I Finally Did It . . . . .

I ate some bugs!!  But I’ll get into that a bit later.  Today I went on another small group tour.  It was with the same tour company that I did the Angkor Wat tour with.  This tour was to see how people in the countryside here live.  We went to a small village outside of Siem Reap called Kompheim Village.  Through the tour we were assigned a host family that allowed us to come to their home for the day.  The village is very poor, so the tour company works with the village for the benefit of the village as well as for us tourists.  The family that hosts the tour group (it is a different family every time which is chosen by the chief of the village) receives the offer of help for the day (they can decide what they want us to do) as well as a small payment, and a larger contribution is given to the village fund for special projects such as water wells or water filtration.   Us touristas get to give back to the community that we have been visiting and get to see a slice of what life in Cambodia is actually like.

It was an enlightening day.  My tour consisted of 4 people – me, and three other people from Poland.  Our host family is considered a type 1 household (a government classification) which means they typically struggle to meet daily needs.  They live in a small, basic house and have 4 kids.  The village is quite poor, but from what I saw they really seemed to have a sense of community and are willing to help each other out.  Our main job for the day was to weave palm leaves together to help the family with a repair they are doing on their house.  It was a bit tough at first, but once you got into the groove, you could really get going.  We were really determined to get as much done and to help this family out in any way we could.  We also helped them plant some fruit trees on their property, as well as contributing to the lunch we had.  While we were working, many of the village children popped in to say hello, and we saw some of them again when we did a walk around seeing the schools and monastery.  As I mentioned before because this town is such a touristy place, it is really hard to get a sense of what it is really like.  This day certainly gave me a glimpse.

On the way to the village we stopped at a snack stand which served insects and frogs.  I was finally brave enough to try the locust and the larvae.  As part of our lunch, we also had red ants.  Yeah!!  I’ve finally tried some insects!

In the evening I went to a performance by “Phare” also known as the Cambodian circus.  It was like a very amateur Cirque de Soleil in an outdoor area (I do love being outdoors in the evenings in the tropics!)   Again interesting and I’m glad I checked it out.