Friendship Village!

Here is the entrance to Friendship Village! Tucked back from the VERY busy dirt road that connects our dorm to Friendship Village.

Friendship Village has an organic garden that produces 80% of the vegetables needed for the children, house mothers and veterans who live in Friendship Village.

The garden is also home to turkeys, chicken and some very feisty geese.

This is Linh, she is 9 years old and so sweet! She loves to paint (especially to mix all of the colors together) and comes into the classrooms every chance she gets. She loves to sit next to you and guide your hand as you paint. We can't communicate but she makes it VERY clear when she doesn't like your work.

A few weeks into working at Friendship Village, I decided that the classrooms needed a new look. The walls, ceilings, windows and toys were filthy and the mustard yellow paint was cracked and peeling. I spoke to the director and the manager of Frienship Village had a meeting with all of the teachers to get approval to paint the classrooms. The manager, is very appropriately named Ms. Ha. She is the only person at Friendship Village who speaks english and she is very blunt. She doesn't hesitate to tell you if you are looking fat or very pretty each day. At the meeting with the teachers, they were all yelling back and forth at each other- very confusing. I assumed that they were furious at me but it turns out that they were just very excited. Since then, the only issue we've had is about how to incorporate bunnies into the underwater scene. I'm not sure why they wanted bunnies, but we worked it out.