I arrived home from my mission speaking Khmer in Sacramento, California on June 18, 2015 and now one year later I am in Phnom Penh, Cambodia for two months with a BYU public health internship. I've been here for one week now and I haven't really been able to comprehend anything that's happened or that I've seen. I was talking with a Khmer girl here who has been going to a college in America for 3 years and she even tells her American friends that she would have no idea how to describe how different her country is from the United States, but the only way they could really know would be to come see it for themselves. I think I would agree with that. So, I'm probably going to focus these blog posts on pictures and then a little bit of commentary. Thanks for reading.
This is called a tuk-tuk and as you can see it's basically like a scooter carriage. The streets in Cambodia are (fill in the blank) a) crazy wild b) absolutely bonkers c) terrifying d) all of the above. It is common for scooters to drive on the opposite side of the road and to make a left turn you basically just turn straight into traffic. Anyways, Seyha here served a mission in Cambodia and he has been our go to driver this first week coming from the airport and finding our way around. He's a champ.
I'm staying with a very nice family and this is us in front of the church building where the branch meets. The father Veasna went to BYU Hawii and does a lot of good for the church here.
I got to go out to the province on Saturday with the hospitals home care team to see some of the people they take care of. This community was very beautiful and people I think live a simple life.
These houses are right next to the Mekong river and when there are floods people ride around on boats and the houses are like islands.
We went to a school and I started speaking Khmer with some of the kids and they were pretty weirded out at first and would run away. Eventually this group of 13-14 year old girls boldly came to interrogate me about how I learned Khmer and if I was married etc. Kids kept circling around and eventually I was surrounded by a group of about 50 kids. The two boys on my left were some of the cheekiest and I asked I could take a picture with them. I'm quite a weirdo here.
The sign at the school says something like "Knowledge is food, and Wisdom is a a weapon" meaning that knowledge can get you food for the day, but wisdom will give you power to go wherever you want to go. Chhavelith is a worker from the home care team.
One trick to getting Cambodian people to like you is to eat the stinky fruit. This is called a durian fruit and it is very stinky, but it doesn't taste that bad. Also tell them you like really spicy and that you think the fermented fish paste smells really bad, but it tastes delicious. Those are the magic words to get almost any Cambodian to smile.
This is a wat we went to on the top of a mountain.
And there were seriously monkeys climbing around everywhere.
On Saturday we went to the Royal Palace in Phnom Penh and there were some monks that said they were there to ponder and look at the beauty. Kristin and Amanda are two other students from BYU with me.
This was the only picture that I took from the Killing Fields site and Tul Sleng prison. It is really quite unfathomable what happened there. This site is preserving evidence of things that happened during the Khmer Rouge where thousands of people were killed and there are still people buried in some parts.