Reputations

My friend, who owns and operates a cafe with her husband, dreamt of me and another frequent patron. “His was different than his body. It was the head of a cow,” she explains, “but it was him. It was his body.” I think of minotaurs and mythology. “Then you stabbed him! But he didn't bleed. Then he ran down that way, on this road,” she points west. We laugh together, the patron and I exchange glances of caution: are you a demon I am supposed to kill? Or am I the demon?

I see this as a bizarre, maybe farfetched metaphor for my place in my village, my home for over 10 months now. I wonder daily what my reputation is here and how people perceive me; standing on the brink between paranoia and ignorance. I want to know while I never want to know. A paradox?

I worry when people see me sitting for a few hours in a cafe plugged into the wifi and browsing social media, scoping out new movies, shows, books, pursuing new educational interests and Netflix. Do they think I'm a gaping doorstop?

Whenever there's a rainstorm and private classes are sort of swept away like everything else, I feel a pang I'm not there for my community like I “should be.” I think I have yet to figure out what “should be” means in my context, for my own sanity. I almost want to ask my community members when I feel a twinge of judgment: “what do you think I should be doing?”

I'm really, really all ears at this point. I want to know where my ideas meet theirs. That's the point not only of cultural exchange but also of sustainable development. What feels like yours and mine that we can strongly make “ours”?

As school ends prematurely, as often is the case in Cambodia, I want to revamp my vibe here and stretch my arms into the heart and soul of my village. The students can only know and do so much at 16 years of age versus asking a mother, an uncle, a grandmother of 10. What do they think? Where do they see their country going?

So, I open my schedule and I let the kids who want to learn, learn. I forgive them as they forgive me and we work together. I bring paint and paper, they bring hope. I bring a speaker, they bring a future. I bring nothing, they bring adaptability. I look past my worry of reputations and ‘tve la’a, ban la’a’: do good, get good. That's all we can really do, right?

Pride & Prejudice

The newest addition to my neighborhood is a mini-mansion, not so different from a house I would see stateside--the traditional Khmer house on stilts across the road instantly juxtaposed with this mammoth of modernity, cradled between rice paddies and dirt roads, gutted deep by rain and tractors. The outer gate of the house sporting a series of Buddhist wheels, circling its existence back to the Cambodian context.
The other houses and businesses in construction have nothing on this palace, but they still show progress and development, what Cambodia has craved for and needed for so many years--this country surviving through colonialism, dictatorships, genocide, conflict, war, deception. The average Cambodian sporting multiple facebooks, each one sporting a different name, a different ‘me’, allowing those able and privileged enough to afford access to the net a sort of self-development--an agency to construct their identity digitally, owning several online properties with their edited, whitened faces establishing their rule and their space.
The selfie phenomenon thriving in Cambodia. Those who partake brandishing their iPhone, worth more than gold, cradling it in their hand to take and flaunt their ‘sty,’ an abridged word for style--a linguistic quirk of Khmer the ending consonant swallowed producing subtle differences in words difficult for my foreign ears to distinguish. (bot bok bak baik bat)
The streets now lined with yellow lines, seldomly yielded, the government imposed rules in conflict with the organically established rules of the junabot, the countryside. National highwaysin production, roads being widened--both carving away at the traditional Cambodian roadside society: markets, houses, businesses, schools all trailing along the main veins of the country.
The power lines webbing across ancient rice paddies up mountains and powering cellphone and radio towers. Each year more and more villages join the masses of Cambodian society with access to stable, hopefully reasonably priced electricity. Schools are mostly still without, some houses using it so sparingly--but in my village lights, camera, action baby! I can hear a loudspeaker’s bass every night, reverberating across the village’s streets, the dogs barking at its echoes: ghosts with their electric buzzing.
I decided to call this pride and prejudice not because I've read the book but because these are all things of which Cambodians should be proud of. Their country moving somewhere else, investing in its infrastructure, creating new opportunities for its citizens. The prejudice on my part and many others--avoiding power lines in pictures opting for a more ‘natural’ view. I should be ashamed of this willful betrayal of Cambodia. Who am I to erase their work, their progress? Who are we to judge construction as a nuisance? How can we justify the profuse litter and waste as nothing but a sign of disposable income?

There's a lot to come for Cambodia and I might have gotten here at it’s sweet spot, it's transformation.

Neither here nor there, more colloquially known as
The phum and the junabot, wedged in

It’s that feeling when you wake up
Coated in a red glow, the curtains at Smiley’s making your room a darkroom
To develop strange, floating memories of a life
You still don’t understand although
You’ve been here ages.

The clench in your gut that jolts
When your taxi driver calls
Telling you he’s waiting, a sign
He is ready to chaperone you.
He’s the Charon to your Soul
Across the River Styx
To Hades.

Sorry,
I mean,
Your site.

You postpone a few hours, because it’s easy
“I’m a little sick please wait”
You muster out in your Khmer
Sounding half-baby, half-overgrown baby.

You want time to order food so you make time
You want time to shower and shave so you do
You want time to contemplate life’s existence
But you don’t
And shouldn’t
Not now, in your most vulnerable state between the city
And the junabot.

The transition between
Knowing while being unknown
To the unknown while being known
A paradox of familiarity with
The westernisms of the city
Versus the anonymity that the countless foreign bodies
Offer you here
Versus the traditions of a culture
So different (but so familiar?)
In a place where
Every sneeze is noted
And every step is counted
And every [insert literally anything] is remarked upon
The privacy of ourselves
Foregone in the sacrifices we make
In a place that is and is not
Our home.

Mildly panicking
Packing up your clothes and
Piling up to go boxes and delivery orders next to
The mountain that is
The garbage can
Swallowed by
Styrofoam
And
Plastic
And
Ants.

Are you slightly hungover?
Or is it the cheese?

Your host family calls
Or they don’t
You let them know either way
You’re on your way!
And yes, everything has been sooooo
sabay!

Food is delivered
Devoured
A shower as baptism
The air-conditioning your mother’s breath
On a spoonful of boiling Spaghetti-O’s

I would kill for some Spaghetti-O’s.

You leave saying bye to the hotel staff who has seen the best
And worst of
Almost every volunteer
Surely
To meet your tour guide to the junabot
To a life that seems like a dream amidst
The city lights
And the Burger King’s
And the
Options.

Back to a place where the steam
Of rainy season clears
Your pores of the dirt dry season caked in,
And the rice that never ends
And the children never tire of
Saying hello hello hello
Whatsyournamemynameis

The city blurs into village into construction
Into village
Into cows and two-lane highways and into
Your phum
Your home

You forget this is your home in the moments between
Quesadillas
And pizza
And life and motion and
Comforts

But this is where you belong
Remember why you left your home
Remember why you left your family
Remember where you wanted to go
Amidst papers and doctors and bureaucracy and recruiters and explanations and money and saying goodbye and saying hello and tears and fears and taking leaps
And go there

Even if it’s not what we wanted or expected
We took a chance and we
Got where we are because
We wanted something
And we got it.