February pics

Here I am, trying to get caught up on blog posts again. To summarize-February was a month of being sick with amoeba and other digestive diseases for the whole family. March was busy preparation for April, which is sort of like December in America. Khmer new year (in April) is the biggest holiday of the year and everything sort of shuts down during that time. Most people travel and even if you stay home, it's too hot to get much of anything done. So here's February. We did manage to enjoy many things that happened in February in spite of the illness: "Spirit Week"-It wasn't actually called spirit week, but it didn't really have a name, so Spirit week is the best equivalent of what it actually was. The entire week was a competition between three "houses" made of up of the students from preschool-12. The houses were randomly assigned and had kids from all grades in them. I assume that the idea of competing houses comes from the time when kids went to boarding school and lived in different houses. Anyway, school mostly went on as usual with competitions at the beginning of every school day. One was a crazy hair competition and Gabe decided to shave a mohawk. It looked pretty crazy and the next day we had to shave it all off because his hair looked like it had been cut with a weed-whacker.

The last day of the week was a sports competition day. Gabe won a green ribbon for his house in the long jump. This competition was held far outside of town at a college campus and many of the students spent a good part of their day watching the crazy foreigners run in the hot sun. I'm always amazed that the kids can put so much energy into competing when it's so hot. We did go through hundreds, if not thousands, of bottles of water that day. For this day, lots of kids who are part of Hope's distance learning program came in from the provinces to take part.



Also during February we had camp week. This week is designed for the older students to do the field work portion of their classes. However, they have programs for the younger kids as well. Eric went to Rabbit Island and Kep with his kids. Rabbit Island is beautiful, but very undeveloped and the accomodations were very basic. In spite of this, they seemed to have a really fun trip and I assume, got their work done. One of Eric's ice-breaker activities was to have teams design a rain-proof shelter and a sea-worthy boat for the 7 dwarves action-figures. Some went above and beyond and designed entire resorts for their dwarf.

Kep is a town on the edge of a national park known for its natural beauty. 100 years ago French colonialists built villas and plantations here and made it into a little Riviera for themselves. The Khmer Rouge hated that sort of thing and destroyed it. The ruined and blackened mansions tell 100 years of history very succinctly.

I didn't get any pictures of it, but Gabe had a great camp week as well. Preschool to year 3 stay at home for a day camp. They had a day of all art projects a day of all water play and at the end of the week, a year 1-3 sleepover. Gabe had a great time and it was one of the highlights of his year