Chinese New Year was the first event after my last blog and was, if I'm honest, a bit of a nightmare. We didn't have any party at the group home (if we celebrated everything we wouldn't stop partying and we'd be even poorer than we are at the moment!) and although the decorations were very nice and the meal out was delicious, it is definitely not rating highest on my list of favourite festivals! Chinese New Year in Cambodia is celebrated by anyone with ANY Chinese relations, no matter how distant, which is quite a substantial amount of the population. Celebrating it means having 3 days off work and doing nothing but spend time with your family, eat delicious food and, well, celebrate. It was a bit like Christmas holidays in Britain really- everyone goes home to their families and there are lots of traditional foods to eat and traditional things to do. I'm sure it would have been lovely if I'd been involved in some festivities, but the half of the population without Chinese connections (which includes the orphanage and by default me) continues life as normal for those 3 days that their neighbours are spending partying.
It really made me realize how much I appreciate the shops being open! We couldn't get any photocopying done for the week because the photocopying shop was shut, the woman on the corner by the hospital who makes iced coffee was taking a break and when the tuk-tuk broke there was no one to fix it! I seemed to spend a lot of time last week waiting for people to do things only to find out that they couldn't do them (but it always took an hour or so to reach this conclusion).
Last Saturday I had my hair cut which was scary- my first haircut without being able to ask my family what they think before I got it done! I went to the hairdressers just around the corner who were amazed with my hair colour, just as I was amazed by the fact that having my hair cut took 2 people, almost 2 hours, involved a head, neck and shoulders massage and cost only $3! Cheapest and most luxurious haircut of my life! The haircutting here is much more brutal than back home, partly due to the lack of sharp scissors- it's very hard to make it look more like cutting than hacking when the scissors are almost blunt!
In the evening we met Kate and John who were visiting from Project Trust for a meal in Phnom Penh which was LOVELY. So good to have some western food and be around people who speak English so well! It was amazing, and particularly amazing just how much we appreciated it.
This past week since then has been incredibly busy with lots of meetings for various reasons. We are in the middle of moving house as I write so there have been meetings all about different aspects of that, and we've been enjoying helping sort all that out. Yesterday (Monday) the new beds arrived and were moved into all the rooms; it's all so nice and brightly coloured now with the painted beds, new sheets and other decorations and the kids are so excited! We move in on Friday along with most of the children from Group Home 1, leaving behind the 5 oldest who need to complete the term at their current school before they move.
The move will be a big change for us, but mostly for the better- we'll have a bigger room, including a bed each! It's a fair bit further away from Phnom Penh, but the flip side of that is that we're in a smaller town where we can get to know people better and even in Takhmao (where GH2 is) we're not so far away from PP that we can't go there at the weekend. When we left Britain we planned to stay every 4th weekend in Phnom Penh to get a break from the children but that's not happened at all- we're happy enough at the group home that we don't feel like we need to get away, even with a 9pm curfew!
I'm going to upload some pictures to facebook soon of the new house looking all wonderful and new, so watch this space!
