The Good the Bad and the Ugly

Nothing's that ugly except for the kind of tiny scar on my forehead from the birthday party. A constant reminder to everyone I'm tall and if I have one beer I am the drunkest boy at the party. I explain again and again I was looking down at a man washing various raw meats trying not to knock him over and doing an awkward sidestep before my head being sliced open. At least I had my tetanus shot.

Today I got the best care package ever. Everything I need at site right now that I didn't necessarily want to find in Phnom Penh, traipsing through markets for pants that would rip in a week (self-experience) or to a department store (pay $50...no thanks!). The food and seasonings and instant meals I DIE! I want to tear into it now but I'm going to participate in the family meal, dreaming about cookies the whole time.

One of my students also won for his grade level in the whole country for those who participated in Write On! the short, creative story competition. We're not sure of the prizes yet but I'm pretty sure it will be a bundle of books! I'll include his umm...interesting essay later.

Today was up and down, an awesome art club where we drew pictures out of words, turning the word into its visual representation. Pictures on facebook. This was, however, after I told the students Tuesday English club will be cancelled until the students can respect me and my free time and the schedule we agreed on. Things were tense but I'm an Aries so….

I then taught my children's class. We used to have great strides but then it's just been going downhill. Students not remembering “I am” after four classes of studying pronouns + to be exclusively. It's frustrating and I ask them why they don't study at home and ask them why they don't pay attention. It takes 40 minutes to get through 6 words and they don't listen or pay attention. I told some of the parents and asked some friends but we're just going to try again. But I'm close to calling it quits, it's not something I'm going to do just to do. I love the kids but not in a classroom context and unfortunately that's what parents want and what is best for their futures.

It's so different than what I expected. Honestly. My site is a mix between rural and urban--10k from the provincial town that just seems to be a bigger version of my town. I'm right off the national road so people could potentially work in Phnom Penh and come back everyday. It's about a 2 hour drive though. It's not so much the isolated village of houses all together with children wandering aimlessly and people hanging out together. It's a bustling market and many, many shops selling all sorts of things. When you find your friends you go somewhere to hangout like a wifi cafe or in your house which is away from the street with a gate. It's definitely more collective but still has many aspects of what I consider individualistic cultures making it a strange purgatory between tradition and modernity.

It's not uncommon for people to sit in front of a television for hours or for kids to help their parents at their shop or playing on a smartphone or sitting in private classes all day. I bike everywhere so, stopping to talk is a commitment and often people think you have somewhere to go. It's mostly true. Every so often I meet someone new and I try to develop more relationships in the neighborhood. It's not necessarily a vibe for me to just go up to everyone and talk like we're ol friends. A lot of people are busy or maybe not so friendly appearing. I don't know. I have a lot of connections and a lot of people saying everyone loves me and wants my children, but I still think about what sort of deeper connections I make with people and what that looks like from a different perspective, different from my own, and it's hard to get that from an indirect culture especially with language barriers and personal investments in each other--don't want to lose face if someone hears you saying something.

I think my community's perception of me is good, they like me, but I do wonder how much they need me or value me. I don't know what more they want/need in their community that I can help them achieve with facilitation and the occasional grant, but those things are going to come with time and patience. Right now I'm focusing on my students, almost 300 of them in my various activities. Hard to imagine having time for other projects when this one is already taking up close to 30 hours of my week. And with the students lack of motivation it seems even longer.

I really don't want to say that but at this point I see students just shut off completely and it's not 1-2 in a class it's like probably close to half of them. I don't know how to encourage them as competitiveness is kind of frowned upon but also they're teenagers. It's just hard to imagine the other communities here that don't have a volunteer but students that are craving extra classes that my community is inundated with. Students sometimes go from 6am-8pm at night with a few breaks and sometimes no lunch. It hurts to see, but that's the culture of education here.

These thoughts may be sporadic or unelaborated, but I want to get this conversation started outside of my head and outside of close circles and just see it visually and just stop to think for a second about where my service is heading.

