Dear China

In the name of all that is holy, I demand that you stop broadcasting CRI on the exact same short-wave frequencies that BBC and Radio Australia broadcast on. It would be only humane.

Thank you.

Pre-Pre-Pre-Farewell/Hello/What!? How Did It All Go By So Quickly?

February 2009 is about to roll into March 2009. It's hard to believe that I've been in Cambodia for over 2 years now. My Peace Corps service is about to come to a close, and I will no longer be a Volunteer as of May 1st.

My general plans, after that, are to travel for 6 weeks in Southeast Asia (sometimes with company and sometimes without) and then to go back to the US in June. After that I'll travel around the US to visit friends and family. Then in August I'll settle down to conquer some biology and chemistry pre-requisites in preparation for an academic career in biological anthropology (even though I still can't identify those organs in my morning bowl of noodles).

Going back to the US, we've been promised, is a big change, and not always easy. We're different from when we left, our country's different, our friends are different, our family's different. (When we left, the economic crisis was not even a glimmer in Lehman Brothers' eye; ol what's-his-name was still our president; nobody was watching Battlestar Galactica; and I thought stripes and florals didn't match.) Being Americans abroad is easy: we can just chalk up personal quirks to our upbringing in American culture. But being an American back home is a little more difficult: do we even remember how to do that?

So if you have any American culture/re-entry advice or observations, please don't hesitate to advise me or observe to me. I still check my e-mail weekly. And if you've been meaning to send snail mail in this direction, it's probably best to post it before St. Patrick's Day, or April Fool's Day at the latest. (April in Cambodia is a month of holidays, so the postal workers here may or may not be sorting the mail then.)

I'm going to continue posting on the blog, as several interesting events (knock on wood) should transpire between now and when I leave. But I think it will go by quickly and the strangeness and beauty of America will be mine to experience again before long.

Long-Promised AW Bike Race Report

Somehow, more than two months have passed since the Angkor Wat Bike Race. How did that happen? I looked up and all of a sudden we were on the far side of Valentine's Day, not to mention President's Day, New Year's, and Christmas. But I didn't forget that I promised a post about the race, so here's what I can tell you:

Looking back on the race, I consider it an unmitigated success because

(1) I got to spend a whole weekend in Siem Reap eating Western food and being decadent, aside from the pre-5 a.m. wake-up time for the race and the whole biking and sweating part

(2) Several contributors gave generously to the race (thank you all!)

(3) I rode the race in record time (1:13) for me compared to how long it normally takes to ride 28 km down the national highway to Battambang (1:20)

(4) As souvenirs of the race, I got a pretty green biking jersey which I wear all the time at site because it wicks and a delicious breakfast at Alliance Cafe

(5) As an added bonus, on this trip I got to visit Siem Reap's crocodile farm and throw fishes at the crocodiles in a not-entirely-successful attempt to get them to show their vicious natures (Would that we had had a camera!)

What more could I have wanted?

Here's a picture of me about to cross the finish line. Yes, I did the race in flip-flops. Tennis shoes are too heavy to put in my backpack for a weekend.

And here's a picture of Team Peace Corps after the sun came up and the race was over. We were down 2 members due to dengue and a forgotten helmet, but we made up for it by eating a lot of food at the post-race brunch.

The School Calendar

Two friends of mine, Ming and Andy, keep a blog about their experiences working and living here in Cambodia. They collaborate closely with several high schools throughout the country on technology issues, and they have a thorough understanding of just how the "system" works.

One of my favorite entries details the school calendar for the 2007-2008 school year. (Each year is slightly different, as at least half of the Khmer holidays are based on the lunar calendar rather than the solar one. But the gist remains the same.) Officially, of course, for a list of school holidays one should consult the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sport. But for a realistic picture of what happens in a real-live school, the unofficial calendar is more accurate.

So why am I not in a classroom on a Monday morning? Because we are welcoming in the Chinese year of the ox today. Happy Chinese New Year!

The Garden

Towards the end of the rainy season, I decided to take a tour of my host family's garden to see what all was growing in it. There are actually a lot more kinds of plants growing out behind our house than I had originally thought, although I'm not sure if we eat all the fruits and vegetables we grow or not.

We have a growing number of papaya trees. The fruits start out green, like they are here, just where the branches begin to stem from the tree, and slowly turn yellow and then orange as they ripen. Sometimes, because the trees are slender, they become so overladen with fruit that they simply fall over. Luckily this tree is still upright and producing more papayas.


We also have an eggplant, um, plant. Cambodians eat small eggplants, usually just raw with prahoc (fish paste---delicious!).


There are a couple of thin young sugarcane stalks too. My host mom used to sell sugarcane juice in her store in front of the house, but then she broke her wrist. Because selling sugarcane juice is physically a lot of work (you have to shave the stalk; then start the press by pulling a cord, like starting a lawnmower; then put the stalks through the press), she stopped doing that while her wrist heals. In any case, we could never grow enough sugarcane out back to supply the store, so I don't know why we have these plants. Back at the end of rainy season when there was very heavy rainfall, a couple of the stalks (on the right side of the picture) fell over because the ground was too saturated to support them.

We also have a banana tree or two. Bananas are so beautiful!

And we have some pretty flowers that seem to grow on a plant that has no fruit.

Finally, we have a couple of mystery trees. I have no idea what those strange round fruits are. I wonder if they are delicious.

