Singing at Night
How high can you jump?
I'm thankful I'm not a dragon fly in Takam!
The next morning we rose with the sound of roosters strutting their voices. It was a very long night. I was relieved to hear them crow because it meant dawn was close to appearing!!! Marja and I trekked to the field for a bit of privacy for our morning refreshment of selves. This day's breakfast was the most difficult of all for me to stomach. It was the leftover soggy and strung together soup noodles which were hard to swallow. It was something about the texture and black dots of bugs which had accumulated in them through the night which did not settle nicely with my mind. The lemon grass dressing was all right. (F.Y.I. If you ever find yourself in a village without electricity, do not take noodles. You may have to eat them next morning! Rice is much more delicious and readily available.)
After breakfast, we along with 4 others including our little mom widow we were staying with began our work of finding the poorest of the poor to receive rice from the donation received. We began by heading out past the temple on the main road. Mid day we stopped at a hut belonging to a friend of our host to rest. We hiked out through rice field to make contacts with more families in the afternoon. Probably covered about 6 kilometers of land this day. I recorded all their names and a brief, very brief description of their stories. There are even single moms in the middle of rice fields for one reason or another. Our cultures are literally half a world apart, but so similar in other ways.
The evening closely resembled that of the previous one, except for everyone talking for 2 hours after dinner in the kitchen, we all sang! I love music. It does something to the soul no matter location, situation, or condition. When Majra and I occasionally recognized a song, we would follow their course in English. Take in the view: 15 or 20 so people gathered about a lit lantern in the open kitchen area. It's been by far one of my most sweetest experiences. I will cherish that memory forever!
It was another long night of cycling through sleep, waking up, turning in attempt to find a comfortable position on the wooden floor with a thin woven mat between myself and it, and shutting my eyes in preparation for sleep to overtake me yet again. In the morning, we freshened by the well. It was a long morning as we waited through the early afternoon for the van to arrive with the rice donation. Seventy plus flip-flops were also donated for the children.
I'll attach a few pictures of the games the children played. One game was the opposite of the limbo in which they saw who could run and jump the highest. They calculated the highest jumper by a rubber band like rope held by 2 children. The ones competing would take turns running, jumping, twisting around 180 degrees mid air, and attempting to hook the rope with a foot to the ground. The children also loved playing with nature, in particular horned beetles, birds, and dragon flies. I think they find the sounds and sticky feet of the beetles amusing. The birds they like to chase around from hut to hut as they land. So much for the birds having time to rest. My favorite of all was their interaction with dragon flies. After catching one, a child would tie a long piece of grass or rice stalk around the dragon flies' tail. He when then proceed to throw it in the air, chase after it and then pluck it by the grass attached to its tail out of the air. What fun! I could not believe it at first. So this, my friends, is how your children or brothers and sisters might play if they lived in a village submerged in rice fields in the middle of Cambodia.
