weddings part deux

The Wednesday and Thursday following my coteachers' wedding was another teacher's wedding. Saret, the bride-to-be, asked me to be a bridesmaid. I didn't really know what all that entailed, but she said just show up and everything would be taken care of.
Being a bridesmaid in Cambodia is not the same as being a bridesmaid in America, shocking I know. For example, you DO NOT ask your good friends to be bridesmaids in Cambodia, because you like your friends. Instead you choose people you may vaguely know who will make the pictures more beautiful. You might, say, choose two students who are very thin and pale and one foreigner who will add a certain cache to the wedding photos. Also, the wedding party does not help with anything except looking nice, but not as nice as the bride.
I did as requested and showed up, which I was told later meant being at the bride's house at 4 am. Yes, you read that right, four o'clock IN THE MORNING. The next two hours were consumed with applying enough makeup to paint a house on the bride and three bridesmaids, and teasing everyone's hair like there was some sort of eighties look-a-like contest to be participated in. Just in case your own teased hair wasn't big enough, there was plenty of fake hair to tease and pile on as well.
My personal favorite part was the eyebrow shaving. I'd like to remind everyone that is was FOUR A.M. and I can barely make it anywhere on time by seven, so I was not fully conscious when they began to shave off part of my eyebrows. When I realized what was happening I did have enough where-with-all to say, "Hey! Please don't do that. Just a little," to which the response was obviously, "No problem! Don't worry! It looks good." In case you were wondering, it doesn't look good. They are still growing back and that doesn't look good either.

The first step of the two day celebration was to go visit a few places in Siem Reap town and take pictures. This was so funny. If the experience alone wasn't enough there were all the tourists who asked to take pictures with us. I was loving it. The best part was the Japanese tourists who wouldn't notice as first that I was not Cambodian and then would make small noises of surprise maybe two minutes into their photo fest when they realized I was "French". Or the American tourists who wandered up and asked if anyone spoke English. They were really impressed with my language skills when I explained what was going on.
After the morning of picture taking, and outfit changing (I was on my second outfit, the bride was on her fourth or fifth) we returned to the house to eat rice. Then it was time for outfit number three (pink top, red pants, least comfortable) and the hair cutting ceremony. Everyone in attendance has a change to come up and pretend to cut the bride and groom's hair. I'm pretty sure money is collected too. A lot of perfume was sprayed. It was really interesting, but man did that outfit HURT! The shirt was squeezing my shoulders so badly I wanted to cry by the time it was over.
Unfortunately we only had a short dinner break before the "eating of cut fruit". I was excited by this, because who doesn't like fruit? Except that we didn't actually get to eat fruit. I did have a nice moment when I was walking in circles around the pile of fruit and firecrackers on the stage in basically a big wedding dress when I just thought, "...WHAT?!?!"

That was a pretty entertaining ceremony, though it was more just fun and less ceremony. Especially when I was handed the microphone to say hello into. Look, it speaks English!!! I especially enjoyed the lighting of the sparklers and watching the bride and groom try to take a bite out of the same apple while maintaining a Cambodian appropriate amount of space between them.
That was the end of day one and I was more than ready for a shower and some sleep, before my 3 a.m. wake-up call the next day.

to be continued...

weddings part one

A few weekends ago my coteacher was married. He invited me to the wedding. Cambodian weddings are very different than the typical "American wedding" you may think of. There are multiple days, several ceremonies, and one big party. Most guests only attend the party at the end of the wedding, which is what I did. Some students came over to my house beforehand as they wanted to travel to the wedding together, which was about 3 kilometers away. Also, it turned out, none of them knew how to apply makeup but they all wanted to wear it. So they asked me to help with their makeup. It was like high school homecoming dance all over again.


One of the other teachers offered us a ride in his car so we all headed over to the wedding at around noon (it started at eleven, but guess how long it took three teenage girls to get ready...). Weddings are a chance to eat fancy Cambodian food, but I recommend avoiding anything uncooked as that is the surest way to get a big case of giardia or amoebic dystentary. The food was pretty good.

While my coteachers' bride and the bridesmaids and groomsmen greeted everyone and handed them a pen, my coteacher was making the rounds to cheers everyone and get drunk. When guests are finished eating and enjoying the wedding they write their name on an envelope provided and put money in it, to be deposited in a giant heart-shaped box on the way out. As a reward, you are given a stick of doublemint gum usually. By the end, when the bride and entourage were accepting money envelopes, my coteacher was dragging me onto the dance floor to dance with him in front of the camera. An important part of anyone's wedding is to dance with the barang. I stood there awkwardly, moving around a little, and wishing I had had a few beers. I asked my coteacher, "Don't you want to dance with your bride?" to which he responded, "Yes! I am surprised!" He was very drunk.
Probably the icing on the cake (of which there was none, and this is my chief and only complaint about Cambodian weddings) was watching my coteacher grab the mic from the DJ repeatedly and slur something into it that was so loud and garbled I had literally NO IDEA what he was saying. But it made all the guests really excited and feel like they needed to scream in response, so I guess it had the desired effect.





