I wrote this October 12 but haven't had internet since then... sorry about the double post. I figured I might as well post them all while I can!
Upon arriving in Cambodia I quickly realized that even simple everyday actions are very different here than in the states. We all had to learn how to wash our clothes, clean our water, bathe, converse, and of course use the bathroom. It is like I left America a more or less fully functional adult, and when I arrived in Cambodia I could only function at the level of an infant. Any 10 year old child could tell or show you how to do these things, but I had to be taught how to do all of them. I thought for your entertainment, and because school ended two hours ago and I am now out of things to do for the day, I would describe how to do some basic things in Cambodia vs. America. Hopefully it doesn’t serve to discourage anyone from visiting!
1. Bathing
Not that anyone needs to be taught how to bathe American style, but just think about what is involved. Turn on the water, step in the shower, close the shower curtain. Lather, rinse, repeat. Turn off the water. Voila!
As I mentioned before my bathroom has a hose that brings the water right into the bathroom. It is glorious. I just scoop the water out of the big bucket and dump it over my head, lather up, and dump again. While I’m in there I usually spray my arms and feet in the morning with mosquito repellant so I can easily wash it off my hands. I then just shimmy into my sarong and walk back to my room! I know some people have given up on this, but I still carry my water bottle of filtered water into the bathroom with which to brush my teeth. Which brings us to…
2. Preparing Drinking Water
For most people in America this consists of turning on the tap.
In Cambodia Peace Corps hooked us up with some awesome water filters! We don’t have to boil our water first, which is nice because I feel bad using too much of my family’s wood or propane and it takes 20 minutes at a rolling boil to really kill what is in the water. Instead I scoop the water out of the rain water catchers and into my giant steel pot where I add a cap full of bleach. This totally freaked me out at first, putting bleach in my drinking water, but it can’t be worse than what I normally ingest on a weekend in the states… After 30 minutes of sitting, I pour the bleached water into my water filter and in a few short hours I have a whole filter full of delicious clean water. Go team.
3. Washing Clothes
This is my favorite. I dream about washing machines all the time. Just sort lights and darks about once a week and throw in a load with some detergent. Return in about 45 minutes to transfer clothes to the dryer or drying line.
FILL: During training my host family had a well in front of their house where I would do laundry. I would throw down the bucket, let it fill up about half way, and then haul it up and pour the water into the basin. Luckily my permanent site family has a motor that pumps water from their well. As I’ve said before, I’m totally spoiled here. I just scoop the water from the holding tanks into the wash basin and also fill a bucket.
WASH: I put a few items of clothing in the basin and sprinkle some detergent on top and squish it around. With t-shirts and stuff I just sort of scrub the fabric against itself because I don’t want it to stretch out too much. With other stuff I then pick up the scrub brush and go to town. Especially my pants require a lot of scrubbing to get the mud and what not out. My poor linen pants have stains on them from I don’t know where that are definitely in there for good. After I scrub out all the curry that I have inevitably dropped in my lap that week I squeeze the water out of the items and throw them in the bucket of water. When I’m done with my whole load I dump out the water from the basin, usually a dark color that is either reddish or greenish or blueish brown, and rinse the wash basin then fill it with clean water.
RINSE: I pull the items from the water bucket and squeeze them out, then rinse them one more time in the wash basin full of fresh water.
SPIN: I wring them out and toss my clothes back into the laundry basket to carry them to the front of the house.
DRY: My family has a bunch of racks so I put everything on hangers and let it hang dry. On drier days this is quick, but on humid days sometimes it takes a day or more. I have a nice set up in my room with a clothesline so when things are dry I don’t even have to fold them I just throw them on the line in my room! I still think it is awkward that my underwear hangs out in front of the house for the whole village to see, but I usually sandwich it between other clothes. Hopefully all the guys have managed to keep their leopard thongs hidden; I don’t think that would go over well in the community. I am not even kidding. This is a true confession by a volunteer…
4. Speaking
It is difficult to explain the difference between speaking the same language as everyone and piecing together part Khmer, sometimes part English, usually part pantomime. I have gotten quite used to sitting quietly while people ramble on to each other about me in Khmer. Sometimes they are not so nice because they think I cannot understand, but when I get the drift of what they are saying I usually just say something mean back in English. My host brother in law was talking about how I must not be very smart because I do not speak Khmer very well while we were all sitting at the dinner table. Later I told him his haircut looked like a ridiculous ugly child in America. He had no idea what I was saying. Is it petty? Absolutely. Does it make me feel better? Absolutely.
