Day 13ish

We are now sailing to Thailand and I have the difficult task of summarizing my whole Cambodia experience as well as the last few days. First the last few days.

The weather was finally decent for the last few days (sorry, I will stop saying that now) and we made the admission free instead of 25 cents, so there was better turnout, though apparently not huge compared to other ports. For example, one day we had around 4000 visitors. Since Cambodia was a poor port, we had a large donation of childrens books (80,000) that we were giving away for free, first one per visitor, then we changed it to three. One of the jobs for the book exhibition was to take their tickets in exchange for the books. On these busier days the free book area became jam packed with people. In western cultures people would not be comfortable being so squished together. The job sounds simple, until you have 20 people rushing you at once with anywhere from 1 to 7 tickets and some of them buying extra books. I turned around for one mintute to count a stack of 70 books that one guy was buying and people started poking me and waving their tickets in front of my face. Gong show would be an accurate description. And don't forget how hot and humid it was too. Partly by God's grace and partly by the fact that we were just giving these books away anyway, I was able to stay calm. At least the Cambodians seemed honest about exchanging the tickets for their books.

Monday, our last day in port, was my day off and I (and many others) went to the hospital I mentioned about before. I'm glad I got to go because I felt like I hadn't seen much of Cambodia yet. There was a house being cleaned up and painted, and we could visit the childrens section of the hospital. There was a lot of us volunteering and not much time to do anything but it was still good to go. The paint job was pretty horrible by professional standards, to be honest, but I hope the people there appreciated our efforts. The hospital was small and dirty. My roomate Hao said that visiting that place really affected him. He is normally quite jovial, but when he came out of there he said he was feeling sad. I tell you his viewpoint because mine wasn't so emotional or interesting. It's getting late and I'm feeling seasick so I will have to resume this tomorrow.