Today's stops included a visit to the local school in the village where our guide Sam is from, an artisans' workshop and a weaving studio. Let me start by telling you about Kmar Primary School.

The school was really fascinating, especially because it's so important to Sam. He's been pretty instrumental in helping to secure funding for improvements to the school and must be the school's biggest cheerleader. It's gone from a school without walls and 250 children sitting on the ground for their lessons to a school of nearly 700 in three large buildings with about a dozen classrooms and a library.

Today was party day for the school because tomorrow everyone starts a three week vacation for the Cambodian New Year. The students had helped drag all the desks out of their classrooms and set them up under a beautiful shade tree and they were all eating and dancing the morning away.

Everything about the school was bare bones. The students buy their own text books and bring them back and forth to school. The classrooms were pretty empty of anything but a chalkboard and the teacher's desk. There can be upwards of 40 students or more in each classroom.

Many of the rooms have plaques indicating who had given money to pay for the construction of the classroom building.

Sam's name was on the outdoor sink area where the children can wash up after playing outside.

The students come to school for four hours per day, half of them in the morning and half in the afternoon. They switch which part of the day the kids attend every month. This school has students in grades K-6. Some students, including Sam's daughters (and his son, when he's old enough) go to the international school in Siem Reap for the other half of the day to further their education.

A couple of things that really struck both me and Lee were, first, how grubby the school was. There's no effort to throw trash into trash cans. Sam said it really bothers him as well and he's pushing to have receptacles placed around the grounds and start training the children to throw their trash away. Imagine having to teach that. I just take it for granted that you clean up after yourself but both here and in Vietnam it's disconcerting to see how many people don't agree.

The second thing that struck us was how happy, healthy, well-behaved and polite the children were. They were having a great time, laughing, playing, being like children the whole world over. It was delightful to spend the morning with them.