God speed! I have trader joes snacks waiting for me :)

Leap Day

Moments here can be suddenly so intimate. A 7th grade girl tells me about her crush, another boy from English club, a 10th grader and a less frequent member. She at first wants to sit next to him, his bag left on the table while he ventures off to buy a Sting, a near-deadly energy drink. Another student complains there's no room on that side and so together we encourage her to sit across from him. “Face to face!” I tell her as I see the nervousness consume her confidence; she tells me to be quiet and settles for a diagonal seat from her Romeo, who, presumably, will have no idea of our secret game: the dynamics of adolescent romances carefully calculated, gently performed and embarrassment avoided.

My host sister asking me if I could hear the television in my room last night. No, I thought, not really, I mean I heard a little sound drifting through the rafters but I fell asleep and soundly. A dinner guest corrects her. She wants to know if you heard some sounds last night. Oh! I thought, ohhhh…. Ahh… AHHH! I said no and they snickered, I'm still unsure of the subtle nuances that were present or the real details--not sure if I want to.

“Is it true women don't wear bras until they're married?” They ask later. I laugh and say “no women wear whatever, depends on what they like.” They got this idea from movies they say.

People often make a point to really stress to me that according to Khmer tradition you only have one ‘songsaa’ (a honey, a sweetheart, a bae). They stress this to me because of a prolific belief that in American culture everyone can have many songsaas. Hollywood! I tell them no most people in America follow pretty strictly a one-one policy, foregoing an attempt to explain other facets of American sexual diversity including polyamory or asexuality. Maybe next time.

Sometimes I think the universe is just trolling me. I'm placed in a country to teach English and the word ‘essay’ translates literally to ‘itch a clitorus’ (eh say). In what cruel world would this coincidence happen? Real life is often stranger than fiction.

Other terrible things is the distinction between ‘maybe’ and ‘probably’ don't exist as suave as they do in English. Some asks me if I'm going to do something and I answer ‘prohail’ trying to squeeze out a little white lie, but it's also basically a promise. Maybe I'll go = probably I'll go. Really depends on your tone and the context. Really string it out ‘maaaaaybe I'll go’ sometimes keeps that tone of ‘please don't ask me to say no straight to your face.’

Explaining to students why ‘I am going to the the market’ is necessary even though ‘I go market’ is essentially the same thing. The superfluous and pretty much nonessential information we put in English to make it fluent is soooo hard to teach and, understandably, very difficult to understand.

Now I understand why my Portuguese teacher was so adamant about us not sounding like E.T.: yes, the grammar can be obnoxious but you want to sound fluent--especially in a world dominated by discrimination down to our inflection of vowels, our tone and our syntax policed more than our meaning and input in some sort of sick paradoxical human nature hell hole only the devil would birth. Not to sound bitter though, you know?

Nothing can really prepare you fully for every experience. After training, I send my love back to the village: “see you soon!” I say. One of my best friends here, my language and cultural tutor, says he's in the big city also. I pause. He never gets to leave the area, his family being extremely poor. I ask why and a whole saga unfolds involving a huge responsibility for a quaint soul. He must leave the village he says, to find work, work that pays more to support his sick father. He found a job, he says, and is doing the training now! Excellent I think, until I learn the training is unpaid and ultimately results in a job selling nutritional supplements, in some sort of pyramid scheme I have no choice but to wince at. He's 20. He has no money. And he's trying to become a man for his family. My heart breaks every time I think about him, especially the times I find myself free, remembering we would study together outside the pagoda, under the trees, the easy breeze, the monks gawking, the children curious, the birds howling, the rice fields waiting, the motos purring, us learning.

I hate roosters. They don’t specify only the rising sun as a sign to cry, but almost anything invokes the scream, at any hour of any day. I once had a dream a rooster explained to me the yell was an unstoppable sudden impulse, a reflex, an unwarranted eruption of the body. They betray themselves with each shriek, like a hiccup for a human, the action completed before the mind can resist. I still can't forgive the poor creatures, but I pity them. Evolution has brought them from the biggest and mightiest of the beasts that ruled the earth to mindless strutting feathered flyless drones constantly pecking at any and all things to eat. Their bodies curbed from a Darwinian route to a culinary existence. I throw things at them sometimes. Sorry!

Pangs of nostalgia awash my brain and even seep into my dreams, perhaps they are born from some sort of unconscious reflex triggered by a lack of familiarity and mild discomfort betwixt a clumsy confrontation with a professional occupation (clumsy in that its success is resting squarely on my shoulders, unfortunately invisible and shifty, manifested as a beast to which I may never bear witness, of which I may never call my creation, but it's embodiment greatly my responsibility and paradoxically my perception) and my everlasting personal coming-of-age story that doesn't seem to want to end, its conclusion as far flung as my imagination can throw it.

