How Now Brown Cow?

Khmer New Year is the biggest holiday in Cambodia. Unfortunately, it happens to occur at the hottest time of the year, so a few other Volunteers and I decided to escape to Laos over the Khmer New Year school vacation, which, to be completely honest, started on about March 1. (I taught for roughly 8 hours in the entire month of March, and when I asked why students weren't showing up to school, I was given the logical answer, "It's almost time for vacation." With that reasoning, why do we go to school at all? After all, vacation's never more than 3 months away...)

Anyhow, we came up with a name for our trek, The How Now Brown Cow Lao Pow-Wow (Yow!), bought us some o' them airplane tickets, and made as few plans as we could get away with (apparently, you can get a visa at the airport!).

We found Laos to be a truly awesome place, and repeatedly voiced our longing to be Peace Corps Volunteers placed in Laos (yeah, it's never gonna happen). It was perfect for an outdoorsy type of vacation, since you can do just about any activity there that will cause you to break a sweat (although there's no snow skiing). The people were laid-back but friendly. And Lao New Year is a fantastic hootenanny, with 2 main liquid ingredients: water, which is thrown at hapless passersby, and Beer Lao, which is guzzled with abandon (not by yours truly of course).

We landed at Luang Prabang. The town itself was cute enough, but the biggest draw was the Kuang Si waterfall, about 30 km away.



We went to some caves of spiritual significance where peope had been putting Buddhas for (apparently) hundreds of years.



We also went on an elephant ride. The experience made for some great pictures but it was a lot like riding a big, water-squirting horse. Still, I would do it again.



We also did a 4-hour river kayak trip. By the end, we were all ready to commit hara-kiri with our paddles. It was the longest workout of my life.

After we had exhausted the marvels of Luang Prabang, we headed to Vang Vieng and Vientiane. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to continue the story of my best vacation ever because I have to hop on my bike and go back to my site so I can teach some English tomorrow. Guess I'll hafta leave you hanging....

Take Ur Daughter 2 Work Day

International Women's Day was March 8. I decided in February that I wanted to plan a Take Your Daughter to Work Day for girls in Battambang province. Apparently, planning an event takes a lot of work (who knew?). So I and one of the Volunteers in Battambang town, Kristine, scrambled for several weeks to put this thing together. Our vision was to bring about 12 girls (3 from each of the Volunteers' high schools)to Battambang town to meet with successful women in different career paths in order to get them thinking about what they might want to do in the future.

A fantastic local NGO, Aphivat Strey (Women's Development), helped get the logistics in order, and we got funding from several different local sources. A lot more planning had to go into the event than I ever expected: we needed to rent a van to get from one place to another within the city, find transport for the girls from their small towns to Battambang, secure a venue to do short debriefing sessions at the beginning and end of the day, buy snacks, and find small gifts for the hosting organizations. Oh, and also ask 4 professional women to talk to a group of high-school students about their own jobs and experiences. In the end, the students got to visit the Regional Teacher Training Center (where junior-high teachers are trained to teach English, chemistry, Khmer, etc.), whose director is a woman; Digital Divide Data, whose local director is a woman; Emergency Hospital, where there are many female doctors and nurses; and ANZ Royal Bank, whose tellers are mostly women.

Not everything went perfectly according to plan, but the students' eyes were opened about their many different options after high school. At the RTTC, they toured classrooms and learned about how one gets admitted to the RTTC. Here are the girls in a biology classroom.



At Digital Divide Data, the director told them how important it is to make career goals and related this to her own career path. The students also met some of the employees, who do data entry for Western institutions and get computer training.

Emergency hospital, which is run by an Italian NGO and cares mostly for trauma patients, generously provided lunch for us. The students took a complete tour of the hospital (including all the wards) with an Italian doctor. Later, a Cambodian woman told them the story of how she had grown up in poverty but had worked hard to become a nurse.



And here are the students listening to the manager of the local branch of ANZ Royal Bank. This is one of the things that wasn't exactly according to plan: they were supposed to meet with a teller but the manager just ended up telling the girls that women are better employees than men. He also ended up telling them how banking works, since most Cambodians in villages use jewelry as their bank.



We all had a great time. The students had never visited any of these workplaces before, and they seemed to enjoy being in the "big" city. Their enjoyment fueled the Volunteers' enthusiasm, and we got to feel like we were doing something important. Personally, this event is the single thing I have enjoyed most since arriving in Cambodia, and I wish I could do something like it every day.

My Writing Workshop

Back in November, I started teaching an English essay writing class. Another PCV wrote up a syllabus for such a class, and I, needing somewhere to channel my energy, decided to use it to teach a class and see how it went.

First, I had all interested students meet in a classroom and write a letter of introduction about themselves. I told them I'd accept 40 students (out of the 70 who were interested) to be in the class. And I also told them not to cheat off each other (this is a completely futile command in Cambodia but you hafta try). I got home and spent hours agonizing over which students I would accept: a lot of letters were partially but not fully copied. Should I accept students who seemed talented but who had copied a third of their letter from someone else (or allowed someone else to copy a third of their letter)? Finally, Kevin told me to be a hard-ass, so I disqualified any students who showed any sign of cheating. This left me with only 35.

So! I had them all choose English names so I wouldn't go crazy trying to remember their Khmer names. (And even though I gave the boys a list of about 35 choices, Victor, Nicholas, and Philip were picked by more than one student.) And then we started learning how to write an essay in English. We talked about the main idea sentence, about putting details in the body paragraphs, about the introduction and conclusion. We talked about alternative ways to say "and" and "but." We talked about the difference between "give" and "allow" (which have the same Khmer translation). We talked about comparing and contrasting 2 things.

