The New Family

8-5-08

Moving in with a new family, particularly when you speak almost no words of your new family's language, is quite possibly one of the most difficult and awkward things that you can do. But at the same time it is the best thing you can do if you are trying to learn that language, and adapt quickly to the new culture that you find yourself in.

We arrived in Tuk Phos district about a week ago. Fortunately we had had some time to learn a few phrases in Khmer, as well as eat some of the local food, so we had some preparation. K1 had basically gotten right off the plane and then moved out to their training villages. They had had absolutely no education in Khmer besides the supplemental material given to them by the Peace Corps and whatever they had managed to research on their own. They also had only gotten to be around their whole group of PCT's during staging; since we are split between three training villages, we really only get to be around a third of the other trainees. We all get together at the hub site every other week, but other than that we have almost no contact with the other two groups.

Anyway, we arrived about a week ago. The district government held a welcome ceremony at the High School for us, complete with speeches by local politicians. They also wanted one of us to give a speech on behalf of the group; I volunteered. I'll post a transcript of it after this post. Before all this, of course, two monks came in and performed a Buddhist blessing ritual, complete with chanting and sprinkling of rose water. Then it was time to meet our new families.

My family's name is Sopphy (pronounced “soap-pee”). The mother has a stall in the market selling fish, which I guess would make her a fishmonger. I'm not entirely sure what the father does. There are at least four childeren that I know of, but there might be more, or even less. Telling who exactly is a member of the family is difficult, not just for me but for all the trainees. There are always neighbors and friends coming and going, so it's fairly difficult to nail down just who lives in the house and who is just visiting. But here is what I've found out about my new siblings.

The eldest boy is probably about my age, maybe older. I'm actually living in his house (well, technically I'm living under his house. More on that in a bit). He works or possibly runs a credit agency out of a building across the street from the house. He's almost never around, probably because he's working. He speaks a fair bit of English, too, which to me indicates that he's probably at least a High School graduate, if not university.

The younger brother is 17 or 18, and is at this moment taking his High School graduation exams in the provincial capital. He's always tooling around on his moto and wears flashy clothes. He and I don't interact very much though, so that's pretty much all I know about him.

One of my new sisters also doesn't interact with me much; I don't think I've spoken to her once since I arrived here. Maybe she's shy, maybe she doesn't like foreigners, maybe she's just being a surly teenager. I don't know her age, but she's probably between 14 and 17.

And then there's Som Po. She's 16, and I'm obviously the younger brother she always wanted, despite being seven years older than her. She speaks a bit of English, and is even president of an English club from her school, which I have been drafted into. And she also runs English classes for younger kids around the neighborhood. She's also my warden. She's always the one coming and getting me for dinner, or asking me where I am going, or what I learned in Khmer class that day. I'll just be sitting down and she'll yell out “Boeng broek (older brother), this is...” and then tell me the name of some tree or fruit or other random thing around. I just wish I could remember half the things she tells me. Last Sunday she even arranged a bike trip with me and another host family for some of us trainees to bike out to a farm so she could teach us all the names of the plants and crops. The rice planting is in full swing, and for a while I thought I was going to become intimately familiar with the rice growing process, just like my homestay in Japan.

My room is actually really nice, despite not having a closet or any other place besides the floor to store my clothes. It's got a tile floor, a desk, a lockable chest where I keep my laptop and any other stuff I don't want lost. I make sure to clean it every day, including rearranging my clothes and sweeping it out. I've already discovered one scorpion in my clothes this way. Sleeping under a mosquito net is actually pretty neat, like a fort I would make when I was a kid. My room is sort of a guest house/room thing underneath the main house (which is up on stilts). I'm sort of left to my own devices over here, except during mealtimes when I cross over to my host parent's house across the “street” for meals.

That cow is back, by members of my Som Po's English club are chasing it away. I guess people just let their cows wander during the day.

And speaking of wandering, I have to go to one of the LCF's houses for yet another seminar on something or other. I should have a chance tomorrow or the day after to post these when I'm back at the hubsite in Kampong Channang.