នឹកហើយ

I wrote this when I was imagining myself going on this amazing trip--but going alone didn't seem right for me. I swallowed the ticket price and decided on other things for me that involved being with people I care about.


I'm sitting here alone, waiting for my flight to Indonesia. It wasn't even my idea to come here but I felt inspired by my friends’ energy here to go, go somewhere off my radar that usually includes cities and restaurants and nightlife to a place that has mountains and lakes and orangutans. I'm here alone because my friend couldn't make it with me due to some mistakes, rash decisions and bruised egos. But I'm here; pondering my life as a “volunteer” in an increasingly tense and dense world. I've had my fair share of discomforts from missing weddings, birthdays, holidays, deaths to sitting in 111°F heat wondering why my groin sporadically hurts thinking of everything from cancer to a bacterial infection, eventually settling down on a kidney stone diagnosis after getting a few uncomfortable ultrasounds on places I didn't know they could ultrasound. To countless colds and stomach aches. To a flesh-eating bacteria (?) behind my ear cured by antibiotics giving me vivid dreams of zombies chasing me while I wake up sweating in the dry season stupor. To yelling at kids smoking meth 10 feet from my front door. I've had to listen to tears and laughter from across oceans and time, distance paradoxically shortened by technology but blown out of proportion as I click “like”, lost in a different world only to snap back to reality after hearing the rats scurrying around my room chewing on god knows what at this point. I wonder about why our cat is so damn useless and how much poison is too much poison. We're not in Nebraska anymore, Liep (the cat).
I wonder what my students think of me as they scream my name and laugh at me across the school yard but many too shy or too scared to say anything to me. I wonder what they think when I unintentionally sigh in frustration because they can't read the words we just spent 15 minutes practicing. I wonder what I would think of myself?
I wonder what my coteachers think of me as I'm too shy to approach them and sound like an idiot in Khmer. Or not laugh at the several overtly sexual jokes. “No, I want to borrow your underwear now to get the real smell,” “John’s butt is so cute!” As I giggle and walk away from them in my soccer uniform I never played in because I was too shy to look like an even bigger loser as I see the previous volunteers’ work at my school like a museum of things I maybe could've should've done. The new buildings from the government and the new bathrooms from another NGO look down at me while I bike back home to lay down with a fan and peruse Facebook hoping for…. something.
It's not like I haven't tried, but that's not the point. I'm here now and trying to make it work, for mostly myself at this point and to try and develop relationships that are meaningful outside of them seeing me as a goofy white blob biking up and down dusty roads, sneezing and coughing and occasionally stopping to say ‘hi’ if I get over the social anxiety of it all--don't really want to be asked how many times I can have sex in one night again. Things seem different in different light and the brightest light often wins at the time.
These are all things that compromise a thriving, beautiful community with a sense of humor as they tell me about running from soldiers shooting at them or watching their loved ones die in front of them during the not-so-distant Khmer Rouge genocide. To motorbike accidents and fireworks exploding in homes. To dreams crushed and garment factories opening. Things are different here and I get that, but I'm different too and not everything is supposed to gel. And I don't want to force it either. I'm tired of fighting currents. Isn't that how you drown?
Regardless of how difficult things get here, we as a peace corps community have each others backs for the most part. We get our homies and we fight for each other and we support each other. Sometimes we need a break. Sometimes a family member comes to visit.
There are a lot of rules in peace corps, surprisingly, for how loose and free-spirited an essence it has. Especially being an education volunteer, compared to the health volunteers, we have a calendar that allows us a few weeks in April and two months in the summer to really travel. This is part of the job of course, but the more you're here and the more things slip into oblivion, the more this timeline doesn't make sense and seems more like a suggestion. There's a policy to ensure you stay in your village because that's your work and that's your commitment, but there's only so much embarrassment, so many projects and suggestions shrugged off or however many exploited insecurities you can handle before you look in the mirror and say “what the fuck?”
You begin to question what an “invitation” from the community as a peace corps volunteer really means.
And then your brother calls and says he can't wait to see you, and, although it's during the school year, you want to get away for a bit and be with someone who really, really knows you. Someone who can see how you've grown. Someone who can gape at your language abilities and your room covered in rat shit and cobwebs no matter how many times you sweep. Someone you have to teach to use a squatty potty and bucket shower. And tell them, “Fuck yeah, I do this every. Damn. Day.”
And they want to see the temples and see the jungles and the lake and the ocean and you say, “duh.” Because…. well, I think you know.
I wouldn't advocate ever for breaking the rules! These are obviously highly nuanced situations. Rules are rules. I get it. I do. But where do the rules get so tense they are bound to snap? Where does the sense of adventure and collectiveness of peace corps come in? And in what parameters and boundaries? How much does your effort overshadow the rest? What do you see when you think “peace corps”?
Things get tense here. As I've written here and there. Sometimes so tense, I lose myself. But I always manage to find myself again.
Rules are rules, and a situation similar to the one above came back to bite my travel buddy in the ass. But I think you could empathize. Maybe? I think you would see the shortcomings of the policy. Are there any? See the overall picture: I'm trying.

