$400 - Part I...

Four hundred dollars can go a long way. Did you know they accept American money over here? Kinda nice. (as long as it is in the form of crisp, clean bills).No painful exchanging of the money process. Just grab your wallet and head out to the markets.

Jeff and I were commissioned to outfit the dorm room of the Daughters building. Interior decorators, if you will. It's okay, I'm comfortable saying it. The future site of Daughters is a unique building in that it sits on a bend in the road. The room dimensions weren't exactly easy to determine. Do you remember that scene in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (the Gene Wilder version, not the infinitely less watchable Johnny Depp version) where they're starting the tour of the factory and enter a hallway that continues to get narrower the further in they go. Well, that's kind of what we're dealing with here...but I digress.

The main things we looked for yesterday were wardrobes and beds for the 10 girls that would be living there during the training program. We visited several different shops with our translator, bobbing and weaving through the tuk tuks, motos, and Lexi (plural for Lexus - yes, lots of Lexi). The prices of the wardrobes were "soft" and in the end, we got some pretty nice pieces of furniture at $40 a piece, or $400 total.

I remember several brief conversations with my wife and others about the fact that as we moved further into our journey in Cambodia that it may feel a lot like Alice in Wonderland diving into that famous rabbit hole - "curiouser and curiouser", one opportunity opening up infinitely more possibilities. We thought we were just shopping for beds and wardrobes, but as we got deeper into the process, we realized that we actually needed laundry racks, fans, pillows, sheets, etc.

This is what it's been like so far. We start out the day with a brief checklist in hand, and before you know it, several things get added, and the day is gone. But, that's just the first half of the day, my friends. I'll let Jeff take over and talk about the rest of the day.

From Phnom Penh,
Clint