This morning I listened to a programme from the Punjab and part of it was about the Sikh Golden Temple at Amritsar. They have over 10,000 visitors a day and they are all given a free meal. One man made the rice pudding using 500kg of rice every day. The pudding is made in what the interviewer described as a small swimming pool. A machine churns out 7,000 chapattis every hour. I'd like to put the place on my bucket list.
I was pleased with my weekly Fitbit report. It said I'd walked 63kms this week and climbed 53 stairs - thank goodness they weren't in one go.
An old friend, Kim Eng, has always worked in the social sector; I first met him when he was in charge of the Khmer Youth Association. Now he's working for an NGO that deals with rural development. He wanted to meet young businessmen to find out what they thought of social needs in Cambodia and what they saw as problems and solutions. It was an interesting group - a beauty shop owner, an airline worker, travel agent, educator, architect etc. It was interesting that a lot of the subjects were similar to the ones we'd talk about in Canada; children using computers and not able to communicate with people. Children who are educated but are not tuned into the world around them. Then some local problems such as with customs people who won't allow them to take their products without paying a bribe. Taxation people who want a bribe so that the company can continue functioning.
One friend works for a company that has 96 private Cambodian schools on its books and 160 teachers. He has trainers who work with the teachers to help them to see the social skills that children need. They work with young children from Kindergarten to Grade 6 and they teach them Buddhist principles such as meditation, cleanliness, tidiness, punctuality etc. The children are taught to respect the traditional values of Cambodia and to greet people respectfully etc., to clean their environment at home and school.
Friend Faye send me her Christmas newsletter and she included news about a man who'd been to speak in her community. He's an author and he's written a book about something called "The feather heist". Faye's husband was a champion fly fisherman who has captained the Canadian national team. He also used to make exquisite fishing flies. I ended up listening to the podcast of the author's story and it was fascinating.
During Charles Darwin's time there was another man called Wallace. Wallace wrote a paper about Natural Selection before Darwin did. The men's collection of birds were kept in a London museum but, during the war, they were removed for safety reasons to a small town called Tring. They've been there ever since and are still used for scientific purposes. In America there was a young man who had a fly tying hobby and was also a flautist who wanted a gold flute. He ended up travelling to England, breaking into the museum and stealing 299 of Wallace's birds - they were exotic colours and not dull browns like Darwin's finches. He started to sell individual feathers to other fishermen who made flies. He was caught but only 1/3rd of the birds were returned - the rest had been sold off or the feathers plucked from the skins and sold individually. If he's been able to sell all of the feathers he'd have made over a million dollars. He claimed he had Asperger's Syndrome and only got one year in gaol. It was an amazing story and well worth listening to. Here's the link if you want to curl up in a cold evening and listening to something interesting: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/654/the-feather-heist
Dinner is over - Samnang came and cooked for me. We were having a good chat and then his mother called for him to head off to Chinese class. He wasn't thrilled.
