April 11th (2020)

 

April 11th

Six am and I am awoken by the smell of food.

Some Colors of Cambodia Advanced Students stayed over last night. They were quiet, so I didn’t really notice them until this morning and their cooking. After waking to the scent of cooking spices, I receive a Facebook PM from Kosal, ‘Good morning Papa, I have kept the breakfast on the table‘. That is the table in the room before me, where the computer is. I don’t know what to say. So I reply a simple ‘Thank you’. The breakfast food is Khmer rice (which I love) and a chicken and vegetable spicy soup, which probably has a name but I don’t know it, and is cooked by Narak. I had awoken to the thoughts of buying bacon, and some eggs, to have for a later breakfast, but breakfast is solved with thanks to these dear Khmers. So all I have to do is eat the food provided and make my ‘Red’ and palm sugar.

The morning has drifted on. I have rested, again.

Running my fingers through my forlorn beard, feeling its coarseness, and observing my hair in the shower room mirror just falling over my ears, it becomes quite obvious that it is more than time for a haircut. Long gone are the days of hair down to my shoulders, now I prefer it off the ears, not over. I’m lucky that we are still allowed out in Cambodia, and that there is no restriction to getting a haircut. In other countries there are lockdowns, and movement restrictions in place, but here I can just walk out, have my hair and beard cut at the hairdresser, walk across the road and shop at the supermarket and all I have to do is have my temperature checked outside the supermarket.

Phanin has cooked, and Kosal has brought the meal to me in a TV dinner tray. It’s a vegetarian tofu dish with rice, accompanied by sliced mango from the twins’s home trees, as dessert. Again, it is so nice of these young people to do this. I really don’t know how to respond to their generosity, but it is certainly wonderful to be able to have Khmer home cooking, something many tourists are denied. I’m not used to others cooking for me, and am very grateful to all these souls at Colors of Cambodia for including me.

The stress of my Project, and the strains of keeping it going while enduring emotional, as well as physical, isolation makes me begin to weigh the possibilities. Maybe I just have too much time on my hands, too much time to think. It’s a curse as well as a luxury.

It’s 10pm and I am hungry. I have a bowl of cornflakes. I read until midnight.

Today’s spend is $21.15

That is $14.15 on shopping (Myojo Bowl Sato Ayam; Dasani Water, Schweppes Tonic Water; Coca Cola Coffee; Farmhouse Milk; Kerrygold Pure Irish Salted Butter; Mild Cheddar, Dutchie Corn Beans Yogurt and Batavia Lettuce the supermarket (Thai Huong Market).

$2 for a Flat White at Caffa.

$5 on a haircut and beard trim.