5. Dropping off the Kids at the Pool
You know what I’m talking about. The John. The throne. Dropping a bomb, a deuce, dookie. There are two kinds of toilets in Cambodia, a western looking toilet and a squatty potty as I like to call it, better known as the Asian style squat toilet. This is basically a rectangular porcelain platform with two indentations on either side for your feet, sometimes ridged for traction, and a hole in the middle. Upon discussion many of my fellow volunteers and I concluded this type of toilet has its advantages. While it may be difficult to master the “Asian squat” at first and it can hurt your knees if you have extended or frequent visits, there is no weird hovering half squat like with the western style toilet, no soaking wet seat, and it’s much cleaner because you get good cheek spread-age (I am so never getting a professional job in any future employers read this. I swear I don’t normally talk about poop and buttholes this much.).
The western style toilet usually looks just like an American toilet… but it is not. I definitely do not sit on mine so I have to do the weird hovering thing. At least it is a thigh workout. I do, however, have a butt squirter. There is a little hose that comes out of my wall, attached to PVC pipe, with a gun like nozzle on the end. You use it to squirt your butt! It is a great luxury. The other option is to take the water scooper, scoop water, and then pour it on your butt, usually followed up or in conjunction with your hand. It is advisable to consistently use your left hand, and only eat with your right. Flushing consists of pouring a scoop of water down the toilet in both cases. Toilet paper isn’t really an option. I guess some volunteers use it but then you have to transfer it to a trash bag and burn it later. The less trash the better. Plus, I personally do not want to have to deal with a bag of poopy paper every few days, or every day if you are lucky…
Hopefully you enjoyed my little lesson about life in Cambodia. If you have any questions about my life here I would love to answer them. Part of the mission of Peace Corps is to teach Americans about the culture in which we live for two years. While that part of the mission is definitely not what I think is most important, it can be fun and interesting.
I miss everyone back home! Send me an email or leave me a comment, let me know what is up in your life (or as my teddy bear Khmer notebook says, what is up in your fashion?).
P.S. I am trying to write an update every week but the internet situation is questionable. I will do my best to keep it current but life is hard on the streets.
Friday, October 23, 2009
So this is my life now…
I am a female. I am 22 years old. For most of those 22 years I have been a book worm, football fanatic, lover of cupcakes, dancer, student, and advocate for the value of education. I am still all of these things, but as of late, I am also a Peace Corps Volunteer serving in Siem Reap province in Cambodia. I have wanted to be a Peace Corps Volunteer for as long as I can remember, long before I understood what it really meant, and to be fair I’ve been in country three months and still hardly know what it means. Now I’m here, trudging through the day to day work, trying to make a change in myself and in my community. I say trudging because it is rainy season and I literally trudge. It rains almost every day for at least an hour or so, which keeps the roads pretty muddy. But it also keeps away the blazing heat so I can’t complain too much.
When I arrived in country it was hot. I was pretty shell shocked and jet lagged after a two day ordeal of traveling from San Francisco to Japan, to Thailand, and finally arriving in Phnom Penh. All I could register was the heat. Still some days it is all I can do to manage being so hot. Sweat pours out of every inch of my skin constantly. I carry bandanas to mop off my face every five minutes or so. Really, it is probably no hotter than at home in California, but the humidity is killer. It feels like the air is made of milk. It is disgusting and uncomfortable.
Luckily, I can find a brief reprieve by “showering” when I get home from school. I am spoiled at my host family’s house by having a nice bathroom with a hose that brings in water regularly to the water bucket. I can scoop cool water out any time and run it over my head to cool down… at least for a minute. The rest of the bathroom situation is not so pleasant. Ask any Peace Corps Volunteer or anyone who has lived abroad in a developing country: your poop is always the talk of the hour, whether the lack of it or the unending stream of it. What parasites it contains. How to keep it away from your mouth (oral-fecal contamination causes more diseases than I could possibly imagine before I came here. News flash: poop in your mouth gets you sick. Who knew?). Cosmo should have a special issue for Peace Corps Volunteers, and instead of quizzes like “What Your Man’s Pizza Preferences Say about His Love” it could have “What Your Poop Says about Your Host Family’s Food Preparation and Hygiene” and articles like “Difficult Conversations: How to Talk to Host Mom about the use of Soap and Bleach”.
I am also spoiled with electricity 24/7. I cannot tell you how awesome this is. My training host family (all the trainees lived in Takeo province for two months and then were sent to our permanent sites after we swore in officially as volunteers) did not have electricity all the time. They ran a generator for a few hours at night, and during that window I had to shower and get ready for bed, and do any work or reading I wanted or needed to. After that it was all flashlights. Headlamps are the best invention ever for situations like this, but they also attract bugs right to your face. That also meant the fan shut off around eight-thirty or nine. If it was hot I could count on lying awake in my own sweat for a few solid hours. Before I was sure I was accepted to the Peace Corps I was looking for apartments hoping to find hardwood floors and a dishwasher. Now all I want is electricity and a bathroom that is not taken over by rats at night. Things snap into perspective here at light speed.
