Return from Vacation-Land

My Christmas present to myself was a 4-day vacation to Siem Reap town to hang out with my Peace Corps buddies and stuff myself full of Western food. I managed to blow nearly an entire month's salary in 4 days, 1.5 of which were spent on a bus. Go me! (Incidentally, I have discovered what must be one of the least desirable jobs in Cambodia: bus driver on the Siem Reap-Battambang route. My butt has yet to forgive me for doing this twice ever. Imagine if it was your job...? To be sure, there are worse roads in Cambodia, but I'll venture that few are as bad for as long.)

I'll say more on Siem Reap later, and commence with the weekend rundown. It mostly involved long periods of internet-gazing punctuated by large Western meals (and beers). Kevin, Sarah, and I also discovered a swimming pool, which may be the best place to spend Christmas Eve, ever. Sarah and I forgot our swimsuits, so we swam Khmer style, in our clothes.



And the sun, how it shone.



I also managed to get into the Angkor Wat complex for a quick sunset photo op (entry is free for foreigners after 5:30 pm) on my friend's rickety bike (no offense, Sarah). I couldn't make it up any temple stairs before twilight really set in, so I didn't get any spectacular photos. But now I can at least say that I have laid my eyes on Angkor Wat, and this less than 11 months after arriving in Cambodia. Again, go me! I nearly got lost in the complex in the twilight but managed to find the road back to town in time for a hamburger.



For now, I'm back at my site, back to speaking Khmer, back to eating rice. Damn, it feels good.

Merry Christmas, all!

The Post, It Works!

Thank you so much to all of you who sent cards and letters to the new post office box! It does work, and it's fast. You made my day. :-)

Wishing You a Merry Christmas

On Wednesday afternoon last week, I was given the task of teaching one of my 10th grade classes alone (my co-teacher was sick). I decided that since it was so close to Christmas and I could not for the life of me remember what chapter we were studying, we would learn a Christmas song.

Now I'm certainly not trying to convert these devout Buddhists, so I chose a fairly secular song: We Wish You a Merry Christmas. This one also has the advantage of being repetitive, so its total word count is low. (We wish you a merry Christmas/We wish you a merry Christmas/We wish you a merry Christmas/And a happy New Year. How many words is that, total? Ten.)

I wrote it all up on the board and had the students copy it down. I had them practice pronouncing "Christmas" (Cambodians tend to say Chris-mack) and defined all the strange words (merry, tidings, kin). We said all the lines together to get the rhythm. Then, right at the end of the class, the devil planted a fateful seed in my brain. Despite my sore throat, impending cold, and history of complete tone-deafness, I should sing this song to the students! So they can hear what it really sounds like, in America.

I opened my mouth, and out it came. I would say butcher is not exactly the right word for what I did to that song. More like I was Crazy Horse, and We Wish You a Merry Christmas was General Custer et al.

I realized quickly how badly it was going, but I couldn't very well stop in the middle, so I finished that whole darn song. And then fled the classroom: "Time's up!" I was worried I would never be able to show my face in there again. I had started off with a fun activity and turned it into a face-losing karaoke experience. Afterwards, two of my students came up to me in the teachers' room/vice principal's office and commented on "how strange" I had been at the end of class. But they had clearly forgiven any voice cracks, any pain I had inflicted on them. They only wanted to chat.

And with that I felt redeemed. Of course I can go back to that class. I will see them next Wednesday. And maybe one day, when they are graduating from 11th grade and I am preparing to return to the States, we will all reminisce with fondness about "that time Teacher sang We Wish You a Merry Christmas." Maybe they'll even ask me to do it again. Maybe I should start practicing now, just in case...

Ek Phnom

Back in November, Kevin, Rennie and I took a little bike journey to Ek Phnom. Ek (pronounced Ike) Phnom is a pre-Angkorean ruin just outside the main town of Battambang. I hear that it pales in comparison with Angkor Wat, which I have yet to set my eyes on, so I can say only this: Ek Phnom is freakin adorable. It's a mini-ruin, tucked back behind a modern temple and a huge statue of the Buddha, that most tourists never manage to see (a large part of the appeal). Parts of the temple are in the grip of the same trees with the gnarled roots that are so famous at Angkor Wat, only on a much smaller scale. The road to the ruin is charming, along the banks of what I assume is the Sangker River. Any visitors to Battambang should take the time to do this.

Here's a picture of the old temple in the foreground and a more modern temple in the background. The old temple is covered not only in trees but also in beautiful purple flowers.



Here are the trees, crafting their wily plans for stationary world domination...



Here are the boys, surely contemplating Shelley's sonnet (or else calculating exactly how many gallons of sweat we have shed this day).



And here is the largest Buddha I have ever seen.

Teachin

When Peace Corps staffers came to visit my site, they took some action photos. Here's class 12B. Aren't the students just precious in their uniforms? The classroom itself is one of the school's older classrooms (our school has built several new buildings within the last year, but the old buildings date from the early 90s). Every classroom at the school has a board of some kind (the new ones have whiteboards!), desks, and pictures of the Cambodian monarchs. Class size is generally between 30 and 50, although at the junior highs it can be as high as 60 or 70. Students don't change rooms like they do in the States. They sit in the same desk for 4 hours each morning or afternoon while teachers rotate through. There are no advanced or remedial classes. If a student is at a lower or higher level than his or her classmates, it must simply be accepted.



The concept I'm getting ready to teach here is past perfect progressive, nearly the most useless verb tense in the English language (had been [verb]-ing). Possibly surpassed only by future perfect progressive (will have been [verb]-ing).

But the students must learn all the tenses, so we teach the common ones and the uncommon ones. English sure has a lot of tenses. Do we need them all? Discuss.

The Calm Before the Storm

Soooo, I haven't been posting much lately because all of my recent attempts to get at the internet have been thwarted. The (ridiculously expensive) internet place in my town has had connection problems, and I haven't gone to my provincial town where I can sit down and type for hours. The good news is that for the holidays I have a connection and time to spare. Yay internet!

My last few weeks have been one of the more intense periods of teaching since I've arrived at my site. My co-teachers and I have actually done things like finish chapters, play review games, and give tests. During my outside-of-school teaching, I've started working on the grammatical concept of nouns and the compositional concept of the body of an essay.