I don't want to be homesick and often I'm not. Time doesn't stand still anywhere and it's unwise to count on it. It's nice to see people's lives accelerate at home, new moments to be treasured and lauded generally excite me. Everyone deserves to have their life move forward according to the pace at which they want, something I've taken for granted surely living in the US, a privilege people have and do die for. However much I feel a part of my community back home, I can still see, everyday, more and more, my negative space, the space I would normally be filling, shrinking, obscuring into less a lack of and more a custom or a habit. Not to say this is a situation of outcry or rage or even sadness, but a sign of growth and the capacity to move on to other social interactions, creating new bridges while others rest, but nonetheless interesting to note as my worlds drift not necessarily apart but begin to have less interconnection and overlap. Growing up is hard to do and following opportunity or adventure involves being drastic at times, sometimes your roots become too overgrown for one pot and the world becomes your home, your fingers and roots and toes and ears stretching and squeezing the dirt, the nutrients of geographical diversity enriching your core, reminding you your health is how you grow, your growth is how you feel, your strength is how far you reach.

Normally, I think a lot of metaphors are kind of tacky and overused, but the idea of just sticking my hands in fresh soil and just squeezing earth is so appealing, the viscerality of it so primal and wild.

Funny Lil Things

The ball comes and I kick. It feels uncomfortable, but I'm trying not to be a wimp anymore. I gaze down, casually, and notice an avant-garde splash of vibrant red offsetting the natural earthen tones of cow manure, sand and shattered brick caked on my toes, the brutal terrain of our makeshift soccer field not heeding the existence of my sandals as protective footwear. I lament, vaguely, for a second and sigh, “chiem (blood)” as the kids gather around my leg, hovering around my navel, obscuring my surrealistic painting of a toe, replacing the view with a pinwheel of bobbing furry black heads, each more curious than the next about my downfall. I apologize for having to quit playing for the day, I just didn't feel like splattering blood everywhere let alone allowing more cow shit and diaper pieces to add to the picture. The kids walk back with me telling everyone on the way I'm bleeding everyone peaking down at my foot, giving me much more anxiety about the state of my feet than the state of my sweaty, red face from trying to play soccer against a bunch of kids half my size. I find the older I get the more soccer mom rage I accumulate; I even stopped at one point and asked a kid who's team he was playing on. More than once. “leng chiemuy krom knhom ot??” He didn't have an answer, just a goofy smile missing his two front teeth while the other kids called him crazy and pushed him around. We lost pretty bad, me picking the underdog team, the kids younger than the rest and prone to running away and dancing on piles of rocks in the middle of a defensive rush. Thanks a lot, guys.
I went home and bucket-showered, washing my toe hoping I don't get gangrene or something and then reflect on what it means to be a volunteer, working in the Cambodian countryside in a world where “goodwill” stories proliferate and I, unwillingly, sometimes subject myself to comparing these stories to my experience within my own cultural psyche inundated with classical classical mixed-messages of “pulling yourself up by bootstraps” while we also venerate “giving to the less fortunate” as essential cultural foundations. How much does my self-critique come from pride and how much from education?
Peace Corps is on its 9th cohort here, interesting compared to some countries on their 50th+ year. We're a newer program and still have hiccups and bumps along the road that are inevitable in any peace corps program and I'm grateful and less pleased to be part of the process of integrating this organization in the inner-workings of the “srok khmai” (Khmer District, slang for Cambodia). When my commitment is essentially finished (if such an experience can ever be finished) the K11s will be coming to replace us K9s, a wild, voracious group that is maybe one of the biggest incoming groups to this country.
So far I have met amazing people working with the Peace Corps here. People that really get me, and hopefully feel vice versa about me. I'm excited to collaborate on projects, share experiences, go adventuring and taking all these relationships back home--or whatever happens.
