This week I went on three field visits to MCC education projects at rural Primary Schools in Prey Veng province. Crystal and the girls came along to one of the Primary Schools in Pea Reang district. I’ll be sharing more about the work MCC is doing in Prey Veng in a later post. I got some…
Category: Daily life in Cambodia
37th Birthday
I turned thirty seven this week. Crystal baked my traditional birthday cake – Jewish Apple Cake – to celebrate and even found a place that sells hoagies in Phnom Penh. The Jewish Apple Cake was wonderful and the staff were quite impressed by Crystal’s baking skills! During my last term it was next to impossible…
Visal Wedding – Traditional Dance
Visal’s wedding had many morning ceremonies. Charlotte’s favorite was, no surprise, the traditional dance. This style of dancing is named Apsara and dates back to the 7th century. It is a slow, intentional dance with a lot of focus on stretching and turning at certain angles. Each movement is deliberate and has a meaning, but…
Visal Wedding – Rice Porridge
Guests to the morning ceremonies at a Cambodian wedding are often fed a hearty breakfast of rice porridge. This traditional breakfast food is inexpensive and simple to make, just cook rice longer than normal in four times as much liquid as normal. Rice & Pork and Kuy Teav are more common breakfasts for sale, while…
First Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving is not a holiday in Cambodia. We decided to wait and celebrate on Sunday so that the SALT participant in the province, Anneliese, could join. Despite spending most of Saturday at Visal’s Wedding Crystal still pulled together an authentic tasting Thanksgiving meal. We ended up with a full house – 16 people – for…
Visal Wedding – Introduction
Our newest work colleague, Pou Sokvisal, got married on Saturday. He has been with MCC since early October as our new Planning, Monitoring, and Evaluation Coordinator. Instead of writing one long post about his wedding I’m going to break it up into a series of smaller posts each focused on an aspect of the ceremonies….
Phnom Penh Rainbow
The quickest route to Charlotte’s school goes through a construction area. They are building a Mall and apartments. On our ride home this afternoon we spotted something in the sky. Don’t worry. I pulled over to take the photos!
Catherine saying a few words in Khmer
Hello everyone. Catherine is going to say a few words in Khmer for you. Please look forward to our next post in this series, Charlotte counts to 10 in Khmer.
Mild Cyanide Poisoning
First – let me start with the disclaimer that Catherine is okay. Fortunately ingesting seeds rarely results in acute toxicity. One afternoon last week, I gave the girls each half of a Sugar Apple (also known as a Sweetsop or Custard Apple) as a snack. They’ve eaten these many times without incident but this time,…
Dirty Money
I spotted this at the local grocery shop and thought it was an apt reminder that money is dirty (and not just in Cambodia). Remember to wash your hands after handling it!