Since the music at a wedding is crazy-blow-your-eardrums-out loud the party is usually mercifully short. About two hours after our arrival, the same teacher gave us a ride home. My wedding experience was quite enjoyable and the perfect duration. My next experience would not be so brief...

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.

catching up

It is amazing that I manage to fall behind on things like updating my blog when I feel like I have nothing to do... anyway...

The students' favorite work of "art"

I've been busy since my last update. At school the week after Chinese New Year it was my turn to host the art show. I had the best works from all nine schools participating displayed in a classroom. Students could come by and look at all the art and vote for their favorite. Of course the picture of the HUGE house with a pond and three cars and a white Asian man in front got the most votes. The theme of the art show was hope. Says a lot about the hopes of this new generation of Cambodians. Capitalism... blah blah blah

The one I thought was the best, sorry for the glare.

Students checking out the art.

All the students really seemed to enjoy the art show, and it was a chance for me to do a project involving all the students, even those who don't speak any English, which is nice. Soon the winners across all the schools will be announced and invited to meet an artist who runs a gallery and art school in Siem Reap. It is exciting stuff.
Unfortunately, along with the art show came a nice round of laryngitis/horrible cold. So for the third month in a row I was sick for a week. I'm starting to take doxycycline (anti-malarial) again, I don't care how horrible it is put that much antibiotic in my body every day. It keeps away some minor illnesses, which I could definitely do without.
In other news: it is HOT. So so hot. It was sooo nice during cold season, some days I didn't even break a sweat! And then out of nowhere something snapped and it is hot again. Like in the nineties with ninety percent humidity hot. I am not taking kindly to the heat. I will end this rant there, because I have nothing pleasant to say about the weather. IT. IS. HOT.

Gung Hay Fat Choi!

Happy Chinese New Year everyone! It has been a bit of a slow week since everyone is celebrating... even people who are in no way Chinese... I asked one of my students why she celebrates Chinese New Year if she is not Chinese and she said her parents went to an astrologer, who told them her father might be a little Chinese. Therefore, if they do not appropriately pay homage to the ancestors they won't have any money. First of all, this girl does not look Chinese AT ALL. She is extremely Khmer. Second, her family doesn't have any money anyway. 

I think this is one of the big differences between American and Khmer culture. Americans are very "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," believing if you want to succeed you just have to work hard. Cambodians are much more fatalistic. Even students who know really value hard work can't escape the idea that your destiny determines your life's outcome, and you have to pay homage to the ancestors or you will be poor forever. I've wondered over this difference a lot, and I think part of is that there are so many fewer opportunities to change one's situation here its easier to blame it on fate than society, or any fault of your own. But this is just one idea. I have no idea if its the right one. 

I often have a hard time understanding aspects of Cambodian culture, or why Cambodians do things the way they do because my mindset is so wildly different from that of most Cambodians. I guess that's part of the value of this experience: recognizing and experiencing the differences in societies and ideas around the world. Sometimes when I get frustrated, and I know I'm not alone here, I will chalk it up to Cambodians just not thinking, or being uneducated, but the truth is more complicated than that. 

My landlord invited me to celebrate Chinese New Year with her (also, not even a little Chinese) so we had Cambodian noodles and curry for lunch yesterday. It was delicious, of course. Everyone else was pounding the whiskey or ABC stout beer, but I explained I had to teach later in the afternoon, and thought it would be wrong to show up to work drunk. That didn't stop the people who work at Acleda bank from throwing a few back before getting on their motos and heading back to work... nor did it stop the doctor who lives next door from having a few beers before he went back to work. I really hope I can make it the next 5 1/2 months (!) without needing urgent medical care in town, especially on a holiday.

All in all, it has been a boring week, just sitting around waiting to go to work. I've been trying to prepare for a bunch of things I have going on next week, but since everyone I need is in their "homeland" (aka their hometown, but for some reason they all say homeland) and not at school I haven't been able to get anything done. Hopefully things will go smoothly next week, and I'll have exciting things to write about.

Happy Chinese New Year!!!