My tour of the garden yielded so many interesting discoveries. My only regret is that we have no mango tree. Guess it'll be fresh papayas for dessert this season instead of mangoes.

We Heart Art

Jumping around a bit chronologically, I want to talk about one of the projects I had way back in July: an art workshop.

Cambodian students seem to get pretty bored during the summer, with neither school nor organized sports to keep them busy and very little farming to be done. I wanted to give some local students something fun and productive to do and also encourage them to think creatively. So I put out an announcement that I would teach a month-long art workshop, and every day for an hour in July 10 to 25 students showed up at the otherwise deserted high school, eager to learn and do. I taught the basics of various art forms, taking about a week for each different subject. We started with visual arts: origami, cartooning, and collage using old magazines. The second week we talked about music and singing, including the Western musical staff and notation (was this concept extremely foreign to the students? Yes. Was it useful? Probably not. But that doesn't stop math teachers from teaching the formula for the volume of a cone so why should it keep me from teaching musical notation?). In the third week, we went on to poetry and rhyme, and the students tried their hand at writing a couple of short poems. The last week was all about Khmer dancing, including dances called the Madison and Cambodian cha-cha-cha. I'm no expert in Khmer dancing, but the school's PE teacher had taught me some basic moves that were easy to pass on to the students. We borrowed the PE teacher's car-battery-powered stereo and cassette tapes with Khmer music so we could all dance in sync. (If only we had had a tape with the Electric Slide!) Unsurprisingly, dance was probably the most popular unit.

The workshop was great fun overall, and I was struck by the talent a lot of the students displayed, especially during the collage portion. So I took pictures of a few of their collages. (My apologies for being an amateur and not cropping the photos. Technology is hard!) This first one is called The Green World and Beautiful of Life by a girl who gave herself the English name Lizzie. I thought she used an interesting combination of paper scraps and meaningful pictures to make a striking landscape. And she used the whole page!

This next one is called Advertise of Watch (no, I didn't correct students' grammar in titling their art. What kind of pedant do you think I am?). This one could be seen as a commentary on the large number of prominent watch ads in Newsweeks, our primary source magazine for these collages. Or maybe this girl really liked telling time. Either way, for some reason I was really impressed with it.

This last one is by a boy who gave himself the English name Peter. He created several distinctive collages using bright colors and basic shapes: this one of a fruit basket, a flower and a fairy, and a grinning pig's face (it's cuter than it sounds).

Hooray for art!

Go West! Er, South. Well, Go Somewhere, I Guess

Another PCV found an interesting article recently about higher education in Cambodia, something that naturally interests a group of people who teach high schoolers. The article is a pretty stark indictment of the whole situation. Its key points are that educational quality is low in Cambodian universities, and most (as in 9 out of 10) university graduates don't get jobs. That's a striking number. Imagine graduating from a U.S. university with a 1-in-10 chance of getting a job. Here are some important bits:

A growing number of eager young Cambodians are finding themselves duped into a higher education system that suffers from weak management and teaching because it is geared more toward profit than learning.

As a result only one in ten recent graduates are finding work, a worrying figure in a country trying to rebuild after decades of civil war.

A few Cambodian students have asked me, their local American and one of the few teachers at their high school with a 4-year degree, for university advice. It's easy to tell an American high-schooler that going to university or even a community college usually makes financial sense, because of the increased earning power at the end of four(ish) years. But in Cambodia I honestly don't know if that's true. Here, the students who pass the national grade-12 exam and pass a subject exam can train to become public-school teachers at free public institutions for 2 years, at the end of which time they will earn a monthly salary of around $50 with modest yearly raises. That salary isn't quite enough to feed 1 person, much less a family; but it's almost a guaranteed job, since there just aren't enough teachers to go around. (For example, my high school has over 2,000 students and around 40 teachers, which averages out to 50+ students per classroom, a number that any teacher will tell you is ridiculous.) And a job as a public-school teacher is a good entree into the field of teaching private classes, which can bring in somewhere between $150 and $250 a month. That kind of money will definitely feed a family of 4.

The math gets a little more complicated for university. Yearly university fees range from $200 to $600 (cheap!), on top of which students often forget to factor in living expenses and books. Salaries upon leaving university, though, are often $100-250 per month. That's if you can get a job, which apparently 90% of graduates do not do. Goodness only knows where they go, but sometimes it's back to their parents' house to help farm rice or sell bicycles or noodles or cell phones.

I can't, in good conscience, tell students to "do what they love, and the money will follow" because that's just not how it works in Cambodia. What things does money follow here? It follows farming huge plots of land, working in the tourism industry centered around the Angkor Wat temple complex in Siem Reap, retailing goods from a stall in the market, etc.

Here's my favorite part of the article:

Qualified university professors complain that many students rarely do their work and cheating is rampant.

Um, the professors are complaining about cheating and students not doing their homework? Has it ever occurred to them to fail a student? I think low or failing grades might be discouraged by university officials, as they could cause students to enroll at different institutions which will give them a similar degree for less effort.

As we speak, my host sister is studying toward a four-year degree in accounting at a Cambodian university, and her little brother is studying rural development at another one. I haven't had the courage to show them this article. I'm hoping that they will be among the lucky 10% to secure employment when the time comes. And I'm hoping that someday, the Cambodian universities will be able to offer something better to young people hungry for education.