Cambodia Trip Part 2

So I as I mentioned I was so excited to get over to Tu Anh's house and get some good cooking and see all the kids (and Tu Anh of course!) plus all the siblings and her mom. I seriously love her mom. She is so funny. So I hopped on my bike and rode down to Beoung Tra Bet (the neighborhood where she lives) and was so surprised! They pulled down the shanty town and built a huge shopping center surrounded by really nice three story homes. It was a little eerie though because only a handful of the homes are inhabited, and a little sad because I am wondering where all the poor people who used to live there are now...

So I got to their house and we had a lovely family reunion. It was seriously so great to see them and to catch up. I know most of Tu Anh's siblings pretty well so it was fun to see them all again and it was great to hear that Tuan (her brother) was going to church again and her nephew Phuoc was too. It made me so happy. When I was a missionary Tu Anh's neice Hien was only 2 years old and was one of my favorites. She was so cute following us around and mimicing us when we prayed. We loved having family home evening at their house. It was such a blast. Here are pictures I have taken of Hien over the years as she has grown up:

Hien and her brother Hai when I was in Cambodia 3 years ago. Hien was 5. How cute is she!?

Hien this past trip: age 7 (she's almost 8).

She was a riot. Still wanted to follow us around and go to the market with us and she and I played countless rounds of hopscotch with our fingers. She would draw the the hopscotch court on a piece of paper and then we would have little rocks we threw on the court and played hopscotch with our fingers. She wanted to play over and over. I got bored after about 20 minutes. So I compromised and watched the Barbie version of Thumbelina. Painful.

The following day I went back to Tu Anh's to hang out with her and have fun and fortunately I was able to find Kha Ai's phone number and set up time to see her. She invited me over to dinner at her house for my last night in Cambodia and then to take me to the airport the following day. So Kha Ai and I have a very special relationship. She had been studying with missionaries off and on for about 2 years before I started to teach her. We clicked right off the bat. I feel very strongly that she is the reason I was called to serve in Cambodia as a missionary and why my language skills were as good as they were. We had to have very serious and indepth doctrinal conversations and I wouldn't have been able to do that if I couldn't speak Vietnamese very well. She thinks of me as the person who helped change her life and helped her become happy. Needless to say there is a lot of mutual love there. I was so happy to find out that not only is she active in the church she is the district Relief Society president! She has a lot of money and she uses it all the time to help the members with no expectation of a return at all. The morning she picked me up to go to the airport we dropped her daughter at the doctor with the nanny, went to see a member whose mother had just died at the Buddhist temple, and then went to the hospital to visit a girl dying of cancer. She is seriously so amazing and generous and I am so blessed to know her! I love you Ai!!

Please ignore the intense sunburn! I am literally neon red.