Saturday, January 15, 2011
blogg-ed at 3:25 pm
It's only slightly more than 2 weeks from my return from Cambodia. But it felt as though it's been a year ago. Indeed a year ago in 2010 and now it's 2011.
I have learned a lot of things, be it about myself, my life etc. during this trip. But I am just not able to list them all out one by one. I just know that I learned something.
Through this trip, I learned to treasure the things I have in life. I have a family, a comfortable house, pretty clothes and bags, clean water supply, wonderful technologies, education etc. These are things which those Cambodian kids do not have and unaware of them.
On the other hand, I learned to love the village and my lifestyle in the village. We wake up in the morning. We take our breakfast, usually bread and cups of Milo which we all share. Go marketing. Go for lessons. Go and build the toilet with eye power. Spend our afternoon playing footballs, badminton, hop scotch, and taking photos with the kids, interact with the other OC members, HTHT, explore the village, take lots of jumpshots etc. We have dinner together at the same time every evening. Queue up to bathe. Beautiful sunrises and sunsets. The never ending debriefing and the interesting circle of trust.
However, when we were there, we all missed home. But I realized that I love the place more than I expected when I return back home. I remember the first morning back at home, I woke up missing the kids, my life over there, where there is no worries, no stress, no heavy workload, and nice company (although I missed family and friends in Singapore).
Now that I am back in Singapore, I treasure everything that I have and I learn to view things from a different perspective and I take things more easily and do things at a slower pace. It's a really really good experience for me and living in a village for a month is definitely an option to escape from this stressful environment.
Jasmine; twenteen