I've also attended the wedding of a good Khmer friend of mine, and a couple of bons (I have no idea what the English word for bon is. I would guess somewhere between ceremony and party.). A real teacher is trying to teach me to read Khmer. And I'm on the 300-somethingth page of The Brothers Karamazov. Only 600 left to go!

Whoops!

Angelina Jolie, aka JoJo the Puppy, is not actually a male puppy. She is a female puppy. Which just makes her prima donna-ness even cuter. She's a little bigger now, and still fuzzy, and she barks playfully at all the mysterious animals that live around our house. Also my sarong. One of my new games is throwing her the carcasses of dried-out toads, which she will attack in the most adorable puppy way. I'm worried that I'm turning her into a vicious killer. I hope this is not true. Look at those eyes....

Puppy Smackdown

My aunt has a new puppy. He may be the cutest dog in the world. The only problem I have in proving this is that whenever I pull the camera out, the little guy gets so excited that he gets tangled up in my sarong. I did finally succeed in snapping him nibbling on my finger.



Is my dog cuter than yours, Jeska?



Maybe. Maybe.

What It's All About

For a long time, I've been meaning to write about what it is exactly that I'm doing here in Cambodia. But it turns out that it's not so easy to describe in just a few paragraphs. Being a Volunteer is its own little world, and to describe it, I need to talk about some of the philosophy behind the Peace Corps, which can't be that interesting to you all and also makes me feel self-conscious because it's so....self-promoting?

But I can't let this all go unsaid any longer. After all, it is the very reason that I am here, and it is what I have really, REALLY been doing these last 9 months (even though it looks like I've just been taking a lot of vacations and trying desperately to amuse myself).

So. What is it, exactly, that I'm doing? The first answer is that I'm an English co-teacher at a rural Cambodian high school. That hopefully, with support from me, my co-teachers will improve their English and their teaching methods and my students will improve their English. And that I, along with the other Volunteers, will develop low-cost student-centered Cambodia-specific English teaching materials for future use by Volunteers and Cambodian teachers.

But that is just the beginning. And here's where the Peace Corps philosophy comes into play and I get a little squirmy. In theory, Volunteers integrate themselves into a community by learning the language, working with an existing local organization or government office, and (in our cases) living with a host family. We do this to be effective at our jobs and also to gain trust within the community. Once we have gained that trust, we are, working with the community itself, to analyze and try to meet our community's other needs, be they health needs, infrastructure needs (God forbid), knowledge needs, sanitation needs, agricultural needs, etc. We are not to do this on our own, because as outsiders (despite our integration), we are not as familiar with our community as the insiders (duh). And because any projects to meet the needs of the community will fail if they do not have community support (also duh).

So. We are not only engaged in our primary activity (English teaching) but also engaged in facilitating positive changes in our communities (squirminess level increasing...).

In addition (you thought this couldn't go on any longer, didn't you?), we are supposed to be loci of cross-cultural exchange. We are to introduce host-country nationals (HCNs) to some aspects of American culture, and to introduce Americans to some aspects of our host country's culture. (These are known as Peace Corps Goals 2 and 3, Goal 1 being what I described above, to provide technically trained Volunteers to host countries to build the host countries' own capacities in certain fields.)

This part can actually be a lot of pressure. We're the only direct contact many Cambodians have with Americans, and we don't want our own country to be perceived poorly based on our behavior. And because Cambodian culture is more conservative than American culture, we (especially the women) have to be careful how we dress, what we drink, what we say. That is why I have attempted not to write anything controversial in this blog. If any of my Cambodian colleagues were to read a negative comment I made about some aspect of teaching in Cambodia, it would undermine their trust of me. (This may be why I've said very little about teaching, period: it's hard to separate my acceptable thoughts from my controversial ones. What I can say is that overall, teaching is fantastic. There are minor irritants and institutionalized quirks, but the general practice of helping young people learn gives me warm fuzzies.)

When you put it all together, we Volunteers are supposed to be teachers, development workers, and cultural ambassadors (squirminess level approaching red...). How much of this happens in practice and not just theory, I have no idea. There's plenty of time for me to find out: I have nearly 2 school years left before I am finished here.

Now you know more than you ever wanted to about the Peace Corps, but I hope it gives you a better picture of what I'm doing, or trying to do.

Finally, altogether, in conclusion, to sum it all up, I just want to say that some days are hard and some days are easy and some days are in between. But what has so far distinguished my time here is the vividness with which the bad days suck and the good days shine. And in the end, that is what Cambodia has given to me, and why I don't give up on the ideal of being so many different things at once.

Cows and a Palm Tree

I've had the darnedest time learning to tell coconut trees and palm trees apart (yes, they are different) since arriving in Cambodia. But I am fairly sure that the specimen below is a palm tree.



I'm also fairly sure that cows + palm tree = something funny. I'm just not sure how. Maybe it has to do with my lonely bicycle standing by the tree?

At any rate, this is near the ancient ruin of Ek Phnom and one of the biggest Buddha statues I've ever seen. See if that impresses the cows though.

Sunset over the Tonle Sap

Phnom Penh during the Water Festival (Bon Am Tuk) is a place of frenzy and motion. The sunset was in motion too, blazing across the sky and disappearing as I crossed the Tonle Sap on a ferry.

Links

I'm trying to collect the links to the blogs of the other PCVs in Cambodia over on the left. If you're sitting around at the office with nothing to do (and I know you are), check them out. We are all in slightly different situations and have different perspectives on our service. Also, some of them are better photographers than I am. Enjoy!

Library Update

The Ministry of Education has decided that the site originally picked for the new library is not suitable, as putting the library there would not be attractive. So no further work has been done on the library. They are looking into two other sites, both of which are currently under water (one spot is actually a pond, the other is just flooded from all the rain we had last week). I am reserving judgment until the thing is actually built.

An Uphill Battle

These are the results of my attempts to introduce ultimate in Cambodia. Perhaps I should have started with an age group that doesn't encompass 2-year-olds.



Aagh! This disc's gone to the Dark Side: it's eating her face!



But I think she has promise....

Rain Day

Despite my claims that rainy season has ended, there are still occasional showers that make life unpredictable. Last week the weather in Cambodia once again threw me for a loop. (Forgive me if I've turned into an old lady, talking about the weather all the time.)

