On Small Mountain

One other thing I did in February was a bicycle trip to Phnom Touch, or Small Mountain. (It's pronounced more like "toit" than the English "touch.") I went with a couple of teachers and a lot of students. The landscape around my province is very flat, but there's one hill that you can see from miles away. This is Phnom Touch. There is a pagoda which encircles and covers the mountain. It's a really beautiful place, and the 20-km bike ride to get there is fantastic.

I first saw the pagoda through the palm trees in an elementary school yard. It seemed very impressive.



The view from the top of the hill is amazing. The strip of green you can see is the area around the road, and then the yellow fields roll out to the horizon.



There's a temple with a huge Buddha statue about halfway up the hill. For some reason, I am a sucker for huge Buddha statues. It's amazing!



Finally, on the way home, one of the girls blew her tire, so she hopped on the back of another bike and steered her own next to her. Nervy girl.

February

Ahhh, and now February.

February was by no means a meaty teaching month. Chinese New Year, although not an official Cambodian holiday, is in practice celebrated by many Cambodians whether they are of Chinese heritage or not. Then the exam period began, so few classes were happening. As I said, exam period doesn't end until March. So I've been doing a lot of non-teaching stuff.

I went to another wedding of a Cambodian and Cambodian-American



JoJo got bigger and, as a total coward, learned how to bark at young girls



I went to Siem Reap with a college friend, where we visited the War Museum



and saw lots of old stuff



and I learned how to pump gas, Khmer-style



I also went to Phnom Penh for the CamTESOL conference. I'm pretty excited to go back to my site and try out some new methods that I've learned about at the conference, specifically something called Team English. Wish me luck!

January

January was a month I have only vague memories of, mostly for self-preservation and also because this is when I was struggling with my camera and didn't take any pictures.

The students at my school were given an official vacation during the first week of the month to help their parents with the rice harvest. I took this opportunity to visit a small town near the Thai border with my host sister. I have a lot to say about this trip, but basically it was amazing! It was interesting to get a glimpse of a life more rural than my own. Also, it was a relaxing vacation, as I didn't feel the need to see the sights or check my email. The town reminded me of the Old West (or what the Old West looks like in movies): everything from houses to fields to trees was dust-colored, and the area has clearly seen better days. Except, strangely, they have ridiculously cheap electricity there (much cheaper than in my town) because of the proximity to Thailand. My host sister and I visited a potato farm and helped chop potatoes for drying. We also checked out a pagoda on top of a quiet mountain. I feel relaxed just remembering it all....

The road out to the border was an experience in and of itself. The feeling was kind of similar to being shoved into a dryer that's on, what with the large number of people in the pickup truck and the size and frequency of the holes/bumps/divots/craters in the road. At one point on the way back our taxi stopped in front of a sign that said "Danger! Mines" and all the men in the car got out to answer the call of nature in the bushes. Despite the awful stories I've heard about "straying from the path," nobody was injured.

After that I went down to Phnom Penh to get some "work" done. You can guess how that turned out. Back at my site on a Tuesday morning, I put on my teacher clothes and made to leave the house. My host brother, who's a 12th grader, just laughed. "Bong Maly, there are no students or teachers at school. You don't need to go today." Usually, he knows more about what's going on at school than I do. So I believed him, but I also thought that if everyone else magically showed up and I wasn't there, I might look lazy. So I went to check it out. Sure enough, the gate to the school was padlocked, and the yard was deserted. So there was no school the second week either.

Peace Corps staff then invited me to a meeting in the next province over, to check out a new university that I've been hearing about. This is where the memory starts to fade. I ate something unfortunate on this trip, got a vicious stomach bug, and spent a lot of the rest of January feeling lethargic. My host sister took a sample (if you know what I mean) to our provincial town for analysis. That's when you know someone loves you.

Somehow I also managed to fall off my bike for the first time since I was 16. I was riding the evil road outta town. At a certain part, the road slopes down steeply to a ditch. I was absent-mindedly riding along the edge of the road when my wheel began to slip down the slope. I overcorrected and found myself flat on my face underneath my bike. I'm pretty sure I didn't hear the other people along the road laughing at me, but I know they saw me, so I was still embarrassed.

January was awesome and cold. I dreaded taking showers. I wore long sleeves. Good times. P.S. I'm over the stomach bug.

December

December was also a pretty meaty teaching month. I lesson planned with my new coteacher for 11th grade



watched my essay students chase a very small snake out of our classroom and kill it with a rock



went to the wedding of a teacher at my school with a Cambodian American



and took my Christmas trip to Siem Reap. I also got word that the rice harvest begins in earnest in late December, so students would start disappearing from class to help their parents cut the rice, thresh the rice, dry the rice, and take it to the rice mill.

November

November was a very meaty teaching month. I began to teach an essay-writing workshop using a fellow Volunteer's syllabus and to teach occasional English classes at a local reproductive health organization. Also, I had a visitor (good to see ya, George!), biked to Ek Phnom with the boys



got a puppy with a diva name



caught a bit of the Bon Om Touk (water festival) after a small meeting in Phnom Penh



and got a computer room installed in my school (not that the computers began working in November).

First Semester Review (October)

The First Semester is officially over in Cambodia. Or it will be in a few days, when the 12th-grade students finish taking their semester exams. But since I don't have to do any more work until March, I say it's over.

The end of a semester is a good time to take stock. So here's a quick review of my school year. I think I'll do a different post for every month so if I get lazy I can stop in the middle.

OCTOBER

School theoretically begins on October 1, but because of Pchum Ben, an important religious Cambodian holiday around the 11th, school really begins around October 15th. I spend a lot of time making Cambodian rice snacks filled with bananas (called ansom jayk) and pork (called ansom chrook). Here's the fam wrapping the snacks up outside my host aunt's house on the ubiquitous bed frame.



Here are the starting ingredients: cut banana leaves for the wrapping, partially cooked rice, yellow beans, and pork fat (bananas not shown).



Here's my mom wrapping her ansom jayk.



Here's a bucket that will eventually be full of our dessert.



Also, the national highway in my town got yellow dashes. Woot!

A Note on Trash

Last month I stumbled on an old issue of Harper's magazine in Phnom Penh, and by a lucky chance it had a great article about a huge dump in Manila, Philippines, which reminded me of my trip to the Phnom Penh dump. If you get a chance, check it out.

A Very Happy Un-Birthday To Me

Today is the 1-year anniversary of my arrival in Cambodia. A year ago today, I couldn't speak a word of Khmer, had never drunk juice straight from a coconut, had never taught the concept of "would rather...than..." to a Cambodian high school student, had never ridden a bike in an ankle-length skirt. It's amazing how much can change in a year.

This means that my scheduled date of return to the United States is 14 months away. I'm hoping to stay to finish the next school year, though, so I might be closer to 17 months away from daily access to French fries.

I suppose an anniversary calls for some reflection on where one has been and where one is going, but I'm feeling kinda sweaty and rather unreflective. We had a small out-of-season rain today, and it made me fall back in love with this country. That is all the reflection I can muster. I promise, I'll try to do more soon.