My pain and fever gone, but still low energy and feel sick when I eat. I went to church on Sunday but couldn't stand up for a whole song. Still can't ride my bike. And talking in khmer is exhausting on the best of days so you can imagine now.

How rude!

“ When you’re ready to go out for dinner come to our room,” I said to my mum.

My husband Kimsoeun and both our mums were on holiday together. As my mum only speaks English and my mother-in-law only speaks Cambodia it was an interesting experience for them to be sharing a guesthouse room for the week. And it meant I had to say everything twice.

“When you’re ready to go out for dinner come to our room.” I said to my mother-in-law in Cambodian.

She had a funny look on her face. I guess she didn’t understand me, so I tried again. She still had a funny look, so I tried to say the same thing in a different way. It’s so hard to learn a new language! Maybe I wasn’t pronouncing something correctly, or my words were totally out of order.

I gave up and went back to the room I was sharing with my Kimsoeun; I guess she’d figure it out.

That night as we were eating Kimsoeun explained to me that he had just explained to his mum that I didn’t mean to offend her, it’s just the way we talk in English. Huh? How had I offended her? And I didn’t even talk to her in English.

It turns out that I was being really rude when I said “our room”. I should have said “my room”. I did make a language mistake, but it wasn’t to do with my pronunciation or grammar. If I had been talking to someone younger it would have been fine. It’s not something I would have guessed at all.

I was glad that Kimsoeun was able to explain to me that I had offended her and why, other wise I would not have known. And I was also glad that he could explain to her that I wasn’t intending to be rude.

I wonder how many other times I have offended people and not been aware. If there is no friend around to explain it must be so easy to come across in the wrong way and not even know about it. It highlights how important love and humility are in cross-cultural relating.

dengue

I haven't been online much recently as I've been sick. Thankfully I'm almost better. It looks like I had dengue fever although for most of the week we thought it was a fever due to an ear infection, then an allergic reaction to the antibiotics.

I only had a blood test yesterday, 6 days after the fever started and the doctor said probably too late to show anything, my temp was already down and body aches gone. But he just rang and said that its likely I did have dengue as my platelet count was 135,000. He said normal is between 150,000 to 350,000.

Hopefully I'll get better completely and quickly, dengue recovering sometimes has complications.

Well, here is a photo of our kitchen wall, and in the corner you can see KS cooking...

The thing about snails detox that I forgot to write last time is that before he cooked the snails KS gave them chilli to eat, to clean them out.

Snails detox and exciting marking

This week Soeun has been marking an exercise where students need to observe, interpret and apply a Bible passage in prep for a sermon or Bible study (SMBCspeak: triangle). He's been excited to see that students have worked hard and learnt a lot. Its unusual for me to hear Soeun talk about marking student's work as exciting, he usually finds it really tedious.

For those of you in Oz who packed an Operation Christmas Child box, you might be interested to read this blog by a girl who lives in Phnom Penh.