I work at a high school teaching English about 16 hours a week, plus prep time. I also volunteer at the health center in town doing… well… I’ll get back to you on that. I am in the first group of health volunteers here. We had a week of training and have a ton of resources but I still am not exactly sure what I am going to do. No one who works at the health center really speaks English and my Khmer is limited. I can, however, tell them all about my favorite fruits and what colors they are. “I like dragon fruit the best. It is pink. Inside it is white and black. It has a sweet flavor.” Look at me, changing the world one useless piece of information at a time.
I have met most of my students and many of them are painfully shy. I think that is the number one thing I would like to change in my two years here. Many of the students are clearly intelligent, but it takes so much prodding to get them to say anything you would never know it. I want them to stand up and be heard. I know some of you are probably thinking, and I’ll admit I’ve thought myself, teaching English to kids who are just going to end up rice farmers is pointless. The thing is, for some of them English is the key to their education. There are not many text books written in Khmer for higher level education. Doctors and nurses are usually educated in French; others are educated with English texts. If they cannot understand English they are limited to Khmer translated texts if they can even study at all (I’m still a little unclear as to how that works since I’ve been told texts are in English but English is an optional subject on the national exam required to get into University). By the time anyone gets around to translating something into Khmer it is very out of date. Additionally, the tourism industry in Cambodia is starting to take off. To get a job at a restaurant, hotel, with a tour company or any other job involving tourists English is the language of choice. Most tourists that I have encountered speak English as either their first or second language. They want people providing their services to speak their language so they can communicate, not an unreasonable concept for any of us to grasp. It may raise questions of what is lost when you separate language from culture, and tourists come to expect that they need not navigate a country’s language, but that is a whole separate tangent… The point is English is a chance to get a better paying job, break the cycle of poverty, maybe help younger siblings afford high education, help their families afford clean drinking water, live in a house that isn’t blown over by a typhoon, killing the family living inside. English might be the rope dangling into the pit, lifting out a girl who would otherwise get married right after high school, if she finished high school at all, pop out nine kids and work in the rice paddies. There are 13 tenth grade classes at my high school, 11 eleventh grade classes, and 4 twelfth grade classes which have significantly fewer students.
These children could be tomorrow’s leaders. They could be the ones making policy and reforming the education system, which desperately needs to be done. High school students only attend school in the morning because they have to share the facility with the middle school students. There aren’t enough classrooms or teachers to have a full day. They get five hours of class, six days a week. There is no arts education, no music, apparently there is a P.E. class but I haven’t seen it. I think when a class of tenth graders cannot identify the capitol of Cambodia (true story) there are more pressing issues than the arts, but I can’t help but think of the eleventh grader who told me today he wants to be an artist. The kid with a unibrow who could barely eke out a coherent sentence in English and supposedly wants to be an English teacher is a whole other issue (Not that there is anything wrong with having a unibrow, that is just how I remember him. I teach about 300 kids during the week so it is hard to keep them all straight.) I want my students to want more and strive for more. I want them to know they deserve clean drinking water, to not be beaten by their spouse, to have a job that pays the bills, and to be valued as much as the kid in the seat next to them regardless of their gender.
I am still a lover of words, a Coca-Cola addict, a bad music fiend, guilty-pleasure magazine reader, snowboarding, overly talkative, cheap laugh seeker. But now I am also an English teacher, mentor, health volunteer and educator, teacher trainer, support system, friend, Khmer learner, ex-pat who wipes her ass with her hand and asks, “Have you eaten rice yet?” Is it a day that ends in Y (or that starts with “twoo-nai” in Khmer)? Because if so then yes, I have eaten rice already, and, yes, it was quite “ching’ahn”.
When I arrived in country it was hot. I was pretty shell shocked and jet lagged after a two day ordeal of traveling from San Francisco to Japan, to Thailand, and finally arriving in Phnom Penh. All I could register was the heat. Still some days it is all I can do to manage being so hot. Sweat pours out of every inch of my skin constantly. I carry bandanas to mop off my face every five minutes or so. Really, it is probably no hotter than at home in California, but the humidity is killer. It feels like the air is made of milk. It is disgusting and uncomfortable.
Luckily, I can find a brief reprieve by “showering” when I get home from school. I am spoiled at my host family’s house by having a nice bathroom with a hose that brings in water regularly to the water bucket. I can scoop cool water out any time and run it over my head to cool down… at least for a minute. The rest of the bathroom situation is not so pleasant. Ask any Peace Corps Volunteer or anyone who has lived abroad in a developing country: your poop is always the talk of the hour, whether the lack of it or the unending stream of it. What parasites it contains. How to keep it away from your mouth (oral-fecal contamination causes more diseases than I could possibly imagine before I came here. News flash: poop in your mouth gets you sick. Who knew?). Cosmo should have a special issue for Peace Corps Volunteers, and instead of quizzes like “What Your Man’s Pizza Preferences Say about His Love” it could have “What Your Poop Says about Your Host Family’s Food Preparation and Hygiene” and articles like “Difficult Conversations: How to Talk to Host Mom about the use of Soap and Bleach”.
