July 1st, 2008
Once again yesturday was another morning at the village. The group continued their English lessons, with mostly the same group as last time. Some of the younger kids didn't show up. I have been working one on one with Piseth, a 21 year old, who is in the 11th grade in high school, and happens to be the best English speaker in the village. I have had a little more trouble then the other groups, due to his vast knowledge of the language already. While the younger groups teach numbers and colors, and the older groups teach basic conversation skills (what is your name?, how old are you?...) I am doing some more advance work. Mostly we have been working in a grammer book, learning all the rules for past tense. This has proven to be a little difficult for Piseth, due to the fact that in Khmer there are no tenses. I also have never realized how much rules there are in the English language, its pretty crazy.

So after a few hours of teaching, attention spans started to drift. We played with the kids until Karen, Steve, Arn and Siy Ma returned with a truck full of fruit trees for the villagers to plant. Then we said our goodbyes for the day and headed to lunch. After lunch everyone took a rest back at the hotel until about 2 o'clock.

At 2 we took a short tuk tuk ride to the Angkor Childrens Hospital. There we met with a guide who told us about the hospital and showed us a dvd about what they do there. It is a free health care hospital for children. It also has a home visit unit, which sounded like a great thing for Man Men's Village. After taking a short tour of the grounds, we all hopped back in our tuk tuks and headed for Angkor Wat.

Standing at the crib side looking at the long walk way across the mote and into the temple was just the start. As we crossed the bridge and entered the temple grounds it felt amazing. There are really no words to discribe it. The famous 3 towers (which seem to the the logo for everything here) stood in front of us 20 feet tall at least. Sarah and I decided to walk the temple together. We started by going along side the outter edge where there are very famous carvings into the stone. It took about 30 mins. to walk around and see all of the carvings, though we got alittle distracted by a group of monkeys. Then we actually entered the temple and climbed the stairs to the top. Unfortunatly the 3 towers were ropped off so we could not climb all the way. There are really no words to discribe it. We all met at the enterence just as a fast moving dark cloud came over us. We all then went to dinner at the Singing Tree, a sort of health food resturant in the area. After dinner it was dark, however the night was still young. The group, minus Steve and Karen, decided to go out to a local dance club called Zone One. Everyone got dressed up and had a great time.

This morning we all met our tuk tuk drivers at 8:30 for a long ride out to a National Park that had supposed holy strem and a great waterfall. We stopped on the way, at a land mine museum. There we learned even more about the Khmer Rouge and land mines in general. It was started by a man who was a child soilder and actually laid land mines for the Khmer Rouge. He later decided to dedicate his life to clearing Cambodia of them. After another hour or so we mad it to the base of a small mountain. We all then climbed up a steep trail to a beautiful waterfall. There everyone got wet from the falls and played in the water. It was great. We all then took the hike down to the base and had a good lunch. After repairing a flat tire on one of the tuk tuks, we were off back to the hotel. Tonight we are all headed to dinner at 7:15 and later we will go to the FCC and lounge/ resturant where we can play pool and have milkshakes. Tomorrow we head back to the village for our last round of english classes. Much more to come on out last week in this beautiful country.

~MT~