And then, when I had taught them all I could about essay writing, and I had only 24 students left in the class, we had a graduation party. It seemed daunting to plan a graduation party on my own, so I delegated that task to the students. They collected the money, bought the raw ingredients, made the (delicious) food themselves, and brought their VCD karaoke collections over to my house. All I had to do was make certificates.

So here are the students, checking out their scores from the class.



And here are some of the girls, preparing the veggies.



Here's the whole class (minus those who were absent for weddings [not their own weddings]).



I also had 2 students read their essays out loud to the class. This is Sarah.



And this is Victor.



Reflecting on the whole experience, I think the biggest thing the students learned wasn't necessarily about essay writing. Instead, they learned how to listen. I taught the class almost entirely in English, and my funny American-accented English at that, translating only when I had to. So the students were forced to listen to me, and listen hard. Even though they didn't learn exactly what I expected them to, they learned something, and that's all I can hope for.

Panned Entrance

The strangest part about coming back to my village from a long absence is the catalogue of minutiae of physical traits that have changed since people last saw me. Usually my family, friends, and co-workers discuss whether I've gotten fatter (good) or thinner (bad), paler (good) or darker (bad). I take the general disagreement to mean that I am exactly the same as when I left.

At any rate, I've got lots to share, about a couple of great school events and a vacation to Laos. I'll try to get some posts and pictures up within the week.

Net/Bugs = x

One of those questions that must be answered time and again: is it worth it to shoo that bug out of your mosquito net? (Another question that must be asked but will never be answered is: how did it get in there in the first place?)

There seems to be a matrix for solving this equation, with the following factors: whether you yourself are inside or outside the net at the time, exactly how scary the bug is, ranging from fruit fly to mysterious prehistoric jetliner with ominous stinger, and how much sleep time, if any, you are likely to lose if the bug is removed (or if it's not).

Usually it's mosquitoes that somehow drift into my net, and I rarely discover them until they've sucked my blood in the wee hours of the morning. I think they sneak in through a flap that is supposed to be "convenient" for my entry and egress. With mosquitoes, one can fairly confidently wait them out. The insecticide with which the net is impregnated will eventually work its magic, and the mosquito will fall into a permanent slumber, though it will certainly have sated itself before doing so. The other option is to wait patiently for the mosquito to float into view and then try to kill it. The only problem with this is, it tends to get your adrenaline up, as you must usually try several times before the target is defeated. This may render later slumber impossible.

Grasshoppers can be allowed to stay. Ants must be squished as you find them, as they tend not to spend enough time on the net to get a lethal dose of permethrin.

Larger bugs, like bees, stick bugs, and mysterious titans from a forgotten geological age, are another issue entirely. The net may eventually knock them out but will probably never kill them. And the longer they stay trapped in the net, the more agitated they are likely to be. However scary it is to get close enough to shoo them away from the net, it is much scarier to sleep in it with them. For this kind of operation, I highly recommend enlisting a Cambodian host sister, who will laugh good-naturedly at your silly fear of bugs but will also take pity on you and bravely remove the offender.

Daydreams

Lately I've taken to having very graphic daydreams of an unexpected nature: a mundane day in Boise, Idaho. I'll just be sitting on my bed here in Cambodia, under my mosquito net, trying to write a lesson plan or listen to the VOA broadcast on my shortwave radio, and suddenly, I'll be waking up in a cold house under a thick comforter. My parents' house. I'll take a trip to the bathroom and not think twice about the tall, familiar flushable toilet, the potable water pouring easily from the sink faucet. Then I'll go downstairs and pour a bowl of cereal, with real, cold milk. The door of the fridge will resist as I open it up to put the milk in. The cold fridge air will pour over my already-cold feet.

Perhaps the most satisfying part of my daydream is the part where I start my mom's Toyota. I put the key in the ignition. I turn it. As the engine rumbles I feel the slight vibration through the seat. The car has rear-view mirrors, which I check as I back it out of the driveway. The cool steering wheel resists as I turn it to enter the street.

For some reason my daydreams are always this simple, as small, familiar things from my life come back to tell me that they will still be there when I return home. But from here they are luminous, unreal. I know when I get home, I'll just be dragging myself out of bed to start the daily grind, and neither the sink nor the milk nor the car will retain the magic that now buoys them to the forefront of my drifting thoughts.

Another Day, Another Book Review

Recently I finished reading The Beach by Alex Garland. (What? I have a lot of time on my hands...) It was a perplexing experience. Garland re-creates the world of pretentious backpackers with careful precision: what drives them to seek out secret adventures and the understandable contempt they feel for other travelers like themselves. His creation of an idyllic community located on an inaccessible Thai island is tantalizing: why couldn't it really happen? Therefore, the first 80% of the book affords an enjoyable reading experience (except for the occasional disjointed Vietnam War reference). And then everything takes a bizarre and sinister turn, and the plot reaches its climax suddenly with a drug-fueled orgy of violence. (Shoot, did I just give away the ending?)

This felt familiar: a novel featuring an amazing world, created with care, and an author, unsatisfied with such an accomplishment, trying to bully his characters into acting out a convoluted plot. And I realized that the parallels are Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, though Stephenson's worlds are the more far-fetched and therefore, perhaps, more impressive creations.

No need to read for yourself unless you want to relive that special bafflement felt at the end of a Neal Stephenson novel. Or fantasize about a beautiful island paradise somewhere out to the south of Thailand. But if you do read it, ask yourself this: how do they get all that rice over those cliffs? I still can't figure that part out.