A Question for My Sisters

Do any of you Wellesley grads out there feel a secret modicum of chagrin when reading the Wellesley alumnae magazine?

My parents sent me 2 of these mags in a recent care package. They're full of stories of impressive accomplishments, successful careers, graduate degrees, awards, promotions. As I read through them, the magazines seemed to be eyeballing me back, asking me what I'm doing with my life.

Well, magazine, here's what I'm doing: lying under my mosquito net, quietly sweating, trying to decide what I should open first, the M&Ms or the Nerds Rope my mom sent in that same care package.

Just doing my best to make my alma mater proud.

Water World

There is something great about taking a shower while it's raining.

My family's kitchen and bathroom are both in a small building behind the main house. This building has a corrugated-metal roof. When it drizzles, the raindrops tap soothingly against the metal. And when it rains hard, the roof makes a clattering racket.

Part of the reason for the metal roof is, it is a useful component in a rainwater catchment system. Rain pours off the corrugated metal into gutters, which lead to several different cisterns around the property. One PVC pipe leads from the roof gutter, through a small hole in the side of the building, back to the cistern in the bathroom that is used for bathing. So when it rains hard, a constant trickle of water enters the cistern. When it rains softly, the trickle becomes a slow drip.

And "scooper showers" create a unique sound too: the splashing slap of the water hitting the bathroom tiles.

These sounds, the rain on the roof, the dripping in the cistern, the splashing on the tiles, weave a soothing melody. It quietly taps out all thoughts and worries. There is nothing like showering in the rain.

Nirvana Is a Boiled Coconut

At a recent training for the new Cambodia PCVs, a monk described Buddhist theology.

Nirvana is like a boiled coconut, he said. If you take a regular coconut and stick it in the ground, it grows into a tree. If you leave a regular coconut sitting around, it rots. But if you boil a coconut, it neither grows into a coconut tree nor rots away. It simply stays the same forever. That is like nirvana.

Is that a selling point?

R.I.P. My Friend

This is the last picture ever taken of JoJo, I think sometime in November of 2007.

She died just before the Cambodian election, in July. I had left the house to buy some water and then got sucked into watching part of an election debate at a friend's restaurant. When I got home, I saw the neighborhood kids gathered on one of the bedframes that sits in front of a neighbor's house. They were looking at JoJo, who was lying on her side on the ground. They told me that she had been hit by a moto. She didn't look so bad; there was a little blood on her muzzle. But she was seizing slowly, as if trying to get air. Every few seconds she would draw her chin toward her chest, tensing all her muscles, and then relax again.

After this had gone on for a few minutes, she stopped moving.

I ran off to cry, vaguely wondering what is done with animal corpses here. Do they get buried? When I stopped crying, I went out by the garden in our backyard, which, I felt, would be a fine place to bury JoJo. It looked like my host grandpa (really my host mom's aunt's husband, who lives in the house behind ours) was making some preparations, getting ready to light some wood. Was it to be cremation then?

Alas, no. I think I was being willfully stupid while the preparations were going on, but when one of the neighborhood boys started filling an enormous pot with water, I finally had to ask. "What're you doing?" "Preparing JoJo. To eat," he said matter-of-factly.

And that was the fate of my beloved dog. All that evening, the scent of something I didn't want to think about wafted through the house. When dinnertime came, my family was tactful enough not to offer any of it to me: only the people at grandpa's house and some of my host brother's friends ended up eating it.

More recently, I mentioned to my family during Pchum Ben (the Cambodian ancestor holiday) that I missed JoJo. They decided that, since I didn't have any local ancestors to honor during the festival, I could throw my balls of rice to JoJo's spirit the next time we went to the pagoda. The thought of feeding her spirit was some consolation, but I still miss her. All I can say about that is, she was a good dog.