Of all the things that could be considered challenging for me, the one thing I think I deserve a commendation for is eating food that I would never dare try. I don’t know whether I can safely say that I’ve learnt anything from my little incident, but probably that I should find out something before jumping right into your assumptions? Or maybe “try, you’ll like it” is not true. Either way, I’ve somehow unintentionally made myself step out of my comfort zone, which was what Challenge Week was for anyway.
My situation was this: after a whole morning playing and teaching the children of Sok Sabay, I was famished. The last time we had lunch in the home, we had rice with chicken and potatoes. It was yummy. I expected something similar this time, and my eyes lit up when I saw what I thought were beef with green beans. I helped myself to a generous portion. I took a huge mouthful. The rice was warm. Another mouthful, the sauce was tasty and the green beans were crunchy. And another. The beef was tender. The beef was also surprisingly rich.
“Guys?” I quivered, “Is this.. liver?” Yes, of course, Kat, chicken liver. My stomach churned and I looked down the long table and saw the children eating chicken liver and looked down at the plates of chicken liver and looked down at my own plate of chicken liver. I know eating organs is common in most parts of Asia, but it was never meant for me. I can’t even eat seafood; you’d expect me to eat liver? But I remembered my manners and I remembered where I was and figured that there was no way out of it.
I suppose this story would not have much of an impact for you daring eaters, but I am honestly surprised at myself for finishing that plate. Take this in whichever way you want, it could show how one can overcome anything, or how things could always take a wrong turn for you, or how one will always somehow end up stuck in a situation. Either way, of all the possible challenges that could have happened, I had to get the one where I was stuck with eating something that absolutely does not appeal to me.
However, that did not stop me from enjoying the rest of the day. I brushed it aside like a fun challenge and had another enjoyable afternoon with the children. By the 4th day with them, we had pretty much run out of things to teach them that most of it was us teaching each other games.
The two sessions there are have two different kinds of fun. In the morning, the group is much bigger and it is mostly made of the younger children. We did an activity where the 3 separate groups had to assemble the countries of South-East Asia into a map and match their respective flags. It was fun to watch how my group worked together to figure out the problem of the sizes of the countries being out of scale, like, say, Brunei was the same size as the Malaysian Peninsula. Their display was the neatest thing I’ve ever seen. It could have put mine to shame, if I had to make one.
The whole day was basically us having to play like how we would have played 10 years ago, and we enjoyed it. I don’t think 7-year old me would have appreciated the chicken liver, though.
The Hebat 