nice to meet you, Ms. Ambassador

Last weekend I was in Siem Reap and saw a flyer advertising an event at Angkor Hospital for Children. The flyer just said, "expats come meet your ambassador" which was enough for me.
It was a little intimidating walking into the event, actually. Networking and making conversation used to be so easy, but I'm a little rusty after a year and a half. Also, I was there alone and didn't even really know what to expect from the event. It turned out to be a really interesting and worthwhile evening. I met several expats, most of whom live in Siem Reap, and a few based in Phnom Penh who were temporarily working up north. There were a number of RPCV's there (returned Peace Corps volunteers) who were really friendly and interested to hear about my experience.
Carol Rodley, the US Ambassador to Cambodia, answered some questions along with several staff from the embassy and then the mingling continued. It was a fairly small event, fewer than 30 people I'd guess, so everyone had a chance to speak one-on-one with the Ambassador! I patiently waited my turn, trying not to feel creepy about standing/lurking there while the Ambassador finished her previous conversations, and then got to introduce myself! Ambassador Rodley was so friendly and open, and very enthusiastic about Peace Corps. I asked her about her appointment to Cambodia (did she get to choose?) and her opinion on development in Afghanistan (where she worked prior to returning to Cambodia as Ambassador) and her answers were interesting and thoughtful. She told me when she got the phone call that she was chosen to be an Ambassador she thought it was a prank call because it was midnight her time!
I am really glad I made my way into Siem Reap for this event, and glad that I overcame my hesitancy and nervousness about going alone. I mean, if I can come to the other side of the world not knowing anyone it shouldn't be hard to walk into a room of strangers, right?
On a side note, it appears Cambodia has begun blocking blogs. For some reason I can still post, but I can't see my own blog. So my apologies for any type-o's which I usually catch by viewing the post after I finish it.

let me show you around

Since I haven't posted any pictures of my new house, I thought now would be a good time! I just cleaned the kitchen and bathroom :) I live in a room with an attached bathroom and a small kitchen area, both of which I get all to myself. It is really nice and usually pretty clean, unless I get busy and forget to scrub the floors for a week. My landlord lives in a big house at the front of the property with her family and a few renters. Behind the house there are individual "apartments" and that's where I live!

The view from my front door. Neighbors clothes drying and the trellis.

 Most of my neighbors are really nice. I live next door to a doctor who works at the Angkor Children's Hospital Satellite Clinic where I teach English twice a week. A lot of the other residents work at the Acleda bank in town.

My kitchen area. Not a lot of counter space, but it gets the job done.

 A giant cockroach just crawled out from under my bookshelf... nice.

storage for dishes

The kitchen sink... by which I mean a water spout and a hole in the ground.

 The room had just been built when I moved in. It was finished the day I moved actually. That means everything is as modern as you can get. I have a nice overhead fan hanging precariously from the ceiling that usually works.

The new desk my landlord just put in all the rooms.

  The house is basically right next to school, which is convenient. I spend a lot of time indoors because I like it so much. :) When I lived with a host family I was always trying to think of somewhere to go just to relax a little and be alone, but there isn't really anywhere. It is so much quieter here, and more peaceful. I love it. Also, my friend from the market lives a few doors down. She's usually working, but she told me this week she'd teach me how to make "cha gruen" or fried ingredients. It's just a stir fry with this delicious sauce on it. I'm excited about that.

desk and bookshelf

 Check out my awesome Cambodian pajama pants in the mirror in the above photo. Don't be too jealous.

my bed, mosquito net, and storage trunk

 Unfortunately there is no shower head, just a bucket and another water spout. But after a year and a half I'm quite used to the bucket showers so its not a big deal at all. The one bad thing is the water often comes out icy cold from the storage tank outside. In cold season it is pretty painful, but I always feel like I'm wasting gas if I boil some water for my shower. I just try to do some jumping jacks before bathing... and brace myself. I'd rather be chilly in the shower and enjoy cold season, than face the hot season again where you shower 18 times a day just to try and not be sweaty for a few seconds.

the bathroom

buckets for laundry and showering

There is plenty of space between the bed and the desk for me to do yoga, which I've been doing almost every day since I moved in. I can also jump rope in the yard area outside my door, which is nice. Usually the neighbors keep to themselves and don't stare too much when I do my weird foreigner exercises in the yard.

my digs!

So that's my place! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do. Not bad for only $50 a month plus utilities and water. No charge for garbage, of course. I just walk through the duck/chicken coop and throw it over the back fence where it will be burned later... oh Cambodia.

Three cheers for cold season!

First, apologies that my last post was riddled with minor grammar errors. I didn't proof read very well, apparently.
It is cold season here in Cambodia, and it is AMAZING! It's been cool in the mornings and evenings now for a number of weeks. I'm currently wearing a sweatshirt. A SWEATSHIRT!!!
Weather.com says it is 70 degrees Fahrenheit, but I think it feels a little cooler than that. Maybe my body has just adapted to the normal  scorching hot weather, so 70 feels pretty chilly.
I'm hoping this cool weather lasts as long as possible, until July maybe??? Unlikely, but a girl can dream.

"fine dining" a la Cambodge

Lately I've becoming more ambitious with my cooking. I made two batches of cookies from scratch last week using my "dutch oven" which is a pan elevated inside a larger pot holding water to basically create a convection oven. One batch was sugar cookies, which were missing vanilla extract, but still turned out ok. The second was peanut butter cookies. I had to try some different size cookies because they were kind of crumbly and fell apart but when I made it into more of a loaf, and just filled the pan with dough they cookie/bars turned out really well.

Peanut butter cookie bars.