One night last week we had a powerful storm (lying in my bed I got sprinkled because my window wasn't closed tight enough and the rain came in through the cracks between boards in the wall). The storm kept up through the morning. I didn't really want to go to school in the rain but it's my job so I put on my skirt and biked reluctantly to the school. When I got there, I found that only about a quarter to a third of the students had shown up that morning. About the same proportion of teachers showed. The teachers, after seeing the half-full classrooms, decided they couldn't teach, as they would simply need to do the lessons over again when all the students returned. So all the teachers hung out under the eaves in front of the school office, chatting. Once the students realized that there would be no instruction, they drifted away as well, slowly riding their bikes and motos out of the schoolyard and back to their homes. Once the teachers felt that the students were gone for good, we left as well. By the time the sun came out around 9 o'clock, the schoolyard was empty.

Frustrating? Of course. After all, we live in Cambodia. It rains here. Students can't just skip school every time it rains: they'd never learn anything. But somehow just enough truancy was involved on all sides so that the teachers could blame the students (for not coming) and the students could blame the teachers (for not teaching). Since my coteacher had left by the time I got to school, and he was the one with the copies of the test we were to give that day, I decided not to make a point by teaching my half-empty classroom. I just let it go and drifted away myself, complicit in the students' and teachers' one-day escape.

Dedicatin' the Library

Work on the new library at my school is scheduled to begin soon, so we had a ceremony last week to bless the undertaking. There was a school assembly where officials gave speeches and a dancer performed a traditional Khmer dance. I was told that she is supposed to look like a peacock, with the feathers in her hair and her delicate hand movements.



I have no idea what the scarf is for. But it sure is purdy.

Wintertiii-iiime

The weather in Cambodia has finally broken. It's cool season now, and the temperature here falls into the range of Tropical Paradise. It's balmy; breezy; temperate, even.

Not that I want to seem ungrateful for all this, but....well, the drop in air temperature has caused a corresponding drop in the temperature of the water we use to bathe. I estimate it to be hovering right around 14 degrees (hey--it could happen). Pretty soon I'm going to start boiling my bathing water. Just like the pioneers!

Overall, the trade-off is worth it.

Oh. Darn.

Well, to make more poignant my sadness about the change from Malys to Maly, I learned today that the white Malys flower is jasmine, only the most beautiful and fragrant (and delicious in tea) flower in all the world. *sigh*

Another Must-Read

If you have not yet read George Orwell's Burmese Days, now is the time. It's a sad novel, to be sure, about the damage done to a culture and to many a human soul by colonialism. And a fellow Volunteer commented to me that Flory should be the vice-president of the Most Humiliated Protagonists Club.

But somehow, it's also a really enjoyable read. The best parts are the uniquely Southeast Asian details: the preciousness of ice during the hot season; the poor quality, physically and otherwise, of available books; the proudly kept long mole-hairs. Actually, maybe you should visit Cambodia before reading this book. I bet it makes the experience that much more vivid.

You Don't Have To Call Me Darlin'

In Cambodia, people don't usually address you by your first name: they use family or status terms. Older siblings are called Bong, but so are people of the same general age group as you are. Ohn seems to be used for younger people in general. Ming, Bhoo, and Om are titles used for aunts and uncles as well as people of your parents' general age group. Yeay and Ta are titles for grandparents and the greatly aged. Monks are called either Loak Ta, Loak Bong, or Loak Pa-ohn, depending on their age in relation to yours. Teachers are called Neak Kru (women) or Loak Kru (men). And important people like your boss, the village chief, the commune chief, other political personages, and the school director are usually called by their titles.

At home, I'm Bong Maly to all my younger siblings and Maly Ain (my Maly) to my mother. If I'm far away and someone is shouting, they call me Maly Uy (dear Maly). At school, I'm Teacher (not Neak Kru, strangely).

So with all this status-conscious naming, what do sweethearts call each other? Boys are called Bong and girls are called Ohn. Is this what husbands and wives call each other, I asked my family. Oh, no. Married couples have a special form of address. If their child is named Vanny, one calls out Ma Vanny (mother of Vanny) or Pa Vanny (father of Vanny) to locate the other. I asked my mother if couples use each other's first names: she said no.

Comfort Food

Vegetarian food has come to Battambang:



!

I could stop here but I feel compelled to gush. A fellow Volunteer who learned of this vegetarian restaurant in Battambang town (on the diagonal road between the bus station and Road 3) introduced me to the "mee ayu veng" (long life noodles) and I am hooked! Noodles, warm broth, mushrooms, veggies, and fake meat all delicately complement each other in one delicious bowl. It ain't no black-bean burger, and the menu isn't quite as extensive as that available at Sunflower, but this is the most delightful culinary discovery I've made in Cambodia since pumpkin stir-fry. One more visit and I think I will officially be a regular.

The restaurant-review deets: the clientele seems to be mostly Cambodian with the occasional Westerner, and a bowl of long-life noodles and a cup of iced coffee comes out to $1. Per Cambodian custom, they're open when they're open.

Confused in Cambodia

Over my 7 months of being a stranger in Cambodia, I've come to learn that introductions are just Not Done. The only reason I can think of that could explain this is that most people already know everybody else in their family, neighborhood, and workplace: if you live in the same village long enough, no one is a stranger. Kids grow up with neighbors and cousins, and have never not known their names and relationships. So when a complete stranger comes onto the scene, perhaps it doesn't occur to Cambodians to introduce her to the long-time inhabitants. I find myself struggling when a neighbor I've never seen before will emerge from our kitchen, knowing my name and asking how I am; I need to judge, based on gender and apparent age (note: ages are deceptive here), whether I should address them as "Uncle" or "Little Sister" or "Grandmother."

The one time I really had a chance to do a great job with an introduction was when I first met my Cambodian co-teacher while I was still in training. Back in my training village, when I noticed that Cambodians struggled to pronounce my name, I asked my training host family to give me a Khmer name. Since they called me "Lih" (the Z at the end being the sticking point), they gave me the Khmer name Malys (pronounced "ma-LIH"), which is also the name of a white flower. Unaware of the significance of the breathy H at the end, I introduced myself to my permanent-site co-teacher as Maly (pronounced "ma-LEE"), which has no special meaning but is a fairly common name (my co-teacher's wife is also named Maly). This version of my name is now set in stone in my permanent site. I don't know what lesson can be learned from this. Maybe I just need to accept that in Cambodia, it's more important that people call me "Big Sister" or "Teacher" than that they call me any particular name. And of course, if all else fails, they can just call me "Barang."

