A Day in the Life of...

8-13-08

A typical day in Tuk Phos usually starts at about 3:00 in the morning, when every rooster simultaneously begins making noise. The dogs usually join in the fun a little while later. Lately I've gotten better at sleeping through this, but I'm usually drifting in and out of sleep. At 4:00am the monks over at the wat start beating on a drum, which is supposed to be the wakeup call for the farmers. At about 5:00am my host family is up and moving around, sweeping, bathing, and doing laundry. Since my room is located away from the main house, This isn't usually that disturbing, but if I have laundry to do I usually try and get up around this time. Otherwise I'll doze until 6:00am or so.

Either way I'll get up, roll up the mosquito netting over my bed, pick all my clothes up from their storage area on the floor (I have no closet) and sweep out my room. This was already my habit, but the recent discovery of a scorpion nestled next to my dress shirts gave it new meaning. Our PCMO says that regularly disturbing the room makes it difficult for anything to nest. So far it's worked, save for that one scorpion. It came back again a few days later, but this time when I swept it outside my host brother took the broom and crushed it. All I could think was “well, I could have done that.”

Mornings where I do have laundry are spent by the well, scrubbing away and listening to the BBC on my radio, or if I'm in a cynical mood one of the English-language stations the Chinese are flooding the spectrum with. On days when I don't have laundry, or get it finished in a reasonable amount of time, I hop on my bike and do a quick lap of the town, or peddle hard down one of the roads leading out of town. Then I head back home, so some calisthenics, and head back out to the well to bathe. Finally, I get dressed and head to the market to buy breakfast. Lately I've been eating almost exclusively fruit for breakfast. It's a good way to “counteract” the amount of rice I eat, if you know what I mean.

By 7:30 or 8:00 it's time to get to whatever activity the Peace Corps has planned for us that day. For the first two weeks it was marathon language sessions, four hours of Khmer vocab and grammar. This week we're doing practice teaching at the school. More on that in another blog, though.

Around 11:30 we're usually done for the morning, and we all head back to our host family's house for a quick shower and lunch. Following that it's usually time for a nap, or just to lounge around in the hammock. I'm pretty bad about getting any work done during this part of the day. Whatever activity we have in the afternoon dictates how much time we get to lounge around. Sometimes we get an hour to eat and run, other times we have three hours to kill.

This week we've had our language classes in the afternoon, but in previous weeks we've usually had some kind of lecture or activity about teaching. If it's going to rain that day, it usually starts around this time. Usually it's a quick downpour but sometimes it rains for over an hour. This usually cools things down very nicely, so rain is always welcome. I don't want to think what the “hot and dry” season around April is going to be like. The Peace Corps actually recommends we take our vacation time then and go someplace cooler.

By 5:00pm we're all done for the day, and we go home for dinner. My family usually eats around 5:30, after which I go over to my house and help my host sister with her English lessons. The sun goes down around 7:00, but the districts electricity comes on at about 6:30 so we have light to work by and I get to charge my various gadgets. 8:00pm is bedtime for everyone; I take down the mosquito netting, brush my teeth, maybe take one last shower depending on how hot the day was, and crawl into bed. I'll either read or play my Nintendo DS for half an hour, but then it's lights out and time for sleep. And then at about 4:00 or 5:00 I wake up and start again, because it's another day in Tuk Phos.