This weekend I got more ambitious and made gnocchi from scratch! It was actually really easy. You just make plain, dry mashed potatoes with 4 potatoes and then mix/knead in 3-4 cups of flour until the dough is not sticky any more, but not hard either. The recipe said you should roll the dough into snakes and then cut 2cm pieces but my dough wasn't snakey, so I just rolled small balls of dough and boiled them until they floated. It was really tasty with some homemade tomato sauce on top. 

Gnocchi and tomato sauce, all made from scratch :)

Cruising to the market in Kampong Thom.

I'm hoping to pick up some groceries in town that I can't get in my village and try some new recipes. Maybe some hummus and flat bread! 

hardworking English learners

Here are some pictures of my English Club students! They try really hard and have improved since the beginning of the year. A few of them have been my students the whole time I've been in Cambodia. Seeing them improve makes it all worth it. Well, it keeps me here anyway...

My English Club! In case you were wondering what your name sake looks like, from left to right the back row is: Abraham Lincoln, Michael, Brad, Mr. Jackson (as in the pop star, but we already had a Michael), and Ryan. Middle row, the girls: Lindsay, Margaret, Diana, Lorissa, Davina, Brenda. The front row: Robert, Aaron, Andrew, Christian, Rosa, Stephanie, and Kelly. :)

All the girls! I don't know what that pose is when they put the Nike Swoosh in front of their chin... Kelly looks like a Korean pop star in the front row haha

And the boys... Mr. Andrew hamming it up in the front. For the record when I said I would take a picture of the girls they got into a picture formation in about ten seconds flat. It took the boys A LOT longer to figure it out...

TBIT: Thank Buddha it's Thursday

It has been a long week, and I'm glad it is Thursday. Actually, yesterday was just a long day since I teach the most hours on Wednesdays, so when I make it to Thursday I can relax. The worst hour of my Tuesdays and Wednesdays is always the lower-level English class I teach. It is so frustrating because I can't do the more complicated and fun exercises and discussions I do with all my other, more advanced classes. Also, I have to ask them every week to stop speaking Khmer in class. Now I know how my foreign language teachers felt in high school. I guess in college they didn't really care, because at that point its your own damn fault if you fail.
Anyway, today I only have to teach my advanced students. I spent a little longer than I had hoped "reviewing" the phrase "used to" in my grammar class. It says in the book that they should be reviewing the grammar point, but as usual they were never really taught it in the first place. So I explained the difference between "I used to go to Angkor Wat" and "I have been to Angkor Wat". It is confusing because in Khmer there isn't really a differentiation between the two, grammatically at least. I think the students were starting to understand by the end of the hour though. So that is progress.
We played pictionary yesterday in my conversation club. The kids were getting tired of the more serious topics/assignments I've been giving so we lightened it up a little bit. They all told me that, "when we play games like this, English club is so happy!". Of course the kids on the losing team may not have felt the same way. Then they all decided they wanted to take pictures with me on their cell phones. I was not looking my best, but then again, when am I in Cambodia??? The I heart NY shirt Robin sent me is going to be infamous as it has been immortalized in hundreds of pictures with me and various students.
So far today is better than yesterday, starting off right with a nice big plate of rice and pork. I wish I had my camera at the market, because it was a quite pleasant looking spread. Just the right amount of pork, sliced cucumbers, and egg. Instead, I've included some pictures of the backyard decorations my landlord has been working on. She put in a trelice (spelling???) and put some beautiful orchids on it. I told her it looked quite sa'at (beautiful). Then she added some bright orange fake leaves.... and some fake grapes. I guess it is sa'at jee-ung now (more beautiful) in the Cambodian sense...

Back on track

After much delay I am back online. Thanks to my parents my computer has been returned to Cambodia and I now have internet! I don't think I can possibly catch up on what has happened since my last post, as it has been months!!! But I had a wonderful summer full of visitors (see pictures, and for the record I wore a white shirt and green shorts that day with my parents too, and it was definitely an accident) and as this IS Cambodia not TOO much has really changed.

I'm starting to feel like I'm in the home stretch now, though I think that's wishful thinking as we still have about seven months left of service. I've been striving to spend as much time as possible just working with my students. I absorb their every free hour with English class, hoping to give them every opportunity to learn English for free while I am here. I teach a grammar and vocabulary review class during the lunch hour, I have an English conversation club four evenings a week with 19 dedicated students, and four students who come to my house for a sort of "book club" to read stories.
The hours I spend with my students really fly by, and I'm actually seeing some improvement. Whether or not that has anything to do with my teaching skills I don't know, but it is nice to see.