I am also spoiled with electricity 24/7. I cannot tell you how awesome this is. My training host family (all the trainees lived in Takeo province for two months and then were sent to our permanent sites after we swore in officially as volunteers) did not have electricity all the time. They ran a generator for a few hours at night, and during that window I had to shower and get ready for bed, and do any work or reading I wanted or needed to. After that it was all flashlights. Headlamps are the best invention ever for situations like this, but they also attract bugs right to your face. That also meant the fan shut off around eight-thirty or nine. If it was hot I could count on lying awake in my own sweat for a few solid hours. Before I was sure I was accepted to the Peace Corps I was looking for apartments hoping to find hardwood floors and a dishwasher. Now all I want is electricity and a bathroom that is not taken over by rats at night. Things snap into perspective here at light speed.
I work at a high school teaching English about 16 hours a week, plus prep time. I also volunteer at the health center in town doing… well… I’ll get back to you on that. I am in the first group of health volunteers here. We had a week of training and have a ton of resources but I still am not exactly sure what I am going to do. No one who works at the health center really speaks English and my Khmer is limited. I can, however, tell them all about my favorite fruits and what colors they are. “I like dragon fruit the best. It is pink. Inside it is white and black. It has a sweet flavor.” Look at me, changing the world one useless piece of information at a time.
I have met most of my students and many of them are painfully shy. I think that is the number one thing I would like to change in my two years here. Many of the students are clearly intelligent, but it takes so much prodding to get them to say anything you would never know it. I want them to stand up and be heard. I know some of you are probably thinking, and I’ll admit I’ve thought myself, teaching English to kids who are just going to end up rice farmers is pointless. The thing is, for some of them English is the key to their education. There are not many text books written in Khmer for higher level education. Doctors and nurses are usually educated in French; others are educated with English texts. If they cannot understand English they are limited to Khmer translated texts if they can even study at all (I’m still a little unclear as to how that works since I’ve been told texts are in English but English is an optional subject on the national exam required to get into University). By the time anyone gets around to translating something into Khmer it is very out of date. Additionally, the tourism industry in Cambodia is starting to take off. To get a job at a restaurant, hotel, with a tour company or any other job involving tourists English is the language of choice. Most tourists that I have encountered speak English as either their first or second language. They want people providing their services to speak their language so they can communicate, not an unreasonable concept for any of us to grasp. It may raise questions of what is lost when you separate language from culture, and tourists come to expect that they need not navigate a country’s language, but that is a whole separate tangent… The point is English is a chance to get a better paying job, break the cycle of poverty, maybe help younger siblings afford high education, help their families afford clean drinking water, live in a house that isn’t blown over by a typhoon, killing the family living inside. English might be the rope dangling into the pit, lifting out a girl who would otherwise get married right after high school, if she finished high school at all, pop out nine kids and work in the rice paddies. There are 13 tenth grade classes at my high school, 11 eleventh grade classes, and 4 twelfth grade classes which have significantly fewer students.
These children could be tomorrow’s leaders. They could be the ones making policy and reforming the education system, which desperately needs to be done. High school students only attend school in the morning because they have to share the facility with the middle school students. There aren’t enough classrooms or teachers to have a full day. They get five hours of class, six days a week. There is no arts education, no music, apparently there is a P.E. class but I haven’t seen it. I think when a class of tenth graders cannot identify the capitol of Cambodia (true story) there are more pressing issues than the arts, but I can’t help but think of the eleventh grader who told me today he wants to be an artist. The kid with a unibrow who could barely eke out a coherent sentence in English and supposedly wants to be an English teacher is a whole other issue (Not that there is anything wrong with having a unibrow, that is just how I remember him. I teach about 300 kids during the week so it is hard to keep them all straight.) I want my students to want more and strive for more. I want them to know they deserve clean drinking water, to not be beaten by their spouse, to have a job that pays the bills, and to be valued as much as the kid in the seat next to them regardless of their gender.
I am still a lover of words, a Coca-Cola addict, a bad music fiend, guilty-pleasure magazine reader, snowboarding, overly talkative, cheap laugh seeker. But now I am also an English teacher, mentor, health volunteer and educator, teacher trainer, support system, friend, Khmer learner, ex-pat who wipes her ass with her hand and asks, “Have you eaten rice yet?” Is it a day that ends in Y (or that starts with “twoo-nai” in Khmer)? Because if so then yes, I have eaten rice already, and, yes, it was quite “ching’ahn”.
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