On the House, the Home, and Homesickness

They ask the differences of

the house, the home;

I say the house is what you see

And the home is what you feel

But

how intertwined they are:

the corners that make your kitchen

inextricable from

your mother’s face as she

serves her lasagna

the position of your couch as it faces

the television: the house

that is the home to the stories

that filled your brain

and

nurtured your

developing consciousness

the door isn’t a door

it’s a portal, to

the first spot you slugged off

your muddy shoes

the gap where your mother’s shouts

echoed to the outside,

blistering your ears,

meeting your mother’s whispers

telling you

it’s okay while

picking pebbles out of your bloody knees

the home meets the house in

the mundanity of

laundry detergent,

the buzz of your leaky fridge,

that stubborn doorknob

in the way your sheets could

envelop you without struggle in

your bed where you

could wake up without doubts

or confusion, save

a few lingering dreams

sifting from your brain as

your dad’s sizzling bacon

saves your senses:

snap, crackle, pop.

fat, meat, salt,

home.

they ask me

what’s a house?

they ask me

what’s a home?

what I want to tell them is that,

we say we’re homesick

so we miss what we feel

you know,

home is where the heart is--

but!

the heart can’t fill

a house like that

scruffy carpet can

or those

wood floors and that

length of hallway;

perfect for running and

sliding

in our countless socks

we withered down to

mush

I’m homesick,

I say,

and I think of

the order my mother would

flip on the light switches:

a sequence created in

a house but

found only in

our home

the way the windows

danced light off our

many hanging pictures:

static architecture and the setting sun

meeting

our dynamic design and wandering eyes

so I guess what I should say,

maybe,

is that

I can’t be homesick without

a home

and I can’t say home without

my house and

well, I, uhh…

next question

please?

Endure for the Calling

My fellow volunteer friend, Jenny, came up with the phrase I then stole to use for the title of this article because it has been something I've been stuck with since she first said it.

If you know me, you know I won't stay silent for long about something that's bothering me, much to the contrast of the passive, patient village in which I reside. So, I decided to open up and stretch my fingers and embrace the vastness of the keyboard.

The keyboard's vastness is of particular interest now especially that my beloved iphone has been whisked away to someone probably poorer than me with much less opportunity than I can even fathom being a very privileged citizen of the United States. It still pangs me to think that the bubble of my community that I've been carefully huffing and puffing into, admiring its sheen and beauty, could be popped so easily, filling me with doubt and fear amidst the static rice fields and monotonous cow moans.

I never expected to be robbed in my own school, even after regular school hours, and especially not when teaching almost 40 village children, screaming, laughing, crying, peeing their pants.... I thought my reputation preceded me and the value that I give to my community is worth more than the risk of stealing my valuables. I'm naive, I know, but that was my vision of my village: a warped mythology I've been feeding for 15 months now.

I've been in and out of the village for various reasons over the past year and change, and every time I come back it's this uncanny feeling between home and not-home, this gap I seem to bridge, but when I turn around, the bridge has disappeared or was never there to begin with. I'm left with a strange feeling of whether I actually crossed the bridge, or not--this purgatory between where am I, how did I get here and yes, I would love to go to your wedding and yes, I am interested in your whole life story, how did you know?

It's hard crossing these gaps when the bridges you use are infinite and invisible, but somehow you find your way across and you prove it, damn it, with your awkward language, tattered clothes and young scars. I made it across and you must accept me.

