I thought I might write a short diary of our day to day life, to record for posterity! So I can remember a bit about our life here in Rovieng before we move. So I’ll start as of yesterday – Monday, 16 December.
Woke up at about 6 am with the roosters and hens. The roosters actually start their jobs from about 5 am I think (or anytime during the night) but I am used to them now such that they don’t bother me until 6 when ALL the chickens (ALL 100 or so) start their morning routine.
Ben has been home over the weekend but will be leaving for the forest this morning. I wait for the pitter patting of little feet coming to tell me they are hungry or that they didn’t wet their nappies (yes, still in nappies – I still have hope they will cease to be needed by the time she is 12 or so). The whole family find their way to my bed and soon the “I”m hungry” cries force me out of bed. This morning I need to go to the market to get the bunny trakuen (gazun-u-eh, or water convolvulus) – the bunny eats a lot and I end up having to go to the market every two days for greens. Have worked out that we can keep a good supply in buckets of water and they don’t get withered so that has helped some.
Oh, the night before it rained. It has been dry season for over a month now and so rains are not expected. I washed clothes the previous day and since I had to wait for Ben so that he could use the generator at the same time, I couldn’t get them finished till about lunch time – losing half my day of sun. So by the end of the day, the clothes were not dry and so I didn’t bother to take them off the line. That night it rained. Of course. Because it is the one time for many months that I have left my clothes on the line overnight.
So the hungry one and I get up and head out to the market on the motorbike. Because of the rain it is all muddy at the market. We get a few snacks. I found some fat bananas at the banana lady stand halfway to the market. At the market, we get some waffles, some fresh bread and some leaves. Lots of leaves. A rice bag full of leaves. We get some apples and some nice mandarins. These are great at the moment, all from China no doubt but delicious. We head home like an overloaded donkey.
Ben is organising to leave. Our house is a mess. It is supposed to be a school day so once Ben leaves for his forest, the girls and I start to clean up. I give up on school for the morning and we tidy and clean the house instead. I really can’t function when our house is too messy. By lunch we are pretty much done. We eat. I made a sort of Tom Yum soup with potatoes and carrots and beans. I wanted it to be a Tom Kha but we have no coconut milk (and no chicken since Kha means chicken). The girls ate it pretty well – seemed to enjoy it more than me. We then spent the afternoon reviewing our memory work for our homeschooling program we are attending. Amelie has tentatively decided to go for “memory master” which means she needs to recite ALL the information that we have covered throughout the 24 weeks of classes we have been attending (and not attending, in our case). She has an amazing memory so I’m glad she has taken this opportunity to stretch herself. She needs to work on her times tables and some of her English stuff but otherwise it is pretty much all there. We get in one hour of maths work before it is dark. I then tell the girls to clean their room. This was not done in the morning and a lot of the junk cleaned out of my section of the house was dumped in their room. And so for the next two hours you can hear me saying, “Are you done?” With more and more junk getting dumped on the floor as they decide to go through each of their toy boxes and organise. I’m not sure if it is well organise and I hear them playing right now in the room so maybe it will look just as bad again tonight.
While the cleanup is happening, I fry some potatoes and warm up the leftover Tom Yum. It rains. Finally they are done after I go in and intervene a little. We eat dinner and then find out our water has run out. Forgot to pump. No problems. We just can’t have baths or wash the dishes. It is getting cold and we didn’t get too dirty. The girls try to have a spit bath with a sponge and a bucket of cold, leafy brown rainwater. I decline. Teeth and Bed. I get them to sleep in their cozy, tidy bedroom (usually when Ben is not here they pile into my bed). So I get to go to sleep by myself with a book. It rains again. So much for dry season.
No comments:
Post a Comment