Take a Bite Out of Crime

Now that the Angkor bike race is less than a week away (there's still time to donate!), I can reveal a secret: my bike helmet was stolen recently. Riding a bike without a helmet is a big Peace Corps no-no, so if anybody had known I was riding around without it, something bad could have ensued. Here's the story.

When I first arrived in my town, I locked up helmet and bike in the schoolyard every day during the hours when I taught. Then, people started asking me why I locked them up. "Gom aui kay luich," I replied, which roughly means "So no one will steal it." Well, people laughed at that. No one's going to steal your ridiculous foreign bike, they implied, nor your ridiculous helmet. Seeing as how barangs (and specifically Peace Corps volunteers and Mormons) are pretty much the only people in Cambodia who wear bike helmets, it would be silly for someone to steal such a distinctive helmet. I took this to heart, and pretty quickly stopped locking my bike up in the schoolyard.

Fast forward 18 months. One afternoon early in November, I proctored an admission exam for my computer class. As usual, I left my bike and helmet unlocked in the schoolyard, and didn't lay eyes on them for about 4 hours. When I came out of the exam, I found that my helmet, which had been hanging from the bike by its strap, was gone. I approached the only teacher left at the school, you might call him the disciplinarian/caretaker, and reported the loss. "I bet the little kids took it," I told him. There's a gaggle of small children who play around the high school, since it's such a stimulating environment (people! cows! a pond!). They like to ring the bell on my bike, and I figured they might've gotten curious about the helmet and taken it off to play somewhere else.

The caretaker reported to me the next day that he had asked all the kids about it, and they had said they hadn't seen it. "That's what they would say," I thought, but didn't say anything. I started asking other teachers about it. The strange thing is that their first response, when I said it was gone, was "Is your organization going to buy you a new one?" They have had so much experience with wealthy NGOs with money to spend that they assumed any loss would be quickly remedied by my "wealthy" NGO. I explained to them that no, since I had not locked the helmet, Peace Corps most certainly would not replace it, and further that I was pretty SOL, since you can't buy bike helmets anywhere in this country (as far as I know) and I would henceforth be breaking a big Peace Corps rule.

Once they realized I really did need the helmet back, it came out that some teachers had seen a student wearing the helmet around the schoolyard. At one point, a teacher saw him wearing it as he rode away on a moto. What a ridiculous picture that must have made. At any rate, no one thought to stop the student and ask why he had the helmet, though everyone knew that it belonged to me. And no one knew the student's name. The school's vice principal made an announcement to the whole school that whoever had taken the helmet should return it. This, sadly, produced no results.

By pure chance, shortly after that I went to visit a favorite student of mine who lives about 7 km down the road. I wanted to make sure he hadn't dropped out of school, since I hadn't seen him at all this year. Luckily, it turned out he'd been in school the whole time. I told him my story about the helmet, and he said he knew the student who took it. "But Teacher," he informed me gravely, "he is a gangster." Helpfully, he added, "It's OK, because he is also my friend."

I enlisted this student's help in getting the helmet back. Only a couple weeks later (I was on vacation for part of this), my student brought his friend the gangster to my house, where he handed me back the helmet. I silently rejoiced. I could once again conform to Peace Corps rules and simultaneously keep my head from being squashed like a watermelon by trucks carrying sand/pigs/tractors down the highway at reckless speeds.

Do It for the Orphans

Dear Friends and Readers,

Well, it's that time of year: the Angkor International Half-Marathon (and Bike Race!) is upon us. December 6, to be exact. I've signed up for the 30-kilometer bike race (something like 18 miles), and pretty soon I'm going to stash my mountain bike under a 45-passenger bus to get it over the harrowing road to Siem Reap so that I can test my athletic prowess against people from many nations.

The purpose of the race is to fundraise for Village Focus, an NGO that works with vulnerable communities in Cambodia. Village Focus has kindly waived registration fees for Peace Corps Volunteers. The least I can do in return is appeal to you for a donation, in any amount. You can make the donation online. Just go to http://www.villagefocus.org/angkor_marathon/sponsor.htm, look down the registrant list (I'm under "Elizabeth," not "Liz"), and click on my name. This will take you to a site where you can make a credit card donation. This would really help me look like less of a deadbeat on the registrant list.

I know this is awesomely timed, considering the current economic situation and the upcoming holiday demands on everyone's budget. My appeal is that you do it for the children! Don't you see, the children are our future...

Also, I will throw in a bonus blog post (with pictures!) if even 1 person donates. Isn't that special? Surely.

A Scientific Approach to Desire

I love rainy season in Cambodia, really I do. But lately I've been finding myself wondering idly when it will end. I ask Cambodians, and they say "Soon." But that word, here, means, "sometime between now and then" so I've stopped asking about it. When I get this equivocal answer, I start wondering if I'm going to regret wishing for dry season once it arrives. I guess a good, scientific way to find out what I really want is to make a list of likes and dislikes about rainy season, and see what comes out on top.

Like: I can fall asleep at night to the gentle sound of rain on the roof.
Dislike: I am often woken in the middle of the night by a storm that is trying to come in through my window to shake my hand.

Like: all the plants are a beautiful, lush green.
Dislike: every surface in my town with an elevation lower than 100 m is now a pond, including my school and parts of my front yard.

Like: the rain washes away the accumulated afternoon heat.
Dislike: the rain re-washes clothes that I have left out on the line to dry.

Like: rambutans, papayas, oranges, dragonfruit, and pomelos are ripe during rainy season.
Dislike: Durians, longans, jackfruit, mangoes, manogsteens, and milkfruit are not ripe during rainy season.

Like: rice needs lots of rain to grow.
Dislike: rice needs lots of rain to grow.

Like: getting stuck in a random place by a heavy rainstorm, making conversation with an interesting new person.
Dislike: that little fountain of mud that bike tires kick up when driving over particularly muddy ground.

Eh, it comes out about even. I don't really have much say in the matter anyway, so I guess I'll wish for the world to keep on turning and be satisfied with what outcome that produces.

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.