One Cool NGO

When Peace Corps arranged field trips to some of the NGOs around Phnom Penh as part of our training last week, I thought that we'd head to drab offices where the only thing we'd see in action would be a row of photocopiers. Yay for being wrong! My group headed to Pour un Sourire d'Enfant (PSE), which is French for "For the Smile of a Child" (or something). This NGO is basically awesome.



Here's the story: Phnom Penh has a dump. It's not like an American dump. Because Cambodia is a poor country, people already sort their trash and refrain from throwing away anything that could be of value. Anything recyclable (e.g., cardboard or plastics) has been sold to wholesale recyclables vendors (I'm not sure exactly how this works, but when the recyclables cart comes around my town with its squeaky horn, people rush out to buy or sell the scraps they have or need). A quick aside: most towns don't have any trash collection, so people who don't live in cities just burn their trash. At any rate, some families living near the Phnom Penh dump comb through the garbage to get at any neglected recyclables. The kids in these families don't usually get a chance to go to school, as they are helping their parents at the dump. PSE works with these families, giving younger children a meal every day.



This is the kitchen: below are the hand-washing stations.



Teenagers get an opportunity to go to school and get vocational training. The kids below are learning about hairstyling and makeup.



Where possible, the parents get involved as well: they are hired for jobs at the school, such as painting or making traditional crafts which are sold to support the organization. These activities give the parents a marketable skill that will hopefully allow them to provide for their families, which in theory means that the children should be able to go to a public school.

There are also a small functioning hotel and restaurant here for students to learn about working in the tourist industry. If you're ever in Phnom Penh and want to see an awesome NGO in action, consider staying for a night or two.

Sihanoukville = woot!

Hooray for vacation! I have finally managed to see something of Cambodia outside of my own town and Phnom Penh. And what a something it is!

Sihanoukville (Cambodians call it Kampong Saum) is a city in southern Cambodia known for its beautiful beaches. My concept of it came mostly from watching the weather report every night in my village with a pang of desire; the provinces show little variation in temperature from one another, with the notable exception of Sihanoukville, which is usually 3 to 10 degrees C cooler than everywhere else.



What can I say? What more do you need than white sand, green water, blue sky, and an ocean breeze? (Seriously, that last component is key.) A few companies operate snorkeling and beach-lying-around tours to small nearby islands out of those boats. There's no dock or pier, though, so you have to wade out to the boat, valuables on your head, and clamber aboard as the boat pitched in the waves. No ballerina, I nearly fell out of the boat immediately after making it up. I repeated the act 6 hours later while waiting for other people to disembark, so I basically felt awesome about myself. But it didn't matter! Because lying on the beach cures everything. The snorkeling itself was only OK, as the marine life wasn't particularly colorful. Also, the captain's warnings of cutting our feet on the coral that rose up near the surface of the water and the scary Darth Vader sound coming out of my breathing tube gave me some anxiety. The best part of the day was Koh Russei (pic below), a lightly populated island where we ate fresh seafood for lunch and played in the nearly deserted waves.



The other big highlight, for me at least, was the seemingly endless selection of Western food. Don't get me wrong, I love Khmer food. But being able to eat french fries on a deck chair on that beach....well, it took away all the stress of the summer: the stress of knowing that I didn't yet have any secondary projects in the works, the stress of traveling to Battambang and Phnom Penh for urgent errands.

Clearly, I left just in time. This place was obviously fixing to entrap me and keep me forever. I may succumb once my service is up. Anyone wanna join me...?

The Friends

I've decided to put up pictures of my provincial buddies. These are the people who keep me sane when I'm frustrated; who when I visit welcome me and try to share some of their lives with me; who get me a car to Phnom Penh when I have dengue. I'm sure some Peace Corps regulation forbids publishing their names so I'll just say this: here we are lounging in an undisclosed luxurious location, preparing to drink some wine.



Here's the straggler, eating an ice cream sandwich (yes, that's ice cream in a baguette) during a visit to my house.

The Enemy

Tell the army to stand down: I have discovered the enemy, and it is not terrorism. It is not even fear. It is laundry.

Some Volunteers have developed a very zen attitutde towards laundry since their arrival in Cambodia, preferring to let it flow into the rhythms of their days and enjoying the quiet monotony of scrubbing and rinsing. I have resisted this calmness and continue to regard my laundry heap, when I cannot avoid looking at it, with an attitude of suspicion and dread. Perhaps this is due to my overwhelming incompetence at the task. Either I use too much soap and am unable to rinse it out properly, in which case my clothes dry crustily on the line. Or else I dry the clothes on the dirty part of the bamboo pole (as opposed to the elusive clean part of the bamboo pole), leaving streaks of dirt along the backs (although I have discovered that hangers do a great deal to alleviate this problem). Or else I wash on a day when it rains unpredictably, in which case nothing dries and everything (especially jeans) acquires a faint mildewy smell.

The process of doing laundry is nearly as old as the existence of cloth itself here. You fill your tub with soap (how much? I am never sure), clean-ish water, and your clothes. You crouch over the tub and scrub the armpits, collar, and hems of everything with a handheld brush until you are sure, sure, that they must be clean by now, right? After 5 minutes of vigorous scrubbing? And yet....is that brown sweat-and-dust spot on the back of the collar still there? Augh! Maybe no one will see it.... You give up and dump out the wash-water and vigorously rinse the clothes (twice) in fresh-ish water, and then you hang everything out to dry, like so, and hope uselessly that it won't rain that afternoon.



And I think it is safe to say that even those Volunteers who enjoy doing laundry still loathe washing towels. Towels are designed to be absorbent; but that means that they absorb every speck of dust and every grain of detergent in the wash-water. I am never sure which one wins out. Some people have stopped washing towels altogether, but I carry on, hoping, someday, to use such a large overabundance of soap as to overwhelm the other muck and come up with a gleaming white towel. I'll let you know how that goes....

Actually, You Do Hafta Go Home

Due to my remarkably fever-free state the last few days, I'm being sent home. Things I will miss about my stay in Phnom Penh: air conditioning, internet access, a refrigerator, and Scrubs (yes, they have Scrubs here! And My Name Is Earl!).

