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”.