Despite the necessary side trip to Sihanoukville, we have managed to uphold our personal promise and spend a solid few weeks in the village. The last month has been really busy and productive, and now we find ourselves needing to leave again to renew our visas. It's hard to believe we have already been in the village for two months!

We have spent our weeks working on a variety of projects which often keep us busy from 6.30 in the morning until around 10 at night (when the power is switched off).

Probably the most dominant project over the last few weeks has been our 'why is farming important?' program. After they were taken from the forests, the families of this village were given land and equipment for growing fruit and vegetables. Many of them have taken the opportunity as good fortune and developed very productive and profitable farms. Other families find it difficult to think past basic day-to-day survival and cannot relate to the long-term planning required for good farming. To help motivate and educate the latter, we have been waking up early three times a week. We spend a few hours clearing weeds, building rows and planting with the farmers themselves. After this we gather all the families involved and conduct a visual presentation on the long-term benefits of hard work, as well as some of the consequences of neglect.

It might seem blunt but the lesson always prompts a good discussion, as well as providing a good kick up the bum for some of the able but lazier farmers of the village. The problem is that many families are either too sick, depressed or disheartened to work, and need to be counseled individually to find an alternative solution.

We are working in the evenings with the young adults who study at the high school in Andoung Tuek, nearby. These students are really keen to improve their English, in order to find well paying jobs in the future. A couple of the more motivated ones, Chen and Soly, are even making an effort to pass on their English to the many eager children of the community. It is great to see such a passion for learning, as well as the generosity to share knowledge.

Despite the efforts of Chen and Soly, there are still too many eager children and not enough days in the week, so until we find more teachers, Jess has been filling in. Although it is lots of fun it is nearly impossible to accommodate everyone. Every class is full of different children and their levels vary from not knowing their abc's to knowing body parts and days of the week! It is a challenge to capture all of their limited attention!

Aidan's Capoeira classes are going well. Most of the boys are particularly interested in learning acro movements, whilst the girls are happy to follow Jess around and practice technique... One parent has already jokingly complained that his kid is up all night practicing!!

The community centre is nearing completion. This project has been on the go since day one, and is turning out to be one of the most rewarding parts of our stay. The idea was to have the community help build it, in order to instill a sense of ownership. When we first explained this to the staff, there was a lot of cynicism. They didn't believe that the community would want to put in any effort. In stubbornness we invited the community leaders to a meeting to explain the purpose of the centre, and asked each family to donate a few grass-thatched roof panels. The response was overwhelmingly inspiring. More than two hundred grass panels were donated, which was one hundred and ninety more than most of us expected!

We have just started to help teach lessons about the importance of basic hygiene, waste disposal and water management. With the help of Shachar, another volunteer, we spent a couple of weeks brainstorming some practical and light-hearted lesson plans. We tested our ideas with a pilot lesson for all the staff, made some adjustments and followed with a lesson for the community health committee. A few of the women on the committee really felt empowered and we are currently guiding them through small group sessions where they teach the lessons. It is really generating some positive discussion and raising awareness. Hopefully we will see some changes around the village in the near future.

To lighten the mood, Jess and the other girls have started arts and craft classes with the children every Friday using mainly recycled and natural materials. The kids are amazingly creative and enthusiastic and the classes are always a great end to the week.

Our weekends have been equally busy and exciting. We spent one weekend with the other volunteers and all the Khmer staff at the closest beach, in Sre Ambel, about an hour and a half from the village by motorbike. Aidan attempted to teach them beach cricket with a home-made bat whilst everybody else learnt to float in the steamy shallow water. Along the beach there were several abandoned wooden bungalows, seemingly forgotten and neglected after the French moved out. Hopefully we can make it back for a camp out!

We also took the opportunity to celebrate Jess's favourite field technician, Mary's, birthday. Cambodians don't really celebrate birthdays, so Mary was in a state of shock to say the least, when we smothered her with gifts and praise in typical over-the-top Israeli fashion!

To balance things out, the following weekend was absolute mayhem. A group of dentists, some Khmer, some English decided to visit our village for a free check-up. Having grown up in the forest, most of the villagers have never seen a dentist before (or a toothbrush for that matter...). Although limited in resources, the eight dentists managed to check out over 100 patients in one day. After the first patient, a simple check-up turned into extraction-mania. Nearly everyone had at least one tooth pulled out. We have never seen so many teeth, or so much blood before. Aidan occupied himself by playing games to distract the waiting children, whilst Jess was given a crash-course in dentistry assistance and rotated between writing down the patient's info, passing equipment and holding people's hands! A lot of people would have woken up sore and sorry the next morning! The craziest part of it all was their immense pain tolerance. Obviously accustomed to pain, not one person cried or screamed all day, in fact most of them barely even flinched!!

To thank the volunteer dentists, we took them to the waterfalls in Chi Phat the next day. In the afternoon we all jumped on a few dirt bikes and a four wheeler and bounced out to a few of the reforestation sites. They weren't quite as majestic as we were expecting, but it was really nice to see one of the major objectives of the project achieving a positive result. This work also provides ethical employment for many of the poor villagers in SB and Chi Phat.

Sadly, we also had to say goodbye to another of the volunteers, Shachar 'Ricardo' Langer from Israel. Shachar was a good friend, and must have thought the same of us, as he left us his travel guitar. A gift from a couple he had met in New Zealand, it was meant to be passed from traveller to traveller. So now we have an exciting tradition to carry and pass on to whoever we deem worthy, and hopefully we can learn some nice tunes and entertain a few people along the way.

Although we are sorry that our hammock time has become less and less, the last month has been absolutely amazing. Hence the rant! Now it is time again to renew our third visa, so we are taking the chance to relax and become tourists again with a visit to the famous Tatai waterfalls!