today has been exhausting. i've been up since about 5, i think it's the jetlag, i can't sleep in. but i went to the first orphanage today at about 8... the kids there are awesome and so welcoming. once i got there, i gave them colouring books and markers and we sat there and coloured for a good 2 hours... the kids coloured with me, asking me to pick out colours to draw certain things and they picked out colours for me. these kids are really smart and easily catch on to english. when i started to teach today, i taught them what A, B, C & D sounds are... i got them to name words that started with each letter and then asked them to draw. these kids are amazing at drawing, i took art for 4 years and don't have the skill these kids have lol... it's insane how good they are, my camera was dying at this point so i didn't get to take pictures of them, but i'll do it again, it's very impressive. i tried two different cambodian pieces of food today.... the first was at the orphanage, it was a bread-type roll thing with rice and eggs and all this stuff inside, i tried to eat it... i couldn't do it! i am usually perfectly fine with mixing all types of stuff together, but the stuff they mix together here doesn't agree with my tastebuds. the second thing i tried, was supposed to be sweet... it was, but it was also very weird. it was sticky rice, crushed ice, cooked egg yoke and something else mixed together, i also triedddd to eat it but i was literally gagging, i felt so bad for barely touching it...i'm having realllly bad luck with eating things here.
but, outside of the food.. more about the orphanage. around 11 i came back to the hotel for some rest and then went back at 2... when i got back there i helped two of the boys there who don't attend school right n ow. one of them is 15 and the other is 17... one of the older men there asked me to help them get faster at typing on the computer. like i said before, the kids seem so smart and seem like they can grasp what you're trying to show them easily, for people who don't entirely speak english.
it's not as sad as i thought it would be seeing these children without parents... they are all happy, smart little kids who are still getting the chance to learn. some of the kids go to school, i found that out today. some go in the morning and some in the afternoon (i think thats how it works). i'm finding out lots of different things each day, i think that some stuff i wrote about before may have been a little off.. it's hard learning things exactly as they are because it's hard to understand sometimes, but i'll fix things as i go :)
i don't know if the orphanage struggles as much as i formerly thought, i think that's what i got from talking to meng and the 'mother' telling him things. it's hard to say that they are completely struggling but i don't know how everything there works quite yet...
but it is easy to see everything that they need, i'd love be able to give them a new dry-erase board to learn from. the one they have now sits on a handmade wooden easel and the board itself has a huge crack in it... the kids have such blank slates that are waiting to be wrote on and they don't have a lot of the right things that they need... today they were all really excited though because they received a donation from someone and it was finally put into their account.
i'm excited to see how this goes, i have goals for some of the kids... like the two boys i was helping on the computer... i want them to be able to type really fast before i leave. also, when i was talking to the 15 year old boy today, he was telling me how he wants to be a doctor in his future. it's amazing to see that even in the position they're in, they still look forward and hope for a better future.
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