So our next stop was Chambok where we stayed with a local family. Fila, our guide, translated so we could communicate with the family. The family members that live in the house are a husband (aged 90), a wife (aged 80), and their daughter (aged 35). The couple have eight children in total, seven children are married and one daughter is unmarried. The family were so kind, friendly and cheerful despite a harrowing story of being chased out of their house by the Khymer Rouge. The elderly lady told us she had no idea how long they had to run for, she just remembers shots been fired and literally having to run for her life across rice fields.
The only daughter not to have married lives with them. The daughter admired our pale skin and said she disliked her dark skin. We told her that people use fake tan to get darker skin where we are from, and she said she'd love to make her skin lighter (nearly all the skin care products here have whitening agents in them) but she can't afford the cream. I think she feels if she had lighter skin she might attract a man to marry her. She is uneducated as the family couldn't afford to educate her. She was shocked when we told her it was a different time of the day where we were from, she had no clue of timezones, she's probably never seen a globe or a map of the world. The whole experience was so humbling. It just goes to show, us Westerners, have little to complain about. I have to say, I hope the Buddhists are correct in their theory on reincarnation. It's horrible to think that this is the only life these people will have and they will never have a chance of a better life.
On a lighter note, the sleep we had (or didn't have) in their house goes down as one of the weirdest sleeps of our lives. There was music blaring from a neighbours house until the wee hours of the morning and at 2:40am the cock-a-doodle-doos started. Then like an orchestra new animals decided to voice themselves and we had pigs, geese, dogs, cats, and of course the cockerel topped the whole symphony off. It was comical but kind of distressing. I woke up feeling abused from such a lack of sleep and Maeve felt like she'd been beaten across the head with a stick for about 20 minutes. At 6am we were up out of our beds to hike to a waterfall, we felt a bit like lemmings, we were confused about what had happened during the night (at Old McDonald's crazy ass farm) and how we'd come to be hiking at such an un-Godly hour. Thankfully we got to swim in the water below the waterfall and it made up for all the bizarre happenings of the night before :)
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