Mitchel Hayden: Still Alive

This is cliche', but...

2009-11-26T22:24:00.000-08:00

11-27-2009

What I am thankful for:

I am thankful for my laptop, without which I would have either lost my mind or said “screw this” and gone home months ago.

I am thankful that, except for the pinworms, a mild case of giardia, and the mysterious open sores that would not heal, the last time I got badly sick was in April.

I am thankful that in the few dozen times I’ve biked from Kandal to Phnom Pehn, and vice-versa, I’ve never gotten into a major traffic accident. Only minor ones.

I am thankful for karma, which ensures that the person who stole my bike will eventually get what’s coming to them.

I’m thankful I finally know exactly what I’m going to do when I get out of Peace Corps.

And of course for family, friends, all that sappy stuff.

So I Moved to Kandal

2009-11-16T04:20:00.000-08:00

11-16-09

So, I finally moved away from Svay Rieng. Back in September, when I was getting ready to go to Bangkok to take the GRE, Peace Corps finally came to a decision on where my new site would be. I would go to the Regional Teacher Training Center in Kandal.

The Ministry of Education had apparently been putting pressure on Peace Corps to send a volunteer to the RTTC in Kandal since K1 was here. The director (who is a women, a rare instance of a Khmer woman in a position of power) had been asking both the Ministry and Peace Corps directly to place a volunteer there to help the teachers with their English pronunciation. Peace Corps resisted this for several reasons. First of all, Kandal is very close to the capital city, so whichever volunteer got placed there wouldn’t really get a good sense of the country or a real “Peace Corps experience.” Also they might be in Phnom Penh every other day and possibly get in trouble if they weren’t mature enough. Also the Prime Minister had his official residence in Kandal really close to the RTTC; so a volunteer placed here might conceivably be a target of police interest, which is never a good thing in a country like this.

But, luckily for me, my timing and my situation were perfect. Prime Minister Hun Sen just built a giant new monstrosity of a house across form the Independence Monument and moved out of Kandal. Also, since I had already been here for a year I already had the “Peace Corps experience,” and staff knew that I wasn’t the kind of person to get in trouble in Phnom Pehn (because I’m so very, very boring).

The RTTC’s are basically two-year community colleges that all lower and upper secondary school teachers are required to go to. Which means my job has changed from teaching English to helping train future English teachers. What this actually means remains to be seen, since I am still mostly observing in the classes. Eventually I’ll transition to actively participating in teaching, but for now I just watch and take notes on what could improve.

Kandal itself is located about 13 kilometers away from the capital of Phnom Penh. It’s seriously that close to the city. I can bike from my house to the Peace Corps office in 45 minutes. Of course I abuse this newfound proximity to the city profusely, biking in at least twice a week to buy groceries and eat lunch.

My housing is also quite an upgrade. I don’t really live with a host family; it’s more like a landlord/tenet situation. The house is about 100 yards away from the RTTC. I’ve got an upstairs room that is about twice as large as my cell in Svay Rieng. I’ve got a desk, at last! And room to walk around in my room! It’s great. Since I don’t really have a host family I cook all my meals, plus I am allowed to put stuff in their refrigerator (yes, they have a fridge). Since I am so close to Phnom Penh, I can buy stuff like butter and cheese there, things I could never have gotten in Svay Rieng. The number of meals I know how to and am able to prepare has tripled (from one to three)! I had grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner tonight. Life is good.

Oh, and I’ve decided that after I leave Peace Corps I’m going to join the Army. Seriously.

Stuff is Happening

2009-08-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

Or: “That’s right, I have a blog, don’t I?”
8-30-09

So a few weeks ago I was finally getting prepared to sit down and write out a blog about how I have been doing nothing for the last several months. Which was true; I haven’t set foot in a classroom since May, and the three students that came to my English club and Karate club on a regular basis stopped coming. Why did they stop coming? Because “it’s the rainy season.” So basically my life for a while now has pretty much followed the following schedule: wake up around 7, go to the market, eat breakfast, find some way to waste five hours, eat lunch, find some way to waste five hours, eat dinner, listen to the BBC, watch some episodes of Stargate, go to sleep. And that’s pretty much been my life.

