Toothpaste?

After Tuol Sleng, we grabbed lunch at a little café down the street.  A little boy was selling books outside the restaurant.  He was decently dressed, and his spoken English was pretty good.  Anyhow, at one point during lunch, he sat down at our table and asked us if we wanted to buy any books.  He then proceeded to pick up my droid phone and play with it, and find videos on youtube.  As we were leaving the restaurant, we asked him if he wanted a toothbrush.

So my dentist – mind you it was my first time ever visiting this dentist and she knew nothing about me other than the fact that I had a cavity in my mouth – as I spoke to the receptionist about making my next appointment, the dentist overheard that I was going to Cambodia. Immediately she told her assistant to order a bunch of toothbrushes for me to take with me.  I’m constantly surprised by the generosity and compassion of people – they want to be part of it, but they need easy ways to do it.

In general I shy away from giving money to people I meet on the street.  I’ll buy them something on the street to eat if they want, or give a child a pencil or something.  This time, we each carried a couple toothbrushes in our bag to give away. So this kid was not asking for money, just for us to buy a book, so we offered him a toothbrush as we were leaving the restaurant instead.  Jenny hands him the toothbrush, and he says: “thank you. What about the toothpaste?”  Absolutely valid point we talked about before the trip, but we weren’t going to bring a few hundred tubes of toothpaste with us… nor were we expecting an 8 year old to challenge us on that point.  Anyways, we found some humor in this little smarty pants kid...