Part Tres....

Roti Bom: a delicious dessert that is similar to a crepe but thicker and covered in sweetened condensed milk. It is a little piece of heaven.

Ice Kacang: a Malaysian “dessert” that should be illegal. Picture a snow cone covered in red beans and creamed corn. YUCK.

Amazon: as in I feel like one. The Malaysian people are not very tall so even though I am only 5’6” I tower over most of them.

The maintenance and grounds staff at Dalat: these people are wonderful. Because of the daily rain, every morning there are wet leaves all over the place and every morning the grounds crew is outside with these weird looking brooms sweeping them up. And if something is broken in your office or in your home, they fix it RIGHT AWAY.

The kitchen staff at Dalat: These people can COOK. No frozen pizza and chicken patties at this school. Everyday there are various entrees for the kids to select (usually one Asian choice and one American choice) as well as stuff to make sandwiches, a salad bar and fruit. And NO SODA POP.

The after-school activities at Dalat: there are all kinds of after school activities here for kids AND adults…sports (like floorball, badminton, volleyball, soccer, weight-training) and crafts (knitting, origami, painting) and others (chess, computers, scouts, book clubs). There is always something going on and the campus is busy until it closes at 5:30pm. The campus remains open until 10pm on Friday nights for kids to come in and play drop-in basketball, floorball, play on the playground , and the ever popular four-square. And it is open on Saturdays and Sundays too! It truly is a community campus.

A side benefit of community: So my 11yo son is REALLY smart but REALLY scatter-brained. He could easily read a high school level text…if he could remember where he put it! Well, the other day he did a really good job on his math homework except he did the wrong page.  At first, his teacher told him he could re-do it and turn it in the next day (Kyle was glad he wasn’t going to get a zero). But that meant Kyle had to do two days worth of math in one evening (which had him freaking out). Well, that evening Kyle’s teacher called John’s cell phone and said he had been thinking about it and changed his mind and he wasn’t going to make Kyle re-do the assignment. He said just skip it and move on. That’s what they do here. We know each other personally, we have each other’s phone numbers, we see each other at church. Kyle is more than just a student to Mr. Davis. He is part of his community and it shows.

Little kids learning bahasa: My 5yo gets lessons twice a week in Bahasa which is the Malaysian language, He learned how to say “Selamat Pagi” (say-la-mot pa-gee) which means “Good morning”. Except that with the way Alex talks it sounded like he said “Sit on the potty”.

Practical Jokes: apparently we administrators do not have enough work to do because we spend our days playing jokes on each other. Like we went into Larry’s office and turned everything upside down. And Brian went around flipping everyone’s desktop on their computer screen upside down.

The neighborhood chicken: just the fact that chickens wander around aimlessly cracks me up daily.