Rice Glorious Rice!

Sorry bout the delay in blogging as I have been preoccupied and if you dont know why, you will find out in a few posts :) Consequently this one is another long one!

It's such a beautiful time of year, the rice paddies are flooded, the cows are mooing and the rain is (sometimes) pounding down.

As far as work been a few places lately mainly to do with FFW like this pond in Takeo. The villagers have hit very hard rock so not much more excavation can be done. Its amazing that a month ago i saw this site and it was a rice field, now it is a massive pond!

as well as distributions of finished projects. This distribution was in a former Khmer Rouge stronghold and quite scrubby land. Consequently there seemed to be a lot of amputees there, including one guy with both hands gone, but that didnt stop them one bit. You don't really notice the ones with prosthetics for a bit. After a while you are looking at someone and you notice that their foot or hand was very small and then the penny drops that it is actually wooden!

Went on an exciting trip in Kampong Chnang the last week of June as well. The water levels have risen there so to monitor a TB food distribution we had to charter a boat. So Bora and I set out on the river which was very exciting. Our boatman I dont think was very experienced as we kept ramming other parked boats, he was smoking over the open engine and to top it all off ran out of petrol forcing us to wait to drift to the edge and climb out, just missing the incoming storm. Oh well all part of a days work :)
It was a really interesting area because there were many houses just floating in the middle of the river and all the houses were on very high stilts, the river routinely going up 3 or 4 metres in the wet season (which we are heading into).

We were meant to stay by the river in the school but our driver decided to gun it a couple of hours into Phnom Penh because he had a doctors appointment the next morning. He said we should stay at the same hotel so we can leave early so i told him we can go 'barang' (foreign) for dinner. He kinda laughed and then about twenty minutes later made an excuse that he could not come to dinner. Then as we approached I said I was tired and that I think I would go to the local Khmer place that was close, and at that his eyes lit up and we had dinner together. The Khmer palate is not known for its adventurousness :)