Some things get lost in translation…

Opening Day for our Library in Putrom 2 Primary School is slated for March 23rd!  We’re so excited to bring books and creative learning to the beautiful Bunong children living a stone’s throw from the border of Vietnam in some of Cambodia’s last remaining elephant lands.  The project has taken longer, cost more, and had more ups and downs then we were expecting (as most projects tend to do when working in 3rd world or developing countries), but sometimes the challenges were also just very funny!  Case in point:

It might SEEM like a simple thing—take the bus 6 hours to the steaming city of Phnom Penh to buy books for your soon-to-be-opened village library. Since I don’t read Khmai, I spend a lot of time looking at the pictures to get a feel if the title is a fit for the Bunong children in Putrom.

So many things get lost in translation. All this time I thought I knew who the boxer Muhammad Ali was, but according to this translation he apparently was a white man who rather looks like actor Christopher Walken. The lovely sales person here cannot understand why I am cracking up—I can’t stop giggling.