Long Time No See…

So it has been a while since I have given everybody an update. My reasoning for the lack of communication is simple, my life is much slower now and theres not so much to update on. I have small hurdles here and there, but overall my schedule really is not what is was like during training, where I was busy all the time. Thats not to say that I am not busy, its just a different kind of busy and less interesting. I have been contemplating whether or not I will be starting a blog sometime in the near future, and the answer is that I will. I will be backlogging all of the emails I have already sent everyone and once I actually get it up and running, feel free to share it with people you know or that would be interested. The reason I am deciding to do this is because I know I have somewhat reliable internet access, and before I left I was quite unsure if that was going to be something I would have. Now that I know, I will begin to blog, and if anyone has any good blogging websites for amateurs or recommendations, let me know because I am clueless.

Anyway, about a week ago I got sick here for the first time. I have yet to isolate the actual reason for my sickness because it keeps shifting around and around. I feel like it was the stale m&ms that I ate, but in reality, I am living in Cambodia and it could have been a multitude of things, like the beer I choose to wash the m&ms down with. The night I ate those things, I began feeling groggy, I just went to sleep early because I thought that would be the best medicine. I woke up feeling worse, and wound up spending the entire day in bed. My body was aching and I thought I had some sort of mosquito borne virus, probably dengue from how I was feeling. So the next day I felt significantly better, but I also had different symptoms. Instead of the body-aching, I had a more general cold, stuffy nose, headache, but not much a fever. My symptoms subsided soon after that, but I have been struggling to get close to 100% ever since. In reality, that is no different than it would be if I was back home and got sick though, so I am not stressing it too much. Plus, I am fairly well taken care of here, we have a doctor who is available to us 24/7, and even though she might not be terrible close by, we can at least get Cambodia specific health advice whenever we are under the weather. My host family obviously also noticed that I was not feeling well, and they took care of me. They fed me whatever I wanted and whatever I requested that I believed would help me get healthy and were generally kind and understanding of my situation.

After the weather had prevented me from doing so since my last update, I have been able to really get the ball rolling, I guess not only figuratively, with the two basketball teams I will be coaching at my school. I have both a girls team and a boys team, and right now I have a total of 44 students who attend my practices regularly. Sometime by the end of November, I will have whittled my way down to only 12 girls and 12 boys for each team, as that is the number I can take to compete at the provincial level and national level tournaments. At this time, I practice with each group twice a week, an hour each time. I wont be cutting anyone, but I will form a club with the residual members that dont make the team, and those students will either show up for club day to continue learning, or I will be able to move on and just coach my teams. We will see how it goes. I am in a positive and negative situation when it comes to coaching basketball. The volunteer who was there before me, you know, only took his team to the national tournament and wound up getting third place. So when it comes to basketball, coaching at my school comes with somewhat lofty expectations, but well see, I can only do my best and hope that its more than the other guy did, or just hope that I wind up facing worse competition. One of the two.

Thats all for this update. I hope everyone is well and had a good Halloween. There is no Halloween here, but there is a different holiday (I was told that Cambodia has 24 official holidays by the way, which is a lot more then the U.S., which has somewhere between 7-9, I dont know) this weekend and I went into my provincial town to unwind for a bit. Having a job where I am working as a representative of the U.S. pretty much all day everyday, does get old eventually and there is a need to escape that every once in a while. So this was a good weekend to do that, but I am recovering from being sick and dont have any desire to party too hard, but it was still nice to get away for two days. If anyone ever wants to ask me questions, feel free to respond back to me in email form or whatever. I will get back to you as soon as I can. Love you all and take care.