All the students in my club chose "American" names at the beginning of the school year either from a list I provided or one they knew of on their own. It is funny when the students' personalities align with that of their namesakes (all the names I gave were those of people I know, which makes it more fun for me). The two real odd-ball choices were Davina, whose real name is Mary. The only student with a name that was already American invented a totally random name, but if it works for her that's fine.
And then there is Abraham Lincoln. I can't tell if he thinks we know each other well enough to make jokes, or he really dislikes me. His vocabulary is quite extensive (although his pronunciation is HORRIBLE and I have no idea what he is saying half the time) and he always commits fully to the activities I assign in class. But then he makes these horribly off-color comments or says the most morbid things! I found out recently his mother was murdered a few years ago, so I've been trying to be more understanding of where his strange sense of humor comes from, but I've been tempted to kick him out a few times for being inappropriate, rude, or just saying freaky things. Unfortunately, there's no John Wilkes Booth in the class (history jokes!).
For the record, Margaret and Andrew are two of my favorite students and are both incredibly clever. Lindsay is one of the sweetest students I know, and she has a twin sister who chose the name Alyson (who was also in my health club). And of course, Lorissa is sassy. That's the best way to describe her. She's got sass for days.
I plan to post more often in case there's anyone out there who is still interested in my daily happenings (now that I have super internet at site!!!) so for now a brief catch-up will suffice.
Belated Happy Holidays and New Year to everyone! 2011 is looking good so far.

Temporary delay

My apologies for the great length of time between posts. . . I know everyone is just dying to know what's new in rural Cambodia, that old hot spot of trend setters and world changing political movements. I had a whole post written up about this summer, and my travels and visitors and then my laptop gave out on me. It literally just died while i was in the middle of something. Odds are not something important, but still. So I took it to the place that has a decent rep for rehabilitating computers in Siem Reap. The technician was really nice, inspected and tested everything and then concluded, "It's the motherboard." "Is that bad?" I asked, but based on the name alone I was pretty sure it was bad. The kindly computer technician told me it couldn't be fixed. My laptop had up and died, taking that last un posted blog post with it, as well as an article destined for our in country Peace Corps newsletter, some npr podcasts, and a few academic papers written my senior year of college. So long story short I am sans computer at least for the time being. Maybe in the time lapse I can think of something entertaining and witty to post when I next have computer access. In the meantime I anticipate reading a lot. . . There are worse things.

When one door closes…

This week the Cambodian school year officially came to a close. Today may or may not have been the school closing ceremony. I went to school at the time the school director told me the ceremony would start, but none of the teachers were there, nor was the school director. One of my coteachers showed up maybe 20 minutes later and told me no one knew if the school would close that day, because it would happen whenever the school director got there. I asked him to call me if would be that day, and he didn’t, so I’m assuming the school director didn’t show up. I’ll try again tomorrow. I watched Sleepless in Seattle all the way through for the first time, so it wasn’t a total waste of a morning.

The Cambodian school calendar is very bizarre. It begins in late September or October and finishes end of June. School runs Monday through Saturday, and in my village upper secondary (grades 10-12) is 7:00am – noon and lower secondary school (grades 7-9) is 1:00pm – 5:00pm. There isn’t enough space to have two schools run all day, so they share. This is fairly common in poorer areas. Lucky for me I only teach high school so I don’t have to go back to school in the afternoon when it is blazing hot out.

Since the beginning of April school has been kind of a joke… more so than usual. Vacation for Khmer New Year lasted the whole month of April, more likely than not because it is just too hot to teach/learn then. In May some students returned, but numbers were definitely lower than before. There were more days when teachers just wouldn’t teach than before. By 11:00am most students had gone home, and the school was a ghost town by noon. Considering that even during the first semester when my classes actually met every time they were supposed to each “hour” of class was about 40 minutes, students barely get any instructional time compared to the US.

I am extremely happy to put the first year of teaching behind me. My experience teaching in the classroom has been more or less a disappointment. I had fairly high expectations of the results I would get by the end of one year. While we were appropriately warned about the condition of the Cambodian school system during training, I was unprepared to have so many students who just did not know any English. The low level was a total shock. Additionally, neither of my coteachers were interested in lesson planning. I tried a few times to set aside some time each week to meet with them and plan our lessons, but it was pointless. They teach the same book every year, and don’t deviate from the activities and material in it, so there is no reason to lesson plan. I was taking up their precious free time, so I let it go. When I came with a warm-up activity prepared they were both usually willing to let me have a few minutes at the beginning of class. That is something I hope to implement consistently next year.

I’ll admit I got lazy after awhile. I tried different things to get students engaged, but usually my tactics just took up too much time for my coteachers to be willing to let me consistently use them. For some months I was typing up worksheets for my tenth graders with a definition and example sentence for every vocabulary word and some activities for them to do at home for extra points. I think this was helpful, but just not something sustainable that my coteachers will continue after I’m gone. It took me hours to grade and correct all the papers, sort out the cheaters, record the scores, prepare the worksheet for the next chapter, etc. Then I had to make copies which was a HUGE pain in the butt. The copy room at school is never open, and they wouldn’t trust me to make copies on my own. I had to wait around for a student who worked in the copy room part time (? I am still confused about exactly what the deal was there). Then I had to collect money for the copies, which I felt badly about since students have enough expenses and most of them didn’t give a rat’s ass about the worksheets.