Things I won't miss: the same damn story on CNN 15,000 times every day. The commercial for Seoul, South Korea, whose audio goes a little something like this: "Seoul. Renew your soul. Seoul. Soul of Asia." (Read it out loud to realize how annoying it is.) In fact, I never want to hear either the word "soul" or the word "Seoul" ever again. I will also not miss any of the coverage of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Guess what year it is people? 2007. That's right. The damn Olympics are a FULL YEAR AWAY. Until they begin, do not mention their existence. Nobody cares. People in Beijing are sick of your cameras. The pollution in Beijing is sick of your cameras. Just leave it alone. The last thing I won't miss about Phnom Penh is, when I first step my big toe out of the apartment building, every moto driver in a 5-k radius shouts out "Lady! Motodop?" The moto drivers in my hometown have learned from my constant annoyed refusals that their persistence will never, ever in a million years pay off. There is no time to teach all the moto drivers in Phnom Penh that Peace Corps Volunteers can't ride motos, so my beleaguered-sounding "No!" must be employed every. Single. Time.

Ah well. At least the dengue's gone.

D-*-N-G-U-* F-*-V-*-R

OK kids, time to buy a vowel. May I recommend the "E"? That's right, I've got a tropical disease to call my very own. Sweet, sweet dengue fever.

When I first came down with a headache last week, I attributed it to heat exhaustion, which I've already had once here in Cambodia (that's a whole other fun story). So I did what you're supposed to do for heat exhaustion, which is drink enough water to drown a horse. But later that night, as I shivered in my bed while wearing my muu-muu, 2 sarongs, a t-shirt, and a long-sleeved shirt in 78-degree weather, I began to suspect that heat exhaustion was not the culprit.

Despite my pounding head, aching body, queasy stomach, and high fever, I climbed into a car bound for Phnom Penh the next day. The doctors did some blood testing, even though it's nearly impossible to tell anything by Day 2 of a fever, especially as malaria, typhoid, and dengue look very similar. What we did figure out was that I didn't have malaria, which is alleged to be even worse than dengue (how anything could be worse, I shudder to imagine).

This situation has continued for the past six days. The only new development was a stomach that bucked and promised to relieve itself of its contents at the sight, smell, or mention of food. Only yesterday were the doctors able to confirm that I do, indeed, have dengue.

All this medical turmoil means I have gotten to have some new experiences: I'd never been hooked up to an IV before, and now I've been stuck to two! Also, I'd never had an ultrasound before, but they decided to test me for an enlarged spleen and liver (?), so now I know what pregnant women the world over go through (and damn, is that gel cold).

Now I'm in the "full-body rash" part of the disease. Which everyone assures me means that I'm on the road to recovery. It had better, because I can suffer no more indignities. The Peace Corps doctor is constantly demanding urine samples and threatening to MedEvac me to Bangkok if I don't eat more. The worst part is that my Khmer friends keep texting me and asking if I've eaten rice porridge yet, as they seem to think this will be very helpful. Even on good days, rice porridge isn't all that appealing. But when your fever's running at a good 102, the last thing you want to put in your stomach is hot rice soup. I have to delete these messages right away, lest the idea of the rice porridge causes my stomach to revolt.

So here's my hard-earned advice, and it shouldn't be too hard to follow if you live in the US (except the South): don't get dengue. It's a miserable, horrible disease. I can't imagine how rural Cambodian children survive this without air conditioning and the relatively modern medical care available in Phnom Penh (there are no hospitals up to Western standard here but there are some Western-standard clinics). I know many Cambodian children suffer through it at home and go to local clinics only to get an IV when their symptoms get very bad.

There is a serious dengue epidemic throughout Southeast Asia this year, in Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia. Because dengue mosquitoes are day biters, mosquito nets are of no use in fighting the disease. No vaccine has been developed yet. Dengue is here, and it's hard to avoid.

LEST THIS DISCOURAGE ANYONE FROM VISITING ME, however, let me remind you that I was here for 6 months before contracting it. And if you visit in the dry season (November to April), there aren't as many mosquitoes and your chances of catching anything go down. Also, the good news is, dengue doesn't kill you. I'm sitting here typing, and all it took was 6 days of my best blanket impression.

More Pictures

As my Most Creative Title Ever implies, I've got more pictures.

Cambodian fruit! Rambutans (left) and mangosteens (right) are in season. Aren't they weird-lookin? But they're sweet and delicious....

Most photogenic palm tree in my village. Possibly in all Cambodia.

I visited the Royal Palace when I was in Phnom Penh for the 4th of July a couple weeks ago. (I have no idea what this building is for.)

Even though the main wedding season is over, there are still occasional weddings. This is my host mother and me on our way to my former host brother's wedding. We appear to have fallen victim to very poor lighting. We participated in the ceremony by carrying pastries on trays from the groom's family to the bride's. Traditional Khmer clothing is hot (temperature-wise).

Doin the Book Thing

My reading list here in Cambodia is pretty much restricted to the books I brought from the States, books I can manage to wrangle briefly from fellow Volunteers, books I can borrow from Peace Corps staff, and books sold by tourists who need cash to bookstores that sell them to desperate PCVs at the approximate price of one book per day's salary. You'd think, based on this availability, that I'd be reading a lot of romance novels (and I could, if I wanted to). But I've found, to my surprise, some real treasures, and I want to share.


A Summer Bird-Cage
Margaret Drabble

How did a women's college grad never read Margaret Drabble? A Summer Bird-Cage feels like The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood, only infinitely more readable. The stark, hollow choices faced by bourgeois female English college graduates in the early 1960s (marriage and therefore virtual retirement to one's own house or a drab tunnel of meaningless employment leading nowhere) are still relevant today in the West and in developing countries like Cambodia (I think of the choices my female students and even other female teachers face). This is the story of two sisters, both Oxford graduates. The older sister marries a strange but wealthy man, while the younger sister works at a tedious job and considers her future while waiting for her boyfriend who goes to live abroad for a year. The question is whether any appealing choices exist. The answer, well, you can guess....

A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley

Rare is the friend of mine who has not heard me rave about Jane Smiley. A Thousand Acres is one of her best (surpassed only, perhaps, by The Greenlanders). This is the epic of a prosperous Iowa farming family in the 1970s attempting to determine the future of their farm. All of the players, working desperately to realize their vision of the future, are thwarted, intentionally or not, by those closest to them because of secrecy, greed, and betrayal. The characters are convincing because they are flawed, and Smiley is merciless in her treatment of them all. As things begin to go wrong, you hope that something, anything, will eventually go right. And this hope will be disappointed. It turns out, having all your hopes for the characters crushed is almost a relief, but one that leaves you a little stunned.