I was selected to serve on the Diversity Committee for Peace Corps Cambodia with my application invoking a militaristic attitude  towards ignorance, but a gentle, grassroots approach for education. But if anyone who knows me well it'll be hard to separate the two not by my personal affect but by the content and its stubbornness I'm prone to when exacerbating a topic of interest. You know. I'm excited to see where these opportunities lead in terms of community outreach and how it can affect my service and future projects in my community.
My village is a wonderland of slowly-becoming-recognizable faces, if never by name at least by smile. I try to overcome feeling shy, but it's hard sometimes to rationalize approaching strangers, although here there really is no such thing. I want to make it a goal to approach new people when they say, “hello,” in an attempt to reconcile more with this distinction of me as foreign and them as citizens. The more I tell my story, the more support I garner and it's refreshing in its psychological effects even if physical fruition is vague and never begetted. I wish I was fluent in this language and not shy to make mistakes, my anal retentive personality souring my linguistic accomplishments. “Chill out!” my chill, alter-ego named “Chad” whispers to me while making a mixtape and playing frisbee at the same time. Ugh if only, CHAD!
Coming up the first two weeks of February is our in-service training that lasts for two weeks in Phnom Penh full of more training similarly to what we did for the first 2 months. I'm not 100% sure on the details, but from what I heard it sounds like a long break from the country and a lot of umm bonding?
I have my art club going and I have my English club on top of teaching 20 hours formally and 3 hours with the children not including playing occasional soccer. All together rounding out now to about 28 hours of education a week, maybe adding more depending on community needs and assessments, and also depending on my sanity. ~120 hours a month for $140. This is really volunteering to say the least and probably the most in a passive aggressive jab at other “service expeditions” to other countries in “need.”
Bitterness aside, Cambodia is saturated in international aid, a sort of hot spot for favor between the US and China, Japan and South Korea, Australia and Britain, etc etc. Throw a rock, hit an NGO. There aren't any in my village, however, so I have no one to compete with, thankfully, given that any NGO could outspend my personal budget until of course I can receive a grant. Speculations and speculations! I still feel confused about my mannerisms when I eat let alone trying to ask strangers for money to do something.
Each volunteer’s experience is unique and no comparison is, to me, ever deemed acceptable or fair given that anyone is prone to any sort of situation hindering or enabling their time in Peace Corps. When times are hard, you shut your phone off and ignore Facebook, stop comparing, start organizing  and remember your time here as beautiful and rare, a truly one of a kind experience that no one NO ONE has claim to.
(Granted there are instances where the volunteer isn't necessarily being the most helpful or really doing much, but those are few and far between. Ish haha!)
Peace Corps is strange and strange things happen and the stories flow and flow. The moods will swing and the awkwardness will ebb and flow. Health will spiral and climb, feelings of utter impunity versus days of clarity where 40km bike rides are easy peasy.
The drama comes and goes, boredom amongst volunteers grasping to any fragment of ‘normalcy’ in their lives, any sort of power and control and high we get from gossiping about this and that--all dumb and all so good at the same time.
There aren't secrets in peace corps, but who are we to judge anyone????? A question I wish resounded more heavily with some volunteers when they look outwards at others’ experiences.
The time has come to go home and take off my collared shirt and nice pants and just lounge it out. Catch a movie, read a book, do a lesson plan ;) or work on my art piece for art club tomorrow!
Getting back to working with my hands and producing tangible expressions is something I've been missing and I'm excited to indulge in my creativity once more. Oh and try to explain Picasso in Khmer to however many students show up.
Wish me luck
Okun churan, metpeak

