TNT I'm Dynamite!

Ummm ok

So i went to two weddings last week. The first one was the sister of one of the guys i work with (Ratha, the technical field monitor) so a bunch of us hopped in the car on Thursday arvo and drove up to Phnom Penh (we always seemed to be trapped behind a guy's Rav 4 type car with a dead cow in the back with its legs in the air...yummy.

The wedding was lots of fun but I got sozzled. My boss is textbook bad at the peer pressure drinking thing so we all got really hammered. The trick is to keep your glass full of ice (ice in beer - travesty i know but better than a warm beer!) so when you have to cheers (every like three minutes) and skull (every like ten minutes) its not so bad. Also had a wedding on Saturday as well which was fun though I wasnt nearly as bad (although pretty bad). The funniest part of that was that i was the only foreigner there so i got dragged up onto the dancefloor and was dancing with like 100 people staring at me!

Monday we (Piseth and I) went to a handover ceremony for some stoves that TNT had built. TNT basically sends staff over to work at some target school to implement things. This time it was Connie and Bernard from Australia to built fuel efficient stoves. So yesterday we went for the ceremony to hand them over.

The first school was Peam Khley School in SamRong Tong District in Kampong Speu. This school was in a quite remote and very poor area. Up until 2002 they had school under the tree but in 2002 UNICEF and Japan built them a school. There was also a lot of defunct playground equipment that had been donated by UNICEF but was now broken. We also had to pass over an Indiana Jones style rickety bridge in the 4WD which was fun :)

The second school was Kraing Po School in Phnom Sruoch District, also in Kampong Speu.

It was pretty cool cos i just had to turn up and make a short speech about the importance of schooling etc. I also had to apologise because school feeding had been suspended for a few months because we had run out of food. So we were handing over a stove to cook non-existent food which was a bit ironic.

We did some focus groups with the kids since we were there and found that about 20-30% had dropped out of school since school feeding stopped and all the kids used to eat breakfast at school. That day only 5-10% had breakfast at home which meant they were restless, unable to concentrate and learn and left school early.

Hopefully at the end of this week I can head out and do some impact monitoring on HIV patients, a field i was working in with AusAID so it would be good to keep up that side of it.

The weather is really starting to heat up and the house gets really hot at night so its gonna get hot from here on in! I think I might skip the wedding this w.e and have a relaxing weekend in the Speu

:) (PS for those of you that missed the news, I am an Uncle again. Little Dilan Ryan Hilton was born in Singapore! How exciting