Our Cambodia team is touring Angkor Wat currently. In the meantime, we will be posting updates from student journals written while they were in the field.
Hi Everyone! Everyone here is doing well and back to working today for our last working day. We all woke up bright and early with the chickens and the sunrise, but I’ve started to get used to it. We had a great breakfast, but some people have definitely started to find their limit with rice. When you have rice with every meal, pizza and French fries and pasta seem like a dream. After breakfast we all walked up the muddy path to the school where we found out that we would be sieving sand again. Of the jobs that we’ve had here, sieving sand to be used to make concrete is by far the most dull, but we took our minds off it by singing and playing small games. The students would spend their breaks outside the classroom sieving sand with us and try to make conversation through the language barrier. Though it’s hard, a few mispronounced words, some charades, and a few laughs help make some basic conversation. The students were a great reminder of why we were sieving sand and the first place, and, best of all, they made us some funny looking hats out of banana leaves to distract us from looking at the huge pile of sand that still needed to be sieved.
The most difficult part of today was digging up all of the physically straining work that we did yesterday. We had poured dirt onto the ground to help make the base and then we had to slam large rocks into it with a large, heavy wooden tool. It was hard work and Olivia, Scout, and I had to take shifts. There was an upward slope in the middle of the base where we had put too much dirt and we had to undo and redo the whole section.