It's so weird feeling bouts of time differently yet simultaneously. I've been here for 6 weeks now and while that's not that long comparatively, it feels like forever. But it also feels like I just arrived.
Sometimes I forget where I am and accept my reality as a blanket truth, that I've grown into this community like some random tweak of the universe and it just makes sense. Other times I'm confused. I wonder where I am and ask myself the question: "what am I doing?" But training is a condensed, concentrated syrup of peace corps service that we mix here and there with water and take a gulp. We'll see what becomes 'normal' when I'm at my permanent site and Khmer flops out of my mouth more like a stream than a sprinkler. (2 more weeks until I found out!)
We started our practicum this week which entails three hours a day of teaching and co-teaching with other volunteers and Cambodian educators. Here we are really getting a feel for planning lessons from the state-issued education books called 'English for Cambodia', a very interesting book. One of the lessons includes a story about a grandmother who one decides she's bored and takes her grandson's plastic gun to rob a bank. This is for 9th graders. Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, or at least stranger than Cambodian educational materials.
I am teaching 9th grade with two other volunteers and it's really awesome. Everyday we chip away at the giant block of shyness and get to see these kids as intelligent personalities and not unlucky pawns in our teacher training adventures. The kids manage to be both angsty and respectful at the same time and it's really quite extraordinary compared to what I remember observing when I was 14.
Language is getting better. I wish I knew more faster, but that's not how it goes and if it did it probably wouldn't be as entertaining. My favorite lesson this week was about Cambodian superstitions involving such atrocities as the Ahp: a floating severed head of a woman with the internal organs attached in whatever way fate decided to birth such a thing. Another favorite is the Prite: a giant, forever starving zombie that lumbers around looking for food. Sound familiar? I think it was foretold I would live here one day.
My favorite thing to do in language is to write short stories and dialogues. The most popular dialogue starring me as a Singaporean pirate (half British and half Chinese) who continuously does business with Khmer peoples circa 1533. In the first dialogue I purchased a big monkey. In the second, three parrots. Wonderful stories!! My teacher loves them.... I think.
Tensions amongst the group are higher than average for us I think. Long bike rides, actually teaching, planning for the language test, heat, rain, mud, and mostly stress about moving to permanent site are all muddled up with tiny victories and American candy to create this purgatory of highs and lows that is just so bizarre. Think of being comfortable and not at the same time. Take a bucket shower and lay down for a minute: the cure-all.
This past weekend we went to Tuol Sleng and Cheoung Ek, the Cambodian museum of genocidal crimes and what are notoriously known as the killing fields. If you know little about the Khmer Rouge, read a little more. I have come to realize how much was skirted over in my education growing up and yet learning now just how devastating an era it was. The Khmer Rouge essentially performed an experiment so perverse my head reels at the thought. Tuol Sleng was a high school that was converted into a prison focus on gathering intelligence through torture. Cheoung Ek was an ethnic Chinese ceremonial/funeral area that was converted into inevitable death and mass graves for those unlucky enough to cross the Khmer Rouge. Tuol Sleng still has blood stains and Cheoung Ek has remnants of clothing crawling out of the soil; almost begging for their story to be told. It's amazing to hear the stories and read the history and still interact with survivors of the regime that never fail to shine a smile your way. It's heartbreaking. It's beautiful. It's the Cambodian reality.
Next week is the last week of practicum and our kiddies will graduate with a cool certificate. I'm happy to be here and I feel accepted. I feel loved. I feel appreciated. And I feel all those things outward as well. Especially my host family who are beautiful souls who let me talk in weird voices and scream out random things. And I love forcing my younger siblings to hug me while I tell them I love them after we make fun of each other.
Now, as I am up way too late (10:30) just thinking about tomorrow and listening to my host dads radio station trickle in my window, while I watch a lightning bug whirl around my room confused and frustrated, while I most importantly always wait for the slightest breeze to roll in, I try to reflect on my experience. It's random and it's wild and it makes no sense sometimes and sometimes it's weird how close I am to my family and other times the market lady seems to just get me and other times I can't say what I want to say and other times I'm giggling with random 13 year olds and telling old men that I speak a little Khmer but I'm excited to be here I can't find my medium and I don't think I want to!
More rambling for another time,
Bong John