Late afternoon ramblings

As I walk among my students for their first class of the day I can't help but notice the wide array of scents from their fresh showers and aggregated perfumes and colognes, their clothes still fresh from laundering, not yet besmirched by the shenanigans they get themselves into throughout the day from slapping and throwing things at each other to farm class and biking to and from school. Thinking of these scents, some blasting me with what can only remind me of my own terrible experimentation with exhuding cool, corporate America approved colognes  and expunging my natural puberty as I was growing up in middle and high school. Somethings don't change across continents and cultures. Or maybe I'm just being a jaded adult discriminating against Cambodian olfactic culture!
The holidays come and go and I'm left with little reminders that make me giddy or cringe for example the wound on my forehead thanks to a low hanging roof, beer, and my trying not to step on a man washing a fresh blob of meat. The scab is disappearing and was never bad really but I still wore a bandaid to school that week -- half social experiment, half scared of getting a gnarly scar. “IM NOT READY TO BE HARRY POTTER!” I shouted on the phone to another volunteer who had to coach me out of feeling ridiculous and into going back to the party with the biggest bandaid I had slapped right on my forehead. I just answered, “kpueh peik” (I'm too tall) to anyone who asked. They still invited me to go to the clubs. I declined pointing not to my bandaid but to my body saying “hot nah” (so tired!).
I teach 5 classes with 3 teachers with around 250 students. All are cuties and a lot of them try really hard so it makes my job easier as I try to negotiate working in the classroom with other experienced teachers, navigating language barriers and flat affects whenever I ask if they understand. It's difficult working in a culture that doesn't value asking questions or being dynamic. “Twe akrak kho prepiynih” -- do bad, break tradition. A phrase that doesn't have much wiggle room especially if you're a woman. But it's not that bad--gender roles need to be seen through a cultural lens, and while its difficult to joke about and see how men get away with everything and anything, tradition has seen this country survive the 20th century full of colonialism, fragmentation of the country, uninvited bombing campaigns (by the good ole USA), genocide, occupation and now a fresh start coming into the 21st century surrounded by countries well into their development while Cambodia catches up slowly but surely, the population booming and campaigns here and there promoting safety and health and constant interest in education reform both campaigns aided by us lovely (and crazy) Peace Corps Volunteers.
We do a lot of work for sure, not only physically, but mentally as well, negotiating language and gossip, trying to show we care so much but we need time to ourselves to reflect and recharge. It's a 24-hour job and it's hard to explain to people why we left our family or why it's still hard because most of the people we serve have never done anything remotely close to this.
It's interesting to talk about differences between us. Yes, America has thieves and poor people but we also have much more money. Yes we have short people, tall people, Asians, Europeans, Cambodians, Mexicans, Africans, etc and just because someone was born in Vietnam, doesn't mean that individual isn't American. Just because that person is black, doesn't mean that individual isn't American. The diaspora is difficult to explain to a country that participated/s heavily in that citizens come and go to various other countries, some for labor some for life, and the people that migrate here are demonized as illegal or seen as temporary NGO workers. Also difficult to explain that the movie we're watching albeit American isn't a whole view of America. Even when the next three movies they see will feature similar faces and skin colors and materialism. It's hard when they think my beauty standards are white and blonde and blue eyed or if I'm like the other foreigners who come to look for ‘dark women' in Cambodia. And then I have to try to explain why they do that. “They like this and you like that. Just different. Yol ot? Do you understand?”
It's hard to tell people to love their skin and stop putting harmful chemicals on it to match up to their own standards of beauty, surely legacies of colonialism and international mass media that shows white is valid and being dark or black is a joke (a Korean comedy featuring a woman in blackface literally named ‘Black’ is dubbed and very popular here) or a medical condition to be cured by various skin products promised to deliver you to ‘sah saat’ (white is beautiful).
It's fun to play with children and let them mock you and you mock back all joking because as hard as it is to ignore somethings they don't mean it. The things we think are rude are just, how can I say, ‘tehehe’ moments. That was supposed to be a child's giggle.
I know I speak funny, but I'm trying. I know you speak funny, but you're trying. We try hard together to understand each other because that's what people do and that's what kindred spirits long for. So we get embarrassed and we stumble and we say dumb things but we fill the gaps with what we can say; to let you know I'm here and you let me know you're there.
We dance because we're happy and I dance like you because I love it and I want you to dance with me. I show you American moves because it's funny and I want you to know dancing can be silly and if someone laughs,  maybe we did our job. You tell me I'm good at dancing and I smile because you were right next to me.
You call me skinny then you call me fat, either way you want me to eat more rice. I eat more.
We negotiate and renegotiate because we're stubborn and unsure of what we're saying but we get to where we need to go, and we can say goodbye and still smile. I can't apologize for the state of the economy that my country and countries like mine are partially/maybe mostly responsible for, but I volunteer here to show you I want to help your children express themselves on a world stage and tell whomever maybe listening that they will be in charge someday.
Some late afternoon ramblings as I think about my time here and going into the international new year which is simply a one day holiday here, nothing compared to the week long extravaganza that is the Khmer new year in April.

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.