I am, however, optimistic that I can use what I learned this year to improve my teaching next year. I plan to be more consistent about warm-up activities. Also, I usually tried to really emphasize the grammar points that I thought were useful. I hope to communicate to my coteachers which points are really good and are a good use of time to practice, and which are less useful. Some volunteers have really developed great resources which I could have used more in the classroom this year, and I will refocus on those next year.

While teaching in the classroom didn’t exactly go as well as I’d hoped, my English club and health club were both very successful. I’ll have a better idea for next year how to structure a successful English club. I should definitely make it more specific, rather than just a random selection of stories, songs, activities and what not. Hopefully my health club continues to go as well as it’s been going these last few weeks! I have high hopes that the girls in the club will stay committed through the summer, and put together a great project at the end.

And now I can just prepare for my parents and friends to visit!!! Thank goodness it’s summer!

Malaysia, Truly Asia

There are these great ads that run on tv here promoting tourism in Malaysia. The slogan is “Malaysia, truly Asia.” I’m not sure how accurate that slogan is though, considering most people probably think of Japan or Vietnam before Malaysia, but it is catchy, I’ll give them that.
Christine, my sorority sister, came to visit at the beginning of June. It was my first time leaving the country, which really put Cambodia in perspective for me. We of course saw Angkor Wat and all the sights in Phnom Penh, and then flew to Kuala Lumpur, the capitol of Malaysia. It was a big shock to fly out of Cambodia and right into a real, modern city. Even the Malaysian airport had a Starbucks and a McDonalds, beacons of westernization if you ask me. We explored all over the city, saw the view from the Petronas twin towers (after being forced to watch an incredibly creepy video about the power of oil that reminded me of a futuristic sci-fi thriller), wandered through the air-conditioned malls, and explored China town.
The first day there we headed out to the Bantu caves. The caves are 276 steps up into a mountain and have a shrine inside. They were an amazing sight, though for some people the monkeys running up and down the steps were obviously the main attraction. On the way back our taxi driver gave us his opinion of Malaysia. Doesn’t David Sedaris say taxi drivers are the best way to get to know a new place? I didn’t ask him what Malaysians believe about Santa Claus but I did gain some insight. Before the trip I knew essentially nothing about Malaysia except that the Petronas towers are the iconic symbol of Kuala Lumpur. Turns out Malaysia was a British colony (literally I knew NOTHING going into the trip). There are huge Indian and Chinese populations, but our taxi driver claimed even if your family had lived in Malaysia for generations, as his had, your Malaysian passport will still say “from India.” He also told us only those who are ethnic Malay can vote for the parliament seats, and unsurprisingly an ethnic Malay person has held control of the country since independence. I should probably do some research to back up these claims before throwing them around on my blog, but my internet is slow so for now I’ll take them at face value.
Christine and I took the overnight train from Kuala Lumpur to Langkawi, an island off the coast of northern Malaysia. The island was so lush and green, it was really beautiful. The weather didn’t exactly cooperate for us to partake in the activities the beach would normally offer, but we did explore the island. One day we rode a cable car up into the mountains and got a beautiful view of the island. All the way at the top it was so foggy we couldn’t see anything, but it was still cool to see the cable cars basically disappearing into the fog. Afterwards we hiked up a very steep hill to see the seven pool water fall. At the very top it was a fairly small stream, but it was still a very verdant and worthwhile site. On the way down we saw a view of the waterfall from below. Maybe the view wasn’t worth the crazy hike, but it was nice to see a wet, green landscape after months of dried up rice paddies.
We had one more day in Kuala Lumpur on the way back, where I was happy to take full advantage of the ridiculously nice breakfast buffet. It was definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me. What can I say, food is a priority?
We then took our last flight, every single one of which was delayed (Air Asia is no RyanAir… they are not the most on time airline and they do not have a great jingle that plays everytime a flight lands on time), to Ho Chi Minh city in Vietnam. The city wasn’t as totally cosmopolitan as Kuala Lumpur. It was more like a half way point between total modernization and being totally rural and undeveloped. I really enjoyed walking around the city, just seeing the wild difference between two major cities only a six hour bus ride from each other, Ho Chi Minh and Phnom Penh. The streets were clean, though they were packed with traffic, and everyone just appeared so much more modern in both dress and behavior. We saw all the major sites we could in one day including the old Post Office and Notre Dame cathedral, as well as the huge market. The hotel where we were staying had a great live band that played on the 23rd floor so we went up to watch them for our last night. It was so much fun and the band really appreciated us livening up the crowd of mostly people there on business.
It was a rude awakening to come back to Cambodia. Seeing other countries really opened my eyes to how rural and poor Cambodia is. Outside of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh the whole country is essentially wooden houses and motos. There is no public transport system, the roads are far worse than the rest of Southeast Asia, and the cities are dirtier. But at the same time I can appreciate that Cambodia has retained as much of its culture as possible. Even given its horrific recent past, I still feel Cambodians are proud and try to preserve the things about their country that are true and original. It is easy to get caught up in thinking that Cambodia is just so far behind, but there is a simple beauty to the country and the culture that you have to look hard to see. I hope that people who visit Southeast Asia get enough of a sense of the country to take that away, and not overlook the small miracles here in the face of the country’s major problems.

