Painting a Children's Library and Adventures to Angkor Wat

This week we left Thailand and moved on in our journey to Cambodia. We all knew that this week especially was going to be a pretty emotional and heavy because of what we were about to learn. We left our hotel in Korat to travel to the border of Thailand and Cambodia. There we crossed over and got our Cambodian visas and found a bus to bring us to the train station. We drove to PTD which stands for Ptea Teuk Dong and that is where we will be staying for a week. During that week we helped paint the library that the children would use and the gift shop, we learned about how mushrooms are grown and put the mushroom spores in crushed corn cob where they would grow, and we also taught at the English school in PTD. It was such a rewarding experience, especially seeing some of the kids faces light up when they saw the newly painted walls in the library! On one of the days we went around and we took a bamboo train down this track which went through these trees, we ate at a local market and climbed steep stairs to a temple, we went a temple where there was a ton of wild monkeys, saw thousands of bats leave this cave, and lastly we saw a killing field and a memorial which was super hard for all of us. We later watched a movie about the killing fields which was super emotional and its all about what was going on in Cambodia during the late 70's and early 80's. Unfortunately some of us got sick including me on the last few days of being at PTD so we missed another day that the group went into the city which was sad and it sounded super fun! That is where the picture attached to this blog is from. Today we are in Siem Reap having a rest day and also visiting Angkor Wat.