Here's to....

I have been at site for two weeks, and after training, I am officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. I have been through a lot and a little in two weeks, two weeks that feels like two months. I decided I didn't want to write a big block piece that took up a lot of time for me to piece together in a logical way, so I wrote a sort of ode to my first two weeks here in my lovely town. It is super stream of consciousness just floating bits and pieces that my memory kicked up while writing. It's beautiful and ugly, good and not so good, but it's real and it's mine and I'm in a good place. Thanks for following me, it feels warm and fuzzy to send snippets of my life, snippets of something bizarre and crazy, but also not at all--this is just one reality of many, it just happens to be put through my brain and my lens. So enjoy

Here’s to….

Here’s to the jingle jangle of music drifting from the Wat to my house, flailing like a fish to remind us we’re in the thick of a holiday

Here’s to some of my students who live there, who tell me in great English how their families couldn’t afford to house them anymore

Here’s to when I visited for said holiday and did most things mostly okay, but many things majorly wrong

Here’s to the plethora of comments about how I cross and fold my legs, always getting more attention than what they’re attached to (me)

Here’s to the monks that snickered slightly when I showed up to a ceremony, sitting almost in the front row, taking up easily three spots with not only my largeness but also my awkwardness

Here’s to the perfumed water I was drenched in, hoping everyday its blessings kick in

Here’s to the confusion and acceptance that greets me everyday

Here’s to the girl who welcomed me to her family’s restaurant with a selfie

Here’s to the guy at another restaurant who smiles at me and we do a sort of like head-nod, thumbs up, unspoken charade to express, “you know, not bad!” as if we’re old strangers saying hi to each other from across a Village Inn

Here’s to him also speaking plenty of English, but it’s intimidating speaking a foreign language!

Here’s to my host family saying his food is unhygienic

Here’s to the market full of a number of things I can’t fathom, that hide in the depths of the piles of the things and things and things

Here’s to the dust that kicks up easily from the national highway that cuts through town

Here’s to that road I biked 10km on to the big city and back

Here’s to the terror I feel when crossing it that never dissipates

Here’s to my bike that makes life easier

Here’s to my high school and the rice paddies and cows that take utility to a new level

Here’s to the teachers I’ve met that have been nothing but nice

Here’s to the two Peace Corps murals already painted on two walls, two maps

Here’s to the pregnant woman who lives and has a shop on the corner with her husband, I adore them

Here’s to the other family across the street who always has a shop, I adore them too

Here’s to the grandmother up the street who greeted me my first day with perfect English, “where are you from?” and how she teaches me khmer while I refresh her memory with English, and how we talk about our lives and how when she was 20 her French teacher at the university paid her way to France and how he asked her parents to get married and they said no, and how I wonder where she would be now, what she would be doing

Here’s to my favorite wifi café

Here’s to the families that run both the café and the barbershop next door

Here’s to them being genuine people who take care of me and talk to me and teach me and are genuinely happy to see me

Here’s to the people asking me if I drink beer

Here’s to my excuse, “I can’t I take medicine, my stomach will hurt!”

Here’s to rice

Here’s to keeping in touch

Here’s to forgetting what I’m doing

Here’s to diarrhea

Here’s to the days that drip away, similarly to diarrhea, when you’re suffering from, well, diarrhea

Here’s to a community effort to help you get better and figure out what caused it

Here’s to never knowing what or why, but it doesn’t matter

Here’s to being around a bunch of people who have their own lives

Here’s to sitting around them not understanding a word, and them not really talking to you

Here’s to when they do talk and you don’t understand

Here’s to when you do understand

Here’s to the patience and impatience

Here’s to speaking something detailed and great, eliciting a genuine awe

Here’s to speaking the same thing the next day, but it comes out like sand, clumsy and ugly

Here’s to another moment of fluidity that keeps you motivated

Here’s to learning a beautiful language that you never ever ever ever thought you would

Here’s to Cambodia

Here’s to my house where I live

Here’s to the mattress my family showed off to me

Here’s to me totally digging that

Here’s to my little brothers, twins, 16

Here’s to my little sister, cutie, 5

Here’s to my older brother-father, 30

Here’s to my older sister-mother, 34

Here’s to us for the next two years

Here’s to us building something we’re all experimenting with

Here’s to me, 24, volunteer, and those moments of SOMETHING you have when you’re half-naked, surrounded by palm trees, sweating, hanging up clothes you hand-washed to dry, looking up, looking down, realizing you’re in the thick of things, darling, and no one can take it away.