do you know how to harvest rice?

People always ask, "Do you know how to eat rice?" It really means do you eat rice, or have you eaten rice here, but for some reason that is how people phrase it in Cambodia.

Now I not only know how to eat rice, which I know a lot (how you say you know something well ex: I know Cambodia A LOT!), but also how to harvest it.

A few weekends ago (I'm catching up on old blog material since I've been busy lately) my friend Abby came to visit me at my site and the next day I went to visit her site. While at my house we made baba ghanoush and falafel. We had a lazy day other than that.

At Abby's (which is only about 30k from my site) we ate some breakfast of noam, which is like Cambodian sweet rice cake and comes in many many forms, and then went on a looong bike ride. We biked along meeting different people and stopping to chat or take pictures of interesting things. One thing we came across was this rice threshing machine. It was shooting the stalks up into the air and separating out the grains of rice. A very apropos picture of rural Cambodian life.

We kept biking and eventually the rode dead-ended into rice fields. We could see a ton of water buffalo and cows and wanted to take some pictures of them (the water buffalo are one of my favorite things in Cambodia, especially the babies). A woman offered to let us leave our bikes at her house, so we parked them and followed her into the rice paddies. She and her family and some neighbors were harvesting rice. They were almost done by the time we got there, so they let us try it. It was fun for the five minutes or so I participated, but doing it for a whole day would be back-breaking work, not to mention how incredibly hot it was out. 

WARNING: if you don't like disgusting stories about mice, stop reading now, and don't move to rural Cambodia.

After we walked out further and snapped pictures of the water buffalo we started to walk back when we saw all the people who were harvesting rice screaming and running around, beating something in the grass. I thought it might be a snake so we hung back for a minute. Turns out while harvesting rice the people had run into a whole den of mice, and were chasing after and killing them. They just kept coming and everyone, especially the young boys, were running and beating the mice with sticks and sickles or picking them up and throwing them HARD against the ground. 

One boy was even reaching up to his elbow into a mouse hole, dragging them out by their tails, and then slamming them down from his full three feet of height to the ground.

This was one of the more disgusting things I've seen in Cambodia. The mice just kept coming! By the end the people had a basket full of at least 50 mice. One little girl was going around collecting all the dead mouse bodies by the tails. I was grossed out and also intrigued. I was standing right next to the action, which would never have happened a year ago. If you live here, you just have to become numb to rodents and other gross or scary things if you want to survive. But I digress... I kept asking why they had all the mice and whether they were going to be dinner. One woman said yes, the people would eat the mice. Another woman said no. I think she was lying because she knew it was kind of "Cambodian ghetto" to eat mice. But you gotta do what you gotta do, and I didn't see many other food sources out where they lived.

Finally we finished staring at the dead mice, and biked back to Abby's house. I have never been so sweaty and dirty in my life. 

I don't know much about life after Peace Corps, except that priorities one and two as soon as I get off that plane are taking a shower and eating In-n-Out. Hold the mice.