The roosters started crowing at 3:30AM, the dogs started barking at 4:30AM and the sun rose at 5:30AM. I am so happy I brought earplugs! We headed down to the river to bathe...
Kenny's mom found a rat around 8AM and sold it to a neighbor.
Then I headed in the back yard to the outhouse.
For those of you who may have never seen one, this is a squat toilet:
Kenny's father makes fishing nets when he is not harvesting sticky rice or fishing. Each net takes him about two weeks to make and the earns about US$8 for a net.
After breakfast we headed over the brand new primary school recently constructed by Unicef. My eyes filled up with tears when I saw this building. This village is so poor and, by comparison, this school is majestic. Kudos to Unicef!
At only 20 years old, Kenny has a wonderful project to teach English to the children in his village and the surrounding ones. He travels out every weekend to teach. This weekend I taught a two hour English workshop to about a dozen students. Among other activities, we had great fun singing "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star."
Here is Kenny's website:
www.communityreadingroom.weebly.com
A walk behind the school...
Kenny's nephew prepares to spear fish:
Lunch was a delicious stir-fry of chicken and greens with sticky rice...
While we waited for the bus back to Luang Prabang, we watched a live call-in program on Laos TV. Kenny picked up his cell phone and got the woman on the screen on the phone during a commercial break. Minutes later, the she came on back on TV and said - in perfect English - "And thanks to Mr. Chi from New York from Kenny." What a sweet moment!
Tangentially, when I returned to Luang Prabang that afternoon I met a woman at my guest house who'd just arrived on her bicycle... from Switzerland! She rode the whole way over the span of a year only choosing to take the train through Afghanistan due to the war... amazing!
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