June 2 - Koh Pdao cakes and interviews

We have officially made it to the penultimate day in our Koh Pdao homestay experience! Today was a pretty routine day. We were picked up from our homes at 7:30am and taken to the community center for meditation, way of the day (which today was "right view"), health check-in, and breakfast. Afterwards, we had another Khmer lesson with Pum and learned the words of many fruits like pineapple and mango, and directions like up, down, left and right. But something special that we did before lunch was to cooperatively prepare banana leaf cakes, a traditional offering to the monks of the island made of rice flour, water, salt and sugar and filled with yellow mung beans and shredded coconut. It was an extremely fun task in which we broke up into groups and took on a separate roles such as cutting and oiling the banana leaves and also forming the cake. We got to eat some of our cakes for lunch--very delicious! After lunch, we had two hours of downtime in which a couple of us played volleyball with the local children near the court. Our (Cameron and Carter) homestay brother has been getting insanely good with the spikes; he always tries to impress his dad who is watching on the sideline! It is always such an amazing experience to get closer to our homestay family through such a fun activity. After downtime we split into two groups, one for our healthcare speaker and one for our youth speaker. Our youth speaker, Sreyching, shared about her experience through primary school on the island and then about high school on the mainland. She talked about how few of the students from the island get to go to high school, roughly 10 per grade, and then how of those 10 only 6 of them go on to university. The other speaker, nurse Seangvuen, talked about how basic healthcare is pretty accessible to people on the island but there is little beyond basic healthcare. Even on the mainland, there are limited treatments for diseases like cancer, and patients often return home and to traditional medicine. After the guest speakers we debriefed as a group and then went to the school to play soccer once again. Some of the local students joined in to play with us which was a lot of fun. Some of us also played games with younger students on the side or stayed back to play Banagrams. We played at the school for about 45 minutes before we bucket showered quickly and headed back to the community center to catch the end of the beautiful sunset. The sun lit up the sky orange and purple and we all took photos on the beachside (see our MENLO silhouette). Afterwards, we had dinner and debriefed to get ready for the final day on Koh Pdao.

  • Carter and Cameron 








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