Waiting for the Rain

Picture a room, about nine feet square, with a large bed, dresser, and dirty tile floor. Imagine laying on that floor while the air around you presses down on your existence, or so it feels. Sweat drips down your face and stings your eyes, while beads of it are trapped between your back and the floor. It can’t possibly be this hot, and yet it keeps getting hotter. You think about moving, but what’s the point? It’s just as hot and unpleasant no matter where you are. Even a fan moving the stale air around the cement box you live in doesn’t help anymore. The air is more milky than airy, every square inch seeming to bear enough water to fill a swimming pool. And then, when you think it can’t get any hotter, you hear thunder and a few minutes later you think you hear rats running on the tin roofing again but actually its rain. Somehow the sky bursts open and water drips down and for maybe 20 minutes it is cool. Then the rain stops and the cycle starts again. Welcome to rainy season in Cambodia.
I know it’s been months since I posted anything, but I haven’t had much to report. I aim to keep it positive, so I haven’t had a lot to say. In April I did take a trip to Ratanakiri. We stayed in a really cool place called the Tree Top Eco-lodge that some other volunteers had recommended. It was really nice and had running water, mosquito nets, and fans. We spent all week exploring the town and the surrounding areas. I rode an elephant, swam in a waterfall, rode a bike on some killer hills to get to a crater lake that is supposedly 70 meters deep, and drank some delicious coconut shakes. The area was really pleasant and beautiful and I am really glad I decided to go. I think it is one of the most naturally beautiful places in Cambodia and it is really on the rise! The capital city, Banlung, where we stayed is growing rapidly and I’m sure in a decade it will be quite built up and the road will be paved, making the trip far less painful. It is an exciting place and I’m glad to have seen it before it is overrun by tourists and completely westernized.
Luckily shortly after I returned the rainy season began. It hasn’t rained much yet but it is nice to break the heat a little bit. I have barely left my house in weeks because it is just too hot so it will be nice to be able to move about freely at other times than the early morning again. Also getting some fresh water is much needed, since the water in my bathroom is more black than water-colored. The only downside of more water means more bugs, as evidenced by the mosquito larvae squirming around in the water I bathe in. Gross.
I attempted to post pictures to Picasa from vacation. Hopefully it worked. Enjoy!

The Battle for the Bathroom

Last week I was going to “take a shower”, to the extent you can call it that, in my house when I saw a HUGE spider on the opposite wall. Luckily my bathroom is big enough that I could keep a healthy distance between myself and the spider, because I did not want to deal with him. I’ve never been particularly afraid of spiders, and in college I was often the designated spider killer, but this is not your ordinary garden variety daddy long legs. This creature was the full size of my hand, and hairy. I’m fine with spiders in the bathroom, or my bedroom even, as long as they don’t move and stay where I can see them, but I was really not thrilled about this gigantic arachnid being so close to me. At least I could watch him to make sure he didn’t come closer while I showered…
I then turned to notice the cockroach sitting on the door frame. Of course this cockroach was also abnormally large. It was easily the size of a table spoon, plus legs and antennae. It was so gross looking and now I had to watch both the cockroach and the spider, AND I had to walk by the cockroach every time I went from the water bucket to the ledge where I set my bucket holding my shampoo and stuff.
Then of course there was also an average sized gecko in the room. I’m not scared of the geckos, and actually really like watching them eat bugs, but how much wildlife does one bathroom need?
It was quite a lot of work to keep track of all the creatures who all brought the outdoors in while bathing. I’m convinced they were doing an epic battle to decide who would control the territory of the bathroom. I never actually saw them fight per se, but the giant spider only had seven legs so I know he was a fighter. He had endured a battle and lost a leg, and still returned to fight. I did not want to mess with him.
For a few days the creatures came and went. The spider disappeared for awhile and another slightly smaller but also abnormally ugly one came to reside on the wall RIGHT NEXT TO my water bucket. He looked poisonous. I’m sure he was. The cockroach took up residence behind the mirror. He poked his horrible little Gregor Samsa face out a few times right next to my soap dish, but mostly he stayed out of my way.
I went away for the weekend and when I returned so had the spider. I noticed him on the underside of the pvc pipe used to fill the bathroom cistern. He was tucked back in the corner. I looked to see what he was up to and noticed he was holding something white, roundish, about the size of a table spoon rounded over. I did not see the cockroach. The gecko was there, however, and had the spider cornered. The horrible arachnid stretched one of his hairy spindly legs around the corner to see if it was a safe route of exit and brushed the gecko right in the face. The spider scurried back further into his corner, still holding the white thing. I was quite impressed the gecko didn’t even flinch. I stared for a few moments and then went about my business, always keeping an eye on the stalemate in the corner, but at least comfortable the gecko would hold the spider there. Then the gecko left! Just like that, with no provocation, he turned around and walked up the wall and through the open slot in the window. I quickly rinsed off and got the hell out of the bathroom. I am fairly sure that the white thing in the spiders’ grasp was the cockroach, all wrapped up and ready for snacking. I was not about to be next.
This morning the spider, the gecko, and the cockroach were no where to be seen. I think they retreated to their lairs for the day. But tonight the battle may continue. Who knows how it will end…

The Day I Survived a Surprise Ceremony and a Khmer Wedding... all while stone cold sober!