Happyish Mediumish

Blog 9/3

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

Fried Eggs

“Fried duck eggs smell just like chicken eggs,” I thought in the shower, smelling my host mother’s cooking through the gap left where the wall separating the kitchen and the bathroom didn’t need to reach the roof. This was my first conscious uncanny experience where, for a brief moment, I thought I was back in the United States, frying eggs some random morning (read: afternoon). The smell was homely and relaxing, even while I stood naked with cold water soothing, and simultaneously stinging, my sweaty skin and with silent, malicious mosquitoes gunning for my bare skin (read: booty). I leave the shower and casually a slip a “chñañ,” which means delicious in Khmer (read: kuh-my), as I waft the smoky wisps of saturated fats towards my nose—always forgetting the word for smell. She laughs at my pale half-naked body as I waddle to my room, constantly afraid of slipping on their tiled floors. My room has three windows and a door, all of which are never covered. The windows mostly always open with decorative iron bars. The door is actually a pane of glass on top of equally decorative iron bars. I live in a cage, and I don’t mind at all. My host siblings take turns peaking in at me in the morning wondering why I’m not doing something productive at 6 in the morning. But after four weeks, I think they know enough of my personality to understand why I like to casually lay in my bed till seven, using the 3G connection on my phone’s local SIM card—thinking to myself that JFK is definitely rolling in his grave.

            Monday through Saturday generally follows the same 8am to 5:30pm schedule: class, lunch, more class. Our classes consist mostly of studying Khmer and learning how to teach English as a foreign language, betwixt classes about parasites, road safety, Cambodian Buddhism, etc and etc. The classes and topics are relentless but every bit helps to prepare for a 2-year service in a place with which most of the volunteers have little to no experience. But these are just classrooms and we are just skimming the top. Our personal vision of Cambodia will be shaped by our own interactions and experiences, which for me have already been so diverse and beautiful I am giddy and sometimes so despotic I lay in bed reeling.

            The rice here is as abundant as the people are friendly. That is a serious compliment. I usually eat rice here three times a day, many times with second helpings. A common greeting here is, “ñam bai haoi ri niuh?” which means “have you eaten rice yet?” The conversation usually then goes, “Are you married yet?” and “How much do you weigh?” It’s never malicious, but can be a little bit of poking fun. As much as they laugh at my pronunciation, I make up for it by mocking their tone of voice or just constantly calling everyone “ch’koo-uht” (crazy). Both usually elicit great reactions…when I’m not being the only “ch’koo-uht.”

            When I first went “dauh leng”-ing (going for a walk), and even now, any strangers’ face goes from this blatant stare of curiosity to the warmest smile as soon as I say “jumriepsuah” (formal hello). Sometimes it becomes a social experiment: I sort of measure how long the stare will last before I say hello and break the mutual stare of confusion and awe. It’s weird, but it’s me.

After four weeks in-country and after every last ounce of PBR has been squeezed from my pores into my sopping undershirt, I am feeling good. It’s a vague term, I know, but it’s just a general well-being that is almost inexplicable in its ambiguity which is sometimes how every day and almost every hour can feel. The pressure of learning a completely foreign language mixed with clashing personalities and residing in a strange setting with strange people is objectively insane. Uprooting my life to move across the world is a concept that is poorly understood here. “Why would you want to leave your family?” “Why would you want to come here from AMERICA?” I have yet to encounter these questions and I’m not sure of a good answer—if there is one.

            I am here because I want to give some of the good I think that I have in me. I’m sure this good can manifest in many different forms under many different circumstances, but I’m still unsure of how and when and where. It’s strange to think back to what I thought of the Peace Corps before joining and to what I think now. I think after four weeks I’m not really qualified to have a strong opinion, but as to what I am feeling now, it is acknowledging this is more than just personal growth and development: it’s a commitment to something bigger. Equally vague, the word ‘bigger’ encapsulates a vision--a sort of abstraction--to which we all, I think, contribute in myriad weird ways.

            Today we are doing our first biggish community project. We listened to our community and within the realms of our capability with limited time and resources, we pulled together a few things to give back to the community that has given so much to us as complete strangers. My group has decided to paint a banner! It will be an outline of Angkor Wat compiled of many different hand prints. I’m excited to see what happens, but, like most things go, it will definitely be a surprise.

Stay tuned and stay cool,

Bong John