PIZZA PARTY

Yes as Peace Corps volunteer we gladly accept ideas of pizza parties just as excited as any 10-year-old kid would be! The idea was brought up to have a kp chhang pizza party Hannah started to ask at hotels around to see if we could barrow their kitchen we had a yes so the planning started which required a trip to lucky ps cheese is really expensive in Cambodia for one block of mozzarella is 20 dollars yea for real. In the end it just ended up being only K4 volunteers and some friends of Hannah’s. Naturally things being how they are in Cambodia there was some confusion the day of so I get into town to go to a meeting with women’s affairs’ and we discover the hotel doest have an oven humm now what to do. Thinking caps on well if none of the hotels have ovens next place to try… bakery bingo they had them but supper big and would not let us use it for what we wanted I even tried to offer him 10 dollars. Plan B we bought big French bread to make the pizza on top of a flame be4 we knew it we had all the Khmer staff helping make this food and feeding them it was interesting to say the least. I was joking around with Hannah telling her she was like the dude from hells kitchen the Khmer staff thought it was funny just how everything was going on when it was done we severed them first which I think took them a bit by surprise. In Cambodian culture its like they make them selves second class next to Brongs and since they’re everyday job requires them to serve people so seeing Americans go out of their way to serve them I think made them really happy huge respect thing. After I spent the night at Hannah’s friends sweetys house who is called the Indian Cambodia is really bad like that its just like why know a person name they do this to me at site to o the American she is over there. it was cool though to talk with her about her life experiences from India. The next morning I had to get up early to get back to my site bc liz was coming to spend the rest of the weekend doing some research work. Though Gadc request from some Canadian ngo they are trying to gather information on Khmer women and voting and economic status. Well lucky for this ngo they will get a wide variety of answers because people who do work tend to only ask big cities but bc I live in the middle of nowhere it was an added bonus.  Interesting things I learned along the way some people think its supper easy to vote others say they are now allowed to vote and pretty much every single person barrows money from the bank and the solo person to take out the loans is the oldest girl in the family if she is of age if not it is the wife. Only about 40 percent of people could read Khmer if they did not understand are Khmer we had a write up for them to read that most children had to read anyways meet a lot of people and learned a little more about day to day Cambodian life. I also think its worth mentioning that asking people about salary etc was not rude at all you know how in America you cant ask those types of Cambodia they all think its so obvious that they are so poor there is not point to hide it for ego sake.  Other good news an organization by the name of KHANA they work with orphans with hiv and at risk population has agreed to work with us in storage for the shoes!!!!  Also I have been trying to get small funding 150 dollars for a first aid workshop and I have been told that world vision wants to help me other wise I was going to pay out of pocket which would have sort of sucked but that’s the things about Cambodia you cant educate for free you have to pay a Khmer person to show up its sort of annoying but I feel this is worth it bc they have motto accidents all the time and first thing they do is pick someone up not realizing it could paralyze them eek! Since coming to Cambodia I have become more and more invested in women equality and gender issues in Cambodia well there is a few organizations that I really think do good work I finally met with one of them and they agreed to do education for my health center staff and to take me on to volunteer on criminal investigation stuff for their work!!! Supper excited about that as well. Until next time peace out from the other side of the world!