Troy was suffering from one of those wonderful Cambodian ailments. Neither Tabitha nor I were brave enough to drive ourselves out to the village (I’ll make a video of the road chaos here and you’ll understand), so after dosing Troy with Tylenol and Cipro, I had a day off. Teo (my roommate from Romania who’s teaching English in the PIP school here for the year) and I headed to the market to buy gifts for home. I had forgotten how unbelievably stifling it is under all of those tarps at one in the afternoon, but we had a lot of fun. After a year here, Teo is a much more aggressive bargainer than I am. I was impressed! One girl asked where we were from. “America.” “But how? You are not fat!” I took it as a compliment. Much as I’ve enjoyed the day off, here’s hoping that the Cipro kicks in for Troy tonight so we can head back out to the village again tomorrow.