The First Day of Pchum Ben

Back home in the U.S. they have learned to put many of the holidays on Monday so that they can have a three day holiday.  Here in Cambodia they don't worry about the holiday being on a Monday to turn it into a three day holiday, they just make their holidays three days long.  Then if by chance any of those days fall on a Sunday they extend the holiday to Monday.

That is what is happening to us here in Cambodia this week.  Pchum Ben is the Ancestor Holiday, we will explain about it in tomorrow's post, Sister Oveson's turn.  The three day holiday started yesterday on the calendar, but today for days off of work.  Not only do they have the three day holiday for Pchum Ben, but on Thursday it is Commemoration Day of King's Father.  With four days as paid holidays a lot of workers took the whole week off.

This morning we had to go to the Mission Office to pick up our office key that we had loaned President Christensen.  There was only one other time that we experienced as light of traffic as we did today, Khmer New Years, another three day holiday.  There are several different routes that we can take to go to the Mission Office, but one takes us through a round about which is always scary.  Today it was very easy to even negotiate through there.  The pictures of the streets in our collage are usually bumper to bumper, but not today.

We went into the office today, even though nobody else was there to reply to some emails from headquarters, Hong Kong and Taiwan, it is not a holiday in those cities.  As we went we knew that we had six emails that came in over the weekend, when we got there, we found six more and before we were finished there were a lot more.  We expected to spend an hour but ended up staying almost three hours.  That was fine with us, it gave us something to work on today.

This afternoon was spent reading the scriptures, working on our lesson for Saturday and more emails.  We enjoyed the holiday, but we also enjoyed having something to do.