Still Alive

Still Alive
4/29/09

And indeed I am still alive. I haven’t written a blog post in…what? A month? Two? I don’t know off the top of my head since I delete all my writings from my computer after I post them. I don’t like to clutter up my hard drive. Either way, I know it has been a long time.

There are a few reasons for this. The first is that I am afraid I am starting to run out of pithy comments to make about daily life in Cambodia. I could start posting things like “yesterday I went to the market again, then I went to school and sat around waiting for my co-teacher to show up; he didn’t.” But that would get boring fast, seeing as how the days here pretty much just blend into each other. I’ve always preferred quality over quantity (except when it comes to Cambodian beer, but there’s not much choice in the matter there).

The second reason I haven’t posted anything is because I couldn’t. At least not in Svay Rieng. There are two internet cafés in town, and both of them closed at the same time and remained so for the better part of a month. One, on the main road, is having construction done on the walkway leading up to it, and the other, by the river, closed for no apparent reason. With them both closed, the closest internet connection is in Prey Veng, about an hour and a half trip by taxi and requiring a transfer in the hated town of Neak Loueng. However, on Monday I was in town to check if I had any mail (I didn’t) and the one by the river was open. I stopped in, and the guys there told me they wouldn’t have internet until the 1st. I didn’t recognize them, so I suspect that the place changed ownership. Either way, I’ll find out when I go to Svay Rieng on Saturday. If you read this on Saturday, it means that there is once again an internet place in Svay Rieng.

Now, what has happened in the last few months? Not a whole lot, when I think about it. February was dominated by the week-long Peace Corps training session that all Volunteers attended in Phnom Penh. Most of March was the same way; go to school, teach, find ways to waste time at home. Go to the market when breakfast stuff runs low. Late in March I visited Kampong Cham and the volunteers there. I have to say, Kampong Cham is a pretty neat town; it’s the first real city I’ve been to in Cambodia that wasn’t Phnom Penh (Svay Rieng town doesn’t count since it’s more of a, well, a town). When I came back from that weekend, I found that the school was closed down. It would remain closed for a month.

I hadn’t realized before how much the few hours I spent teaching dominated my day. Even when my co-teacher didn’t show up (often) I would still kill an hour or so dressing in my “teaching clothes”, biking to school, waiting, biking back, and getting changed again. With that gone, the only thing to break my day up was lunch, dinner, and listening to the BBC World Service on my shortwave for an hour in the evening. Other than that, my time was entirely spent trying to find ways to stave off crushing boredom. My English club and Karate club (have I mentioned those before? Maybe not. I’ll write something up about them later) could still only meet on Sundays, because while school may be closed, the teachers continued to give private lessons during the day. So for six days of the week I had nothing to do. For a month. A lot of books were read, a lot of DVDs were watched, and a lot of games were played on my laptop.

Now that Khmer New Year is over, school has re-opened again. Sort of. Only about half as many students come to class as they did before the month long hiatus. My co-teacher still insists he is “too busy” to come to school and do his job. And I still spend hours at a time with nothing to do. Soon the rice planting season will start, and school attendance will drop again. And the school year will end and it will be summer, when I will officially have nothing to do. I have a few ideas for projects to make it appear like I’m actually having an impact on the community here. Perhaps I’ll write up more about that tomorrow.