Although my phone is gone, the world moves on. The rice harvesting season is in full tow now and the sun still sets and the weather is cooling down as customary around the ending of my year and the middle of theirs.

There's nothing much to say but things are things and people are people and maybe this was a blessing in disguise. A chance to get away from the ease of wifi and the endless scrolls through social media feeds that simultaneously laud me with and drain from me information. The vacuum it created for me peaked during the election where I watched ignorance take control of what I thought was my country (selfishly) and became something else altogether.

I want to use this "opportunity" (see: euphemism) to get a break from the bad news and selfies and delve into films, books, crafts, art, the analog and step away from the digital. I don't want to think of it as something valuable, because it's really not. Not right now, not for me.

I don't want to remember my Peace Corps service as being surrounded by children opening their bags for me to look in and check before they go home.
"I trust my students," I told them, because I don't want to live in a world let alone a community where I have to even fathom the possibility of one of them stealing from me. I can't and I won't.

I know I'm still materialistic and this isn't my rejection of material wealth and vow to wear one pair of linen pants the rest of my life. But it is a recommitment to myself first and foremost as an active, independent, and vulnerable agent in a dynamically static enviroment and I will still cross those bridges and still look for clues to how I did it, but, I refuse to let this escape me. I answered my calling and I have chosen to endure.

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.

Updates...and things !

“Don't go to school” my host brother says to me as I'm about to step out the door.
“Why?” I ask.
The gust of wind that follows is my cue to the rain and ensuing storm that gathered in the last 20 minutes.
“Okay so….”
I try to call my counterpart and no luck as it starts to sprinkle. Maybe I could just hop over and make an appearance and see….
“No students” he says back to me reading my mind.
30 seconds later the rain pours down the clouds hardly dark at all, my ignorance of the rainy season revealed after what seems like an infinite dry season.
I sit now, waiting for some cosmic sign. I've seen rain last for a few minutes to hours. From dusk to dawn a steady rain pounding the corrugated metal roofs and trees, putting “Stomp!” to shame--nature wins again.
I think about how long it's been since I've posted and it's amazing how much and how little has happened. I've done a lot of trainings, a fun weekend for students who placed in a peace corps art competition, celebrated some send offs, a few birthdays, helped facilitate a diversity workshop, and tried to be a good teacher at school.
It's been a whirlwind with Khmer new year thrown in there. My semester break ended up being about 7 weeks…. As opposed to the scheduled 2 weeks we were supposed to have. Unfortunately during that time the temperature got to a mean “feels like 111°F” so a lot of that time was just my brain boiling mulling over things trying to study.
Khmer new year was about 10 days of partying, dancing almost everyday, showing off to my community that I can get down on it.
My birthday was lowkey most people forgot in my village and that was okay. They're not really celebrated here. It was also sweltering hot.
I finally got to see Angkor Wat albeit for a short time with other volunteers and some students for our winners weekend. We did different workshops and learned about different aspects of art and culture and also met new friends from around the country. It was awesome and I really want to do it again next year !!!!
I went straight from there to garden training in kampot where I realized I was stricken with a 102° fever and a throat like sandpaper. I was told to go to the hospital and 4 hours later had an antibiotic prescription for strep throat. Not very exciting or fun at all. But it was fun to help develop the garden at another volunteer’s site for the rest of the training I didn't miss.
The previous cohort is finishing up their time here and I got to see some of them before they skedaddle. I'm going to miss them and their advice but I guess we're going to be the new them, the new MASTERS of peace corps Cambodia for the babies.
Helping facilitate a diversity training (with 5 other volunteers) for all the Peace Corps Cambodia staff was awesome. We learned a lot and everyone shared amazing stories. Some about difficulties in service, most about trying to understand more. I think everybody was willing to go the extra mile to listen to different perspectives and ideas for the three days I was there. We are anticipating Peace Corps Cambodia’s first same-sex couple with this upcoming batch of volunteers!
I'm just sort of glazing over smaller details, giving a bigger picture while the rain trickles down--but if you're ever curious about anything feel free to ask. I won't judge you or leave you hanging.
Now as my sister’s wedding approaches, I think about my service so far and reflect on the love I have received from and the love I can give to my community.