Journal: Sunday 5 July 2009

Today we were going out to Da’s village to show Magda life in the countryside. We met at Soup Dragon for a quick breakfast. She rented a bicycle to ride all the way out, while we went ahead on the motorbike. It took her about an hour and a half, but she arrived in good spirits.

Houy (Da’s brother) was back from Phnom Penh and he was making lunch. We had a soup with green watermelon and dried fish, a bamboo shoot soup with pork, papaya salad with chicken and fried long beans with pork. I love eating long beans!

We relaxed a little then took a walk into the village. First stop was the village center where there is a kind of meeting place with a raised tile platform and roof. A new addition had been added to this since I was last here, plus there’s now a Buddha statue in the corner sitting behind some curtains that were drawn over it (presumably to protect it from the dust). We sat there for awhile and Magda took some pictures of the children hanging out.

There were some people heading off to the rice fields to prepare the bundles of rice seedlings before they get transplanted, but they wouldn’t really be starting for another half an hour so we headed to the house to visit the new baby.

Little James is a bit more active now. He’s got quite long arms and legs for a Cambodian baby. We got to watch him get a bath and it was incredible to see how strong he is already. He was able to hold his own head up and that’s at 3 weeks old!
Baby 'James', Da's new nephew at 3 weeks old.

After about an hour we took off to see the activities in the rice fields. It was fun to watch them pull out the seedlings then whack the bundles on their feet to remove the excess dirt before tying them up and setting them aside. It’s definitely a messy job! And hard on the hands, too! There were three groups of people preparing the rice seedlings, so we went around to all of them to check them out and get some photos.

Pulling out the seedlings to prepare for transplanting them.

It was now time to go back to town, so we thanked Da’s family and Magda headed back on her bicycle while we drove again. We went straight to the Siem Reap Christian Fellowship service which was at 4:00pm. Tonight was praise and worship and communion, so it was a shorter service.

From there we met back up with Magda for our final dinner. We ate at one of the restaurants at the Old Market. It was good, but they have definitely upped their prices. We said our goodbyes and Da and I headed off to look at furniture. I’m looking for some rattan chairs for the porch, in addition to a shelf. They were a little too expensive and I didn’t have enough money on me anyway to buy anything. But we’ll try again on Monday.

I wanted to go to bed early since I had to be up early for school. Unfortunately I could not fall asleep as quickly as I would have liked. My mind was racing about the first class and my lessons. Just go to sleep already!