I hate that I stopped writing the blog. It's great to have a record of my stories and adventures. I love looking back and reading my accounts of the things that I've been up to that I may otherwise look back on with a hazy memory or have completely forgotten. When I think of something that I've previously done in the nine months of absent blogging, I'll have to randomly drop it in a post.
For example, yesterday I remembered when I visited a floating village in Cambodia. This village was completely surrounded by water thus making it mandatory to get there by boat taking approximately thirty minutes to arrive from the mainland. All the wooden houses were built high up on stilts so that in the wet season the locals homes wouldn't be washed away. When I paid my visit it was dry season, so there was some land to walk on once you got there.
I was with my pals JP and Kate. We'd heard there was a school at the village with plenty of children, so we thought it would be nice if we took some sweeties to share out between the kids. Before we reached the village, we decided to have a leisurely boat ride through the nearby lagoon. I call it a boat, it was a tiny little wooden situation with a local woman with an ore as the driver, and if you so much as thought about peering your eyes to the side you'd be arse over tit in murky water and swamp critters.
So between us we had two big share bags of sweets for the children. This ride through the lagoon lasted at least half an hour. We were sat there looking at these bags of sweets. We thought it'd be fine if we just opened one bag and had one each, just for a taste, y'know, just to check and make sure they weren't poisonous before we gave 'em to the sprogs and all that! Needles to say, girls will be girls and we smashed off the whole bag of sweets.. And we might have opened the other bag for a sneaky couple too!
Our slight pangs of guilt quickly depleted. When we arrived at the village the children were out of school and playing football in the dusty dirt track that ran between the two rows of huts. Kate lifted out the bag of sweets and BAM! Kids came flying at her from all angles. Snatching the food, swinging off her, pulling at her dress, climbing on her. They were relentless! She looked a bit shook up. Ah well, guilt free!
We went into the school there, it was only one classroom, but this was a proper building made out of bricks and mortar and it had all the gear you needed in it. It was by no means high tech, but it had a blackboard, benches, etc. I noticed a plaque at the entrance of the school and a couple from Shrewsbury had it made for them. Go team England!
Another thing I've thought of! Again in Siem Reap in Cambodia, myself and a girl I met at my hostel, Amy, met and got chatting to a monk at the temples. He said he ran a class teaching English to children so many times a week and he asked if we would like to attend. So a few days later we went down and met the monk at his home. He invited us in and it was the Cambodian equivalent to a bed sit. It was about the size of a standard double bedroom, with his bed in one corner and a bit of a kitchen area on the opposite side. I didn't notice a bathroom, though I guess he'd use a bucket for that. He sat us down whilst he waited for the children to arrive and he told us a bit about himself and what he does in his spare time. All he did was read, and I don't mean just normal books, I mean proper intellectual books on philosophy, physics, politics... All in English. We asked him to read out an extract so we could get a grasp of how hard these books may be to read. "no", he says, and pulls out a 500 hundred page stonker, "I have this book memorised". And so he did. He read out at least two pages worth completely from memory. I was impressed!
We went out to the classroom which was comprised of the gap between his house and next doors, with a wheely white board at the head of the enclosed alley, with say ten benches lined up behind one another reaching back to the front of the two houses. I'd say there were about thirty kids in total, aging from about seven to ten years old, some of them having nowhere to sit. Definitely an incentive to get there early! They had text books but it was just a book with paragraphs in that they just read from, they were learning about tenses but from that thing there was no way, it barely made any sense to me. The monk asked us if we would like to take the class, and so we did. Amy went to the front to teach whilst I sat at the back with the stragglers. They were really confused and asking a lot of questions, some I couldn't answer as with having the language barrier I sometimes struggled to gasp what they needed help with. However, at the end I gave my group a test to see if my efforts had been of any use. Well blow me they all got it bang on. I felt great knowing that I'd helped a few kids, even if it was minor. Plus I managed to bag myself four ten year old Cambodian husbands there too, result!
After the class we regrouped in the monks house. We chatted some more and he asked our thoughts on the class and so on. Whilst he was talking I noticed a little brown worm wriggling around at my toes. I kept toe flicking him away but he kept coming back. He was no bigger than about 6cm. Next thing I know the monk is screaming at me, "NOOOO DO NOT TOUCH IT!!!". I shat myself didn't I, thinking 'balls, I've offended a sacred creature or something'. Apparently it was a very deadly snake and even at that size, one bite and I'd be brown bread. His way of dealing with this highly poisonous specimen was not to kill it or chuck it out the door, oh no. He just picked it up with a pencil and put it in the bin. Great.
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