Strange Medicine
I played two games of soccer and was pegged full force in the face with the ball, effectively ending the second game. Had conversation with a congregation of boys during the evening dance. How old am I? How many girlfriends do I have? What it my favorite place? Have I been to Laos? What is my job? Why did Bin Laden attack America? Etc. It was hard to explain terrorism to them.
Last night, I witnessed some superstitious medicine. Some of the kids are getting a cold, and it seems like a treatment may be worse than the disease as it involves getting scrubbed with the edge of a quarter smeared in Tiger balm. The kids wail in pain and the bigger ones cry. And how this is effective in treating a cold, I don’t know. I had them try it on me and it hurt like Hades, leaving the equivalent of a long red speckled scrape from shoulder to waist. The balm made the whole area feel hot and prickly.
S. and I went on a walk to buy fruit ( big bunch of little bananas, mangosteen, and the unnamed spiky fruit) and some sodas and ice. A block of ice the size of a shoe box costs a quarter. We buy one daily to keep our cooler colder.
Another trip to buy vitamins tomorrow.
I’ve been daydreaming to music in the night before falling asleep. Crazy dreams have followed, oddly involving a lot of frustrating themes in American settings. Last night, one phase of the dream involved me pushing a shopping cart/lawnmower through a whole city to drop it off at the Salvation Army. I was afraid people would think I was homeless. This transitioned into a fictional tram ride to Ankor Wat, running, being late for a dinner, seeing a bare butt, watching a former lover walking down a hallway (and being hypnotized by her hips) to meet her ex-boyfriend for dinner, driving down the coast, being in a cave, shooting rockets at my former roommate as she got out of a car in WW II era Europe, and more.
I am getting bitten by so many mosquitoes. Dengue fever here I come!
SOME PHOTOS:
The cutest, non-orphan baby at the place. She just stares at you dumbfounded.
Some drawings S. and I and the children did one day. They wanted me to draw a lot of birds and giants. The drawings below the cutouts are the children’s drawings of Cambodia.
More later.