Too short a visit

Friday, December 21

In the morning, we feel successful about the project and everyone is in a good mood. Xander and I spend about an hour in the jewelry store/art room. The children have been making beaded necklaces, bracelets and earrings for a few years now and have gotten really skilled. They are priced low and we figure we can sell them in the US for a higher cost and help sustain the music program further. We leave the store with $100 worth of jewelry and 2 t-shirts. It’s hard to resist keeping a few for ourselves, made by the children we’d been with all week.

I call James from the office and he is still on board with the project and is already thinking about bringing his own band down to Wat Opot as the first stop on their tour. I’m hugely relieved that there is a future in music at the orphanage after all the work we’ve done over the last few months. Finding James was the last (and probably most important) piece in the puzzle.

Xander and I clean up the instruments and put them away, but leave out 3 ukes and jam on “Imagine” with Ya, who still hasn’t gone to school since his injury. It’s finally time to leave and we say a final goodbye to the children before we board the tuk tuk.

After a brief, but tearful goodbye, we are driving down the noisy and dusty roads of the village with Wayne, who is doing an errand in Phnom Penh today.  He enthralls us with gripping stories of his extraordinary life and his time spent in the Vietnam War as a medic. Arriving at the airport, Wayne thanks us for everything we’ve done, but we are the ones who really feel grateful to have been welcomed into such an amazing community.