Homage to Catalonia
George Orwell

This book will change your life. Read it. Read it now. It's Orwell's story of the 1936-1937 Spanish Civil War from his own perspective as a reporter-turned-militiaman who is injured in the fighting. What strikes you is, well, everything. The revolutionary spirit in Barcelona, the labyrinth of Spanish and international politics, the privations at the front, the moral choices faced, sometimes courageously and sometimes cravenly, by people, parties, and countries. I walked around in a daze for an entire day after I finished it.

Twiddling My Thumbs

Soooo....I have now reached the phase of the school year called vacation. I'm trying to find some other projects to fill the summer. My best ideas, like doing English classes with the high school teachers and making the school library more student friendly, have been delayed for logistical reasons (the teachers are busy teaching private classes and the library is moving to a new space come October). So lately I've been hanging out at the wat and teaching English to the monks, spending a lot of time in the family hammock, and trying to recreate my American mom's limeade recipe (possibly the most ambitious event of my cooking career, as it involves 3 whole ingredients, 4 if you count the water and sugar used to make simple syrup as separate ingredients, as opposed to the usual 2 of pasta + sauce).

Any day now, I'm going to get a brilliant idea that will cause my days to be magically filled with tasks, duties, responsibilities, what have you. Until then, I'll be in the hammock.

Biking to the End of the Earth

A couple weeks ago I joined an excursion to visit one of the more remotely placed Volunteers. He lives perhaps 20 km from me down a dirt road. And when I say it mildly like that, it doesn't sound like a big deal. But this road is no ordinary dirt road. It is rocky, rutted, cratered, and muddy. The quickest way to travel this road (if you're Cambodian) is by moto, as there is a narrow, smooth track along the edge where one can travel quickly and relatively safely. Cars and trucks have it worse, as there are rarely 2 parallel tracks, which makes for a beating on their shocks and a really uncomfortable ride.

As motos are forbidden to Volunteers, the three of us (two staffers and me) rode our mountain bikes. It was a relatively cool day, overcast, with a breeze. It wasn't raining but had rained recently, which kept the dust down. Basically, we rode under ideal conditions. The 20-km ride took 2.5 hours.

This is one of the larger obstacles. The picture doesn't do it justice. Woe to any vehicle that falls into the center of this. But look at the beautiful trees on both sides of the road! We got to look at 20 km worth of them. Lucky us.


This bridge was taken out by large truck a few days before we passed through. We walked our bikes over a footbridge to continue our ride. Trucks had to take a detour to go over the stream.

But at the end of the road was a warm welcome, a really nice visit, and an adorable host sister, so it was all worth it.

The New Wat

A new wat has just been built near my town, and to celebrate its completion there was a community party. Everyone was invited: monks, parents, children, vendors, fortune tellers, anyone. Vendors sold food and incense, and kids clambered all over the carnival rides, even if they weren't operating at the time. It reminded me of a county fair. There was even corn on the cob!

The wat is beautiful with its brightly painted walls.

This is part of the fence that surrounds the wat. It's a shockingly bright pink. I love the carvings.

These doors lead into the wat. I'm sure that kid is trying to give the peace sign and not the British bird.

This is my neighbor, enjoying the rides. He should really talk to that other kid about proper peace sign-age.

Random Visuals

This is my sister Phea folding the petals of the lotuses she puts in the Buddhist shrines at our house every week. She taught me how to do it too. The word for pink in Khmer is "color of lotus flowers."

Yum, delicious Durian-flavored snacks. I bought these for my family since they love Durian fruit. However, the wafers didn't taste all that much like Durian and went stale quickly due to the humidity. Next time I get them some snacks, I think I'll try for chocolate-chip cookies.

What Does 105 Degrees Feel Like?

When your sweat rolls down your side, it feels like it's leaving a trail of burned skin. That's what 105 degrees feels like.

My Brush with Fame

The call came one June afternoon from my coteacher. "Come to school now."And then something garbled. Possibly the explanation of why I should go to the effort of putting on my teacher outfit and pedaling down to the high school in the stifling heat when I didn't have to be in class. Which is what, against my better judgment, I did.

The full explanation was easy to understand when not relayed by cell tower: a famous film star was coming to our school! To give us a library!

The first thought that crossed my mind was this: Cambodia + film star = Angelina Jolie. That equation, however, seemed far-fetched, so I decided that some young, scruffy, do-gooder actor was more likely. But I still secretly hoped for Angelina.

The Cambodian teachers crouched together under the shade of a small tree, sitting on benches or motos or their shoes. Waiting. A couple of the female teachers showed me the classroom prepared for the scheduled reception of the star. I tried hard to see it with my Western eyes, as the film star would see it, but my Khmer eyes wouldn't let me. Real flower bouquets? Where did they get those? (Trees in Cambodia are bursting with flowers but the kinds you see in houses and offices are usually silk or plastic.) Fans? The school owns fans? What may have looked like a standard reception to my American eyes 4 months ago was actually a grand welcome.

As the actress and her entourage made their way from their cars to the classroom, I scrutinized their faces in the hope of one of them triggering my memory. A woman walked by wearing a giant pair of sunglasses, and I thought "If that's Angelina Jolie, how do they make her lips look so big in the movies?" As it turned out, though, this lavish reception was set out for an Italian actress named Sabrina. I wondered if I had seen any of her films. (As it turns out, no.)

Once we were settled, the speeches began: speeches thanking all for their attention, money, presence, effort. And after this, we went back outside to talk to the assembled students.

I've done my internet research, and apparently this actress's name is Sabrina Ferilli. She does Italian-language movies exclusively and is married to a CEO of an Italian company. Through an NGO, they are providing funding to bring a library to our school: building, books, and all. It's pretty exciting for the school, as in my opinion the Khmer students need access to more books, especially Khmer-language books. Rumor is the library will be finished by next spring.

Sadly, I have no pictures of Sabrina. But I promise to post pictures of the library once it's built.

Also in the News

Here's an AP article about the Peace Corps' first group in Cambodia. I know the Minneapolis Star-Tribune printed it but couldn't find it online so I'm posting the WashTimes link. Our group has 2 married couples and an abundance of comedians.

