Happy International Women’s Day everyone! Here is Cambodia we celebrate women’s rights by taking a day off of school, what else? On Thursday there was a stage being assembled in the middle of the school grounds. I asked my co teacher what it was for and he told me there would be a ceremony for Women’s Day on Friday. He said about 200 people were asked to attend, and everyone else would go to class. Obviously I doubted that students would be going to class that day. I also assumed at the last minute he would tell me we were going.
On Friday I got to school and had barely hopped off of my bike when my co teacher said, “okay we will attend the ceremony now.” I do so hate being right. Then something unexpected happened when a woman who I do not know, and frankly still have no idea who she is, grabbed my arm and lead me to sit on the stage. All of the women were in the back row of chairs… Since I knew some important people were coming to the ceremony I wore my nicer teaching shirt that day and didn’t roll up the sleeves, so at least I looked mildly presentable, but everyone else was wearing formal sampots and white lacy shirts. In fact, one of the older women was wearing a shirt that was entirely made of lace! You could completely see her bra; thank goodness she was wearing one. I can’t believe I was told not to wear one of my shirts anymore because it was too low cut. I should have known it would be okay if the shirt is just see-through, as long as the cut isn’t suggestive in any way.
So just before the ceremony began one of my other co teachers came up to me and informed me the organizers wanted me to give a speech. “No problem, just a short speech, only two or five minutes,” he said. And of course they expected it in Khmer. I told them I cannot get up and give a speech for two or five minutes in Khmer, about women’s rights, without any advanced warning. I don’t have that kind of vocabulary! So I agreed to speak for maybe two or five minutes in English, and my co teacher would translate. I scribbled some notes of things I could say, but out of spite I refused to let the man who was translating see them before we started. Take that! I know it is wrong to behave like a petulant child, but that didn’t stop me. They knew about this ceremony weeks ago! All I would need is a day to translate some words ahead of time. So I took my revenge and put my translator on the spot they way they put me on the spot. It made no sense, given the speech wasn’t his idea, but I chose to be vaguely vindictive to anyone around. It happens.
I stood up and gave my few sentence speech about women being the way of the future, making advances in science, math, politics, literature, etc. I told the students present that I knew they were the future of Cambodia and they had a real chance to make a difference in a society that is rapidly growing and changing. I told them to do their best and do anything they could dream of; they have all the same capabilities and should have all the same opportunities as their male counterparts. It probably wasn’t my best work, but given that I had five minutes to prepare and wanted to keep it fairly simple for translation I thought it was ok! When we sat down my co teacher said, “Maybe next time we tell you before so you have some time to prepare a better speech.” Ya think???
After the whole ordeal was finished my classes were over so I went home. I needed to get some things done anyway, since I was going to Kralanh with my whole family on Saturday and would be gone all day. I woke up at 4:30am and got dressed and we all piled into a van. By 5:00am we were on the road. When we arrived I realized we were going to a wedding. I was definitely not dressed for a wedding, but no one in my family was wearing traditional wedding clothes, so I think it was okay. We saw the morning ceremony and then went to the pagoda to make an offering both to the monks and the ancestors. Then we went back to the house and waited. Khmer weddings have three parts, basically the same as any American Judeo-Christian wedding. There is a formal ceremony in the morning, then people eat a lot, then people drink a lot and dance a lot. Unfortunately in Cambodia there are long breaks between the three parts, making it a full day event. Everyone else went back to their homes to rest and get out of the heat in between parts. We had no where to go so my whole family and I just waited around for the next part to begin.
When lunch was served I was more than a little nervous. Almost all the volunteers I know have said they were sick after eating at a wedding because the food is prepared en masse, in a place with no clean water, and Typhoid Mary is probably the one in the kitchen. I picked at a few things that looked safe, but didn’t eat much. I told my host father I was scared of getting a “chew poo-uh” or stomach ache. He understood and agreed I should be careful.
Of course throughout the event men kept offering me beer. As a foreigner I get to blend some of the gender lines a little. I’m like a Cambodian hermaphrodite I guess, I have a little of both sexes. So finally I was so bored I decided to have a beer, which I never do at site even though they usually offer me one when the men in my host family are drinking. My host father said, “No, this is beer! Do you know how to drink beer?” Yes, I think I might… So I started to drink some beer. All the random men of Kralanh, especially those who know Janice, the volunteer there, came up to cheers and try to force me to chug some Crown beer. I kept telling them it was too hot to drink so quickly. I was fine drinking it slowly. I had a few glasses full, with ice in the glass to cool it down, which probably equated to a little over one beer. Then my host dad took my glass away! Raining on my parade as usual.
Luckily we left before the dancing started. It would have been another several hot hours of waiting so I was not excited. We piled in the van again and set off back down the road for home. I was pretty excited to get back and bathe. I was happy to experience my first Khmer wedding, and have my host family there to look out for me and explain things, but I was even happier to be back home before dark. After all, women really shouldn’t be out past dark unless they are prostitutes.
You've had beer prior to Cambodia? Really?
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