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.

Feeling hot, hot, HOT!... and a general update of what I'm doing.

Well apparently it is hot season. I had forgotten what it feels like to be covered in sweat all the time. Cool season was so nice, and I really took it for granted because it wasn’t actually that cool. Now I wake up a little sweaty. Am dripping by the time I get through my morning routine, and have soaked through my shirt before I even get to school. I have to mop up my face about every ten minutes to keep the sweat from running in my eyes while I am teaching. I come home and lay on the tile floor in my room with the fan blasting on me. The floor is definitely not clean, but I am so unbearably hot I don’t even care. I shower before dinner or before I go to bed but I start sweating again as soon as I dry off. I soak a sarong in water and wring it out, then drape it over myself when it’s time for bed. It helps me cool off enough to fall asleep. I do not like hot season.
In other news, I just returned from a week long meeting and conference of English teachers in Phnom Penh. It was a really busy week and I feel like I had so much to do and so little time to do it in. I didn’t get through everything on my to-do list but I did eat a delicious roasted veggie and hummus bagel sandwich one day, so that was nice. I have a lot of new ideas, and just getting away from site for a week helped motivate me to move on some ideas that I had before but was having a hard time implementing. I started a participation program in my classes today. I mark down every time a student speaks in class and after two weeks the most vocal student will get a prize. The only problem is it isn’t motivating any students who don’t already speak in class. At least maybe it will spark some competition among the students who do know enough English to participate. I am also planning a writing workshop for the 12th grade students with my co-teacher. Well actually, he asked me to do an essay writing workshop and I am making him do it with me so he can learn the information as well and teach it after I am gone. I need to hunt down my school director this week and get his permission which is always fun. It usually takes about five days to pin the man down in a meeting, which then takes about 20 minutes in half Khmer half English to get my point across. You gotta do what you gotta do though.
After I make it through the essay workshop I hope to start my girls’ health club. I need to move soon since students will be mostly MIA as summer approaches, and it will be impossible to wrangle them after May. I am hoping to find several students who want to work in the health field and speak enough English to follow me if I speak slowly and translate difficult words and teach them about various health topics. I also hope they can tell me from their perspective what the most pressing health issues are in my commune and we can work on a project together to improve one of them. I think this will be a great opportunity to discuss basic health information that isn’t known to many Cambodians and also to give young girls a chance to be empowered by seeing the change they can make in their community, however small.
I have a few other ideas for things I want to do this summer, but for now I need to figure out how to get support and funding and coordinate with other volunteers!
Sorry my blog updates have been infrequent lately. I haven’t really done much except have diarrhea and try not to get on a plane back to America. I will try to be better this month and hopefully I will have some exciting things to share soon!

Do Not Befriend the Livestock

It was a lesson hard-learned, though, to be fair, I’ve had ample opportunity to learn it. Some of you may remember the tale of the mouse I rescued from the cistern during training only to find it dead less than 24 hours later. This time is was a duck.

Some Cambodian ducks are ugly. They have a weird red bumpy growth on their beak and face that looks like an awful case of acne, but not Norbert the duck. Norbert appeared one day in front of my host family’s house. He was a beautiful and friendly looking duck with a thin blue plastic string tying his feet together at one end and attached to a table at the other.

Clearly the beginning of our relationship was, well, less than ideal. Nonetheless, I had pictures of a long and happy life together with Norbert. He was ferociously feeding on some rice grains that someone had put in front of him; if you’re going to kill and eat a duck, why would you feed it? No point in wasting the rice, the aqua vitae of Cambodia, and no sense putting poop into its intestines. Better to let the poop be voided and thereby avoid later removing it oneself before enjoying the intestines. Plus, you can’t plump an animal up overnight (despite my host family’s comments on my girth after being gone for only a day or two), so if they were plumping Norbert he’d be my companion for at least a while.

I got quite used to seeing Norby on my way to school, and of course greeted him when coming and going. Then a few short days into our relationship the rice disappeared, and so did Norbert. This is how I know Norbert was a male duck. After his needs were satiated he was gone from my life.

At dinner that night I sprinkled a few pieces of roasted meat onto my rice. It could have been anything since it was cut up into pieces and my eye is far from discerning when it comes to meat. I bit into it and it was juicy, tasted similar to chicken, but was a little chewier. I believe I ate a little bit of my Norbert the duck. I guess I got my just desserts: Norbert broke my heart with his devilish good looks and always being there for me – I knew it was more than the rope around his legs keeping him there – until he suddenly took off, but I know I really got under his skin in the end.