A Visit to the Farm

Last week my sisters, our neighbors, and I paid a visit to my aunt's fields. Although we live in a district capital (like a county seat), the urban space is just a thin slice of land along the national highway, away from which the houses quickly give way to fields. So one evening around dusk sister Phea and I rode our bikes out to the north and east so that I could finally see agriculture in action. (I visited the fields near my training village but as it was the dry season at the time there was not much action.)

This is my aunt standing in her field, wearing her kroma (traditional Cambodian garment) on her head. I can't describe how beautiful it was to be out in the middle of a world green to the horizon, with the sun hanging low over the trees and a few solitary farmers, like my aunt, capturing the last minutes of light to finish up their day's work. A cool breeze slid over the fields, but the water was warm, and the frogs quietly sang their songs as we walked by.

Waving goodbye. My aunt, neighbors, and two sisters all prepare to go home. One of the boys caught a crab in the water on our walk back to the road. The balloon survived until we were almost home.

Riding home at twilight. We're taking the water pump, the blue pipe I'm holding onto, back home in the go-yoo-un, which is a vehicle that results from the marriage of a pickup bed and an outboard motor (approximately). The road's bumpy so I had to hold on tight, even though all the Cambodians with me had no trouble staying in the cart.

Next time, maybe I'll try my hand at catching a crab...

The Rainy Season

The rains have started. They don't come every day. They haven't come for nearly a week now. But some afternoons (usually the ones when my jeans are hung out on the line to dry), the clouds roll in, announcing themselves with rumbles of thunder. Everyone closes their windows and stands at their doors or under awnings to watch the poor souls who have some mission that takes them outside during the downpour.

It usually rains for about an hour. The paved streets dry quickly. The mud next to the road becomes dust by the next day, two days at the most. The unpaved rural roads fare less well, becoming rutted and slippery.

Mercifully, the rains also bring cool air. And they bring relief from the monochromatic hot season. Yellow no longer dominates the countryside: now not only the palms are green but the fields as well.

School is over. Wedding season is over. Planting season has begun.

Swearing-In (Only 2 Months Late)

Giving me a blog is akin to giving a monkey a blender. The result may be a fruity, sweet melange, or it could be a shake that smells of feet.

With that in mind, I'm posting a link to a Peace Corps press release about the Cambodia Volunteers' swearing-in ceremony in Phnom Penh on April 4 (see if you can spot me). If the link doesn't work, blame yourself. It's no use blaming the monkey.

http://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=resources.media.press.view&news_id=1196

It's Organ-ic!

Back in the States, being a vegetarian was something I did not necessarily because I enjoyed it but because I thought it was the right thing to do. I gave it up because I was told that being veggie in Cambodia is very difficult. This turns out to be true.

But being a carnivore has its pitfalls as well. Specifically, organ meats. Cambodians don't waste edible meats, so in the last few months I've dined on liver, kidney (at least I think so), intestines, and even chicken hearts. Some of these meats are delectable, specifically the meat which I am fairly sure is kidney (it is the color of liver but has an appearance like a leaf under a microscope, small cells outlined in a darker color. [Note: if I want to pursue biological anthropology, I should probably learn to identify organs a bit more accurately.]). Intestines, if they're fried, are also pretty good. Liver is a little bit...ferric. And the chicken hearts it's probably best not to mention.

Don't let this give you the wrong impression of Khmer food. Khmer people eat mostly rice, stir-fried vegetables with meat, and fish cooked many ways, all of which are delicious and healthy. Organ meats make it into very few dishes; I've had them only occasionally with rice porridge for breakfast. I'm trying to learn to enjoy them more. Hopefully before long I'll be ordering extra liver with my porridge.

Shake It, Girls

Last week I stumbled on one of the last things I expected to find in Cambodia: aerobics. It isn't exactly like familiar American aerobics: it has all of the ingredients, just with a Cambodian flair. A group of Khmer women gather around dusk in a backyard where a concrete platform overlooking a deep pond has been erected. Some women sport tennis shoes, others flip-flops. The instructor brings a stereo, which is powered by a car battery (a ubiquitous source of power in rural Cambodia because it's cheaper than a generator and easy to transport and recharge). And then for an hour everyone dances behind the instructor, whose moves are accompanied by shouts of "One, two, three, four" in Khmer.

In the eyes of someone who comes from a culture where exercise is taken very seriously, this Cambodian aerobics class is refreshingly light-hearted. People are friendly and helpful during the class, and if you look around you can see that the women are smiling.

I suspect that part of the reason the classes are possible is that my high school gym teacher is awesome. She is one of the instructors and was kind enough to invite me to join the class this week because I "looked lonely." (I'm not sure if it is true that I looked lonely. For the most part I don't feel lonely.) I think she may have had something to do with the construction of the platform.

I hope my town has more surprises like this in store...

Administrative Issue Resolved

As a result of some very effective lobbying (thanks Lesley), I have decided not to up the security for the blog for now. (I think it best not to mention the role that laziness played in this decision.)

Visuals!

My former bed. As you can see, I was sleeping on the roof under a rather femme mosquito net.

This is a view of my town from the roof of my former house. In the foreground you can see the building-materials business my former neighbors have, in the middle ground is National Highway 5, and in the background are houses, shops, and trees that line the road to the south of the town market.

This is my new house! My family sells gas, cigarettes, drinks, ramen noodles, soap, sugar, hats, and candy. You can sort of see my bad-ass mountain bike in this picture. I've mastered riding it in an ankle-length skirt. My host sister is in white, and the neighbors are sitting at the table.

Nerd Alert

Ants heart my retainers.

I don't know why. Of all the delicious things to eat available around the house (and believe me, there are many), they are drawn, inexorably, to my bright red retainer case, labeled with my name, containing my two retainers. They especially like the all-plastic lower one.

Please note that I will henceforth strike the phrase "like a moth to a flame" from my daily usage and replace it with "like ants to my retainers."

It's kind of sad that I am no longer squeamish about putting them in my mouth, even after the ants have used them as their tiny playground (for those weak of stomach, I do clean them before I put them on). It's also kind of sad that I'm posting about my retainers. *sigh*

The News

Here's what's new: I have a family! A great family! I moved in two days ago. I have a mother and three siblings, an extended family nearby, a room of my own, and a classroom on the ground level. My family sells shampoo, sugar, gas, cold drinks, and other stuff I haven't yet examined at the store out front. A month of unsettledness has turned out to be worth it.

