Friday, September 16, 2011

Site Announcement

This last week Hal and I found out where we are moving for the next two years! I really liked how they told us the news. We started out after a lunch of pizza from Phnom Penh. Pizza!! It  had been so long since we'd had pizza, people literally ate an entire pizza themselves. I had just downed a dragon fruit because I thought we were having more Khmer food for lunch. Much to my dismay I was too full to eat more than 3 pieces.

After lunch they gave us a commitment speech. It was actually a really nice speech, and helped build up the anticipation, since they wouldn't let us go upstairs, to our normal meeting room.

We were so surprised when we went up there and they had taped to the floor a map of the Cambodian provinces, and there were numbers all throughout the each province, obviously, everyone's sites. So they started out by calling a number out of a box and that number had someone's name attached, and then they handed you a large envelope which said your province and site name on it.
I was lucky and was probably in the first 10 people called. Good news, I got the site I wanted! I can't tell you exactly where we're moving, but we're going to the north.
Below is everyone going to our province

The very next day we headed out for site visit. We spent all day on a bus. I think we got in around 7 or 8, which is like almost midnight by Cambodian standards. We stayed one night in our provincial town(the biggest town in that province) and then the next morning we met our host families and went to our prospective villages. It was lonely being the only ones in our village, but I think we'll really like it there.
We visited Hal's Health Center (above), and the director was very friendly. It took us a while to track down the school director, but apparently he had been trying to track me down as well, so I was able to meet with him also. My school it seems is rather large, they have 8 English teachers, which is more than anyone I've talked to.

Our host family was awesome, and their house is pretty nice! We only have a small room, but hey, we have running water! I haven't had running water since we got here! And the best part of their house? In our bathroom, is a FLUSHING toilet. You don't know how amazing that word is until you've been using a bucket to clean yourself for two months.

We're back in our training villages for another couple of weeks. I must say, I'm really going to miss living with my training host familiy. They are so sweet and loving, and I even missed them for the 5 days that we were gone.
It feels good to be "home", but I'm sure soon enough, the north will feel like home too.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

How exciting! I'm so happy for you!

Crazy Shenanigans-JMO said...

That is so exciting and great that you know where you'll be going! I've been meaning to tell you in e-mail but if you guys want anything from over here like food or candies or magazines.. Let me know and I'll ship you one of those priority boxes!

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