Siem Reap

So currently I am sitting here in this internet cafe in between two buddhist monks. How awesome is that. One of my favorite things about Cambodia is seeing the monks dressed in their bright orange robes doing typical everyday things. These include writing emails, talking on their cellphones, riding on the back of motos, swimming in the ocean (still wearing their robes), etc.
Anyways, so yesterday morning we took a dusty tuk-tuk ride back to Man Men's village to begin english lessons. Before we left, we had a quick strategizing meeting in Reige's room to try and brainstorm ideas on how we were actually going to go about teaching english. We decided it would be best to split the kids into two groups of younger children who knew very little english, and two groups of older and more advanced teens; one guys and one girls. We spilt the older group by gender because in Cambodian society females are taught to wait until alll the men have spoken first. By splitting them up, we hoped that the girls would feel more comfortable speaking, which is an essential part in learning a language. Sarah, hannah, connor and I worked with the younger kids while luke and mitch worked with the older guys and diana and annalise worked with the older girls. There were about 20-25 kids ranging from age 7-21 (so not all kids) who showed up for our lessons. Even though we had tried to prepare ourselves, we really had no idea what to expect. For the little kids we worked on numbers, colors, and basic conversation ("hello", "My name is ___", "I am ___ years old"). They already knew the numbers 1-10 but had a difficult time grasping 11-20. They also had a hard time understanding what "I am ___ years old" meant even after help translating from Sey Ma. By teaching them colors we also learned that the colors blue and green share the same name. The older groups worked on pronunciation, math, world maps, and more advanced conversations. The sounds "ch", "th", "r" and "f"are very difficult for Cambodians to say, because those sounds do not exist in their language. Some of them knew alot more english then we had expected, which is a good sign in the development (in terms of jobs) of the village. While we were teaching english, Karen, Steve, Arn and Sey Ma went into town and purchased the medicine that they requested and two more fishing nets. Hopefully they will be teaching us how to fish soon! After about 2 hours of lessons we played games with them and learned some Khmer to pass the time. Again they gave all the girls in our group lots and LOTS of flowers. We said good-bye to them and went out to lunch near the Old Market.
The Old Market is one of the most amazing places i have ever been. Its stuffed with hundreds of small "shops" filled with everything from silk kramas, t-shirts, souvenirs, carvings and anything else you could possibly want from Cambodia. It is very cheap (especially if you have gotten good at bargaining) and most of us have already finished buying all of our gifts for friends and relatives. After, we visited Artisans d'Angkor which trains people from the country side in various traditional arts. Karen, Steve, Sarah and I took a 45 min, very, very dusty tuk-tuk ride out of the city to visit a silk worm factory (part of Artisans d'Angkor). It was incredible to see how precise the whole process was. *Did you know that you can produce 400 meters of silk thread from one silk worm cocoon?* Sarah, Riege and I each ate a boiled silk worm. It was disgusting and squishy.
We rejoined the group for dinner at "Hawaii Pizza House"to get our American food fix. We planned on heading to bed early but some of us stayed up a little bit longer and played (and learned) Texas Hold 'em.
We woke up "bright"and early at 4 am to take tuk-tuks to watch the sunrise over Bayon temple, a huge temple with about 200 giant faces and over 1.2 km of carvings all over the walls. After that we visited 2 other temples in the area. On one of the temples we climbed steps which were about 6 inches wide and 18 inches tall. In other words, fun to go up and terrifying to go down. We went back to the hotel for a quick break then went out to brunch at the Butterfly Restaurant. The whole restaurant is surrounded by nets and once a week orphan children are paid to catch and release hundreds of butterflies (most of which die in about ten minutes). Its an amazing but sad sight.
We returned to the village in the afternoon to play games with the kids. The guys played a heated game of volleyball, while the girls played lacrosse, frisbee, hand games and Cambodian hop-scotch. Even though we visit them everyday, the villagers are always so excited to see us. Tomorrow we will be returning to teach english again. We'll keep you posted!
-Hilary