The other news has to do with why I have internet access today. The branch of the bank in my town doesn't give out cash (hey, it's always an adventure), so discovering that I was down to my last $4 with no credit-card cushion and no local access to money, I ventured in to the big city for a visit to the bank. Which is a complete trap! Because when you're in Battambang, you have to spend money on the delicious Western food and things like beautifully illustrated Khmer-language books and possibly, possibly, musical intruments. I've got to get out of here before the temptation takes hold...

And Some Administrative Crap

I think I'm going to have to password-protect the blog. Or something. Some Peace Corps policy says it's "recommended." Be ready.

My Awful Confession

There is some old saying, yes, about a picture being worth a certain large number of words? Which in theory means I could make this blog much more compact simply by making entries that look more like this: [picture]? Or: [picture]! Or even, most efficiently: [picture]

However, my titular awful confession is that I am intimidated by my camera. It's a nice camera, and I had enough foresight to buy it the day before I left Idaho, cleverly leaving the bill to my unsuspecting parents. The problem is, after taking these lovely pictures, I don't really know what to do with them. So here's my ambitious promise: next time I'm in Battambang town, I will post pictures. (Note the "s"!)

Language Family Tree

Despite the presence of the word "linguistic" in the name of my college major, I still have no idea what makes one language family different from another. (A little research on Wikipedia reveals that my confusion is shared.) English is part of the Indo-European family. Khmer, according to my books, is part of the Mon-Khmer family. But in the end, they don't seem so different to me. I mean, yes: Khmer and English have many different sounds, and Khmer verbs are conjugated differently from English ones (that is to say, minimally). But in the end, the language is made up of words and sentences, and they're even generally in the order of subject-verb-object. What kind of acrobatic grammatical contortions did I expect I'd have to put myself through?

Maybe I am simply seeing the surface similarities because my current grasp of the language is so poor. Maybe once I am more conversant in Khmer, the language will fall clearly, in my mind, into a family of languages to which my native tongue does not belong. Until then, I will look at the language family tree with skepticism.

Postmark: Battambang

So! Training is over. To sum up training: we learned how to speak beginning Khmer, practiced teaching English at a secondary school, learned how to take care of basics like traveling and eating in Cambodia, and in the process made some predictable and some unpredictable mistakes. We lived in a small rural village with Cambodian families in wooden houses with outdoor bathrooms and no electricity (although batteries and generators provided the power for watching TV with our families).

The unintentional (and therefore eerie) foreshadowing in the last post is as follows. Two weeks ago, just before I left my training village and arrived at my permanent site in Battambang province, where I'll be for 2 years, I learned that the host family at my permanent site was no longer able to host me and that I would need to find a new family to live with. I am hoping to identify a new family this week. In truth, this is an opportunity for me to exert control where most Volunteers have none, as host families are usually identified by staff and not by Volunteers. When I visited the original family, there seem to be no hard feelings on either side. Settling in will just take me longer than most folks, and to put it all in perspective, I remind myself that one month of unsettledness is short compared to 2 years of service.

Cambodia has just emerged from the holiday of Khmer New Year. America definitely ought to adopt this holiday as a model. It's 3+ days of celebration and relaxation with family and friends. The transition from old year to new year happens not in the middle of the night but in the middle of the day, when, Khmer legend has it, an angel...well, does something (my listening comprehension isn't great yet). People go to pagodas to pray and also to enjoy the company of other people. And for recreation, they throw water balloons at passing trucks and moto drivers (the American version wouldn't allow this for legal reasons but I propose pedestrians as an alternative target). Seize the opportunity, America! I expect to see a daytime holiday complete with water balloons when I return. Although come to think of it, are water balloons a good idea in January?

Dry/hot season is sighing its last raspy breaths. Now, the Cambodian countryside is mostly yellow. Think Serengeti with palm trees. We've had a few raging rainstorms, but the predictable daily rains haven't started yet. Can't wait to see what that's like.

Where To Begin?

My first post from Cambodia! (And I can't even remember now what's remarkable and what's prosaic. Many things that were initially strange and different are now simply The Way Things Are.)

Cambodians are amazing people. They are friendly, helpful, industrious, and inventive. My training family has woven me into their lives. My language teachers have taught me about Khmer culture and helped me when I was unsure of myself. Cambodian high school teachers do loads of work with few resources. And I am continually amazed at how friendly and generous strangers are to me.

Cambodian culture had my head spinning at first. The way people dress, handle status differences, eat, get married, sleep, feel about their families: all topics of lengthy discussion in my training village as we Americans navigate our lives there. I will absolutely write more on this in the future....

For now, the focus is on transitioning from being a trainee to being a volunteer. Everything I currently know about my job here is about to change. Hahahahaha*snort* *wipe away tear* *reflect on whether tear is result of joy or despair*

n.b. Good news! My mailing address will remain the same for my entire service.

Just Shoot Me

The following immunizations are required before service:

• Hepatitis A and B
• Japanese Encephalitis
• Meningitis
• Polio
• Measles Mumps and Rubella
• Typhoid
• Tetanus
• Pneumococcus
• Rabies
• Influenza

We are going to be the most robust group of people ever.

Postcard from Bogus

What's the crazification factor on this?

We're already acquitting ourselves well in the new Congress now, aren't we?

From the Idaho Statesman:

Angered by the passage of a bill to increase the federal minimum wage,
Idaho Rep. Bill Sali offered a symbolic proposal to abolish the law of gravity.

Getting rid of the force that attracts objects to one another would
lower obesity rates, the freshman Republican argued, trying to make a point that
laws to dictate wages and reduce gravity would both defy "natural laws."

Let me explain...

...No, there is too much. Let me sum up.

• Enjoying/enduring holidays
• Snowboarding! after discovering that my cave-man boots are technologically inferior (too many days to count)
• Obsessing about Boise State Broncos' amazing victory in Fiesta Bowl (ESPN link from Eschaton)
• Making and ignoring Khmer flashcards (1 to 10 are in the bag, though)
• Capturing crazed Pomeranian after (est.) 1-mile chase through parents' neighborhood
• Making attempts to learn lindy hop
• Fighting/making up with younger sister
• Obtaining Idaho driver's license via clever use of the "study for driver's test" method (real excerpt from Idaho Driver's Manual: "Horses, cattle, sheep, goats and other livestock under controlled movement over a highway or road have the right of way in Idaho.")