It's been Ponleu's turn to spend the weekend with me. His parents always jokingly ask me to take all three boys but I decline the offer. They are so competitive, and they are constantly fighting at home, so why bring the trouble to my place? Right now he's trying to fix his Lego village which did a wobbly and fell.
We went for a walk along the riverside before breakfast as it gets too hot later on. With Ponleu it's always a stop start walk as he's constantly stopping to look at some creature. Today he found the pupa case of some kind of insect. Near the riverside he picked up dead worms and hurled them at the sparrows. He wanted to feed corn to the pigeons so I took six 1,000 riel notes with me. He found a little girl selling corn so he took a bag and gave her the 6,000 riel without asking how much it cost. The bag only cost 1,000 riel. His parents don't allow the boys to handle money so they've no clue how to deal with it. I got the money back before the girl had time to leave. I then took pity on her friend and bought another bag. Within seconds we were surrounded with children holding up bags. We took off for the park and Ponleu enjoyed himself chucking the seeds all over the place and trying to get the pigeons to eat out of his hand; it didn't work.
On the way home we stopped at a French place to buy some bread. I'd never eat there as it's too expensive; they want $9 for a fancy breakfast. I can survive all day on less than that. We took the wrong turn and ended up in a market. The stalls are so crowded together that the path is much less than one metre wide. Ponleu was fascinated with the fish; some of them are able to survive out of the water so they were jumping all over the place. One lady was chasing two of them that had managed to escape. Ponleu stopped and asking questions of the sellers and they happily pushed the fish towards him so he could touch them. We were following a foreigner who got really angry when a man on a motorbike came down the path. They do this all the time and people just move out of the way. Not this foreigner; he let forth in French and the one word I understood was "idiot". I get a bit fed up when foreigners bring their culture here.
A while back a friend, who has worked at a children's home for many years, came out of the dormitory with some of the young boys. He'd spent the night with them as he used to live there as a child. There were some French volunteers staying at the centre and they reported this incident as if it was a case of child sexual molestation. The story got all the way to France where people are major donors to the home. My friend, and the boys, had to go to a number of psychologists to make sure that everything was OK. He decided it wasn't worth working there any more as he didn't want to have an impact on the money coming from France.
I took Ponleu home for a while and in the evening I went over to collect him again. His parents asked if Oudom could come as well, which was fine by me. Ponleu did a dicky fit - he wanted to come on his own. Maybe I'll get Oudom tonight.
I'm typing my old Nigerian diary notes each day and yesterday I saw that I'd made a note about being fascinated seeing Nigerians with more than two people on the motorbike. I had seen people carrying bicycles on the back of a motorbike and even a bed. Now I'm in Cambodia I don't take a second look at such things as it's a daily occurrence.
We had a violent storm yesterday evening, just before bedtime. I dashed outside to remove the cushions from my furniture on the balcony as it would have got soaked. In bed, I was trying to read to Ponleu and the power kept going off. We finally gave up as the noise was too loud to read. So the rainy season hasn't ended yet.