K3 arrived at the end of July. I was involved in their first week of orientation; greeting them at the airport, keeping them awake in Phnom Penh the first day, and then participating in various sessions before they went out to their training sites. After that it was back to my usual schedule. Except for one small detail.

I have said before that my one ambition at this school was to start a library. The project has had various ups and downs before, but I felt like I was finally ready to get this thing off the ground. While I was away for the week with K3, I instructed my co-teacher to start gathering the necessary information I would need to start writing a proposal. Prices, availability of material, stuff like that. I assumed at this point that we had the school’s permission to actually do this thing, too. I returned to site and went to my co-teacher’s house. His first words to me?

“I don’t know who will work with you now. I got a new job in Svay Rieng town, and will not teach here anymore. And the school director will never approve your library project. He does not want you to get involved in the school at all, because he is very corrupt and takes the money the province gives the school.”

So…that was that. And I had finally had enough of this school. It was time to call Peace Corps.

Fully expecting to have to fight admin and fully prepared to have to threaten to leave, I called up our program manager. Fortunately, I had planned ahead and had my co-teacher standing by to confirm what I was saying about my situation at school. And Peace Corps was…surprisingly helpful about it. They basically said that if it sounded like I had honestly tried to do stuff at the school but because of the school itself nothing had worked out and they agreed that it would probably never work. So they said they would look into letting me switch sites.

Peace Corps has been understandably busy with the Pre-Service Training, so getting me moved hasn’t really been that high of a priority. Plus they still haven’t figured out exactly where they wanted to put me. My first conversation with them was at the start of August, and I still don’t know exactly where I will be going. At first it seemed like I was going to be put in a Provincial Teacher Training Center, basically the vocational college that all Cambodian teachers attend. However, then it seemed like I might go either the Prey Veng RTTC, or a High School in Battambang or Kampong Thom (find a map for yourselves if you are confused). But NOW, when I talked to Admin on Friday, it looks like they are going to place me in the lovely-named province of Kampong Speu.

Peace Corps has wanted to expand to Kampong Speu (it’s seriously pronounced “spoo”) for some time now. I think they were trying to get K3’s there, and I know that the Ministry of Education has been pushing them to place some volunteers there (also they have been pushing Kandal province, which again probably means nothing to the vast majority of people reading this). But for whatever reason they have been running into road blocks. But since I have suddenly become available, and because they know I won’t freak out if left in a province by myself, they figure I can be the test case for the province.

It will certainly be an interesting opportunity. I don’t know anything about Kampong Speu, except its location. I can’t really ask anyone because nobody has ever lived there. But at the very least I will be in a provincial town only about an hour away from Phnom Penh. And once again I will be the first Peace Corps volunteer at this site…and this time, the first one in the province. If nothing else, it will look pretty good on those grad school applications.

And speaking of which, I’m going to try and take the GRE next month. I will have to go to Thailand to take it, so I’ve got a weekend in Bangkok to look forward to. I’ve been studying for a little over a month now, and while I probably won’t be getting any perfect scores, I’m confident I can make a decent showing. I should get at least over 50% correct in the math section…I think.

Anyway, that’s been what’s happening to me here in Cambodia. Big changes are on the way. If I stick to my blog schedule, I should be posting another one…sometime in December.

Stuff

2009-07-02T19:48:00.000-07:00

6/25/09

It’s been a while since I’ve written up anything, so I figured I would take this opportunity to update the world on what’s going on at my house.

As you may remember, I have two host sisters; one who teaches at the primary school, and one who just does housework. Well, a few months ago my family suddenly started stockpiling building supplies. I didn’t really know why and when I tried to ask what it was for I didn’t understand the response. And then month or so ago they suddenly began cutting down trees and clearing brush along the road in front of the house. As it turned out, they built a little shed to run a store out of. Now my host sister (the eldest one) stays out there all day selling little snacks and rope and various dry goods, as well as selling gas out of old glass Coke bottles. I guess they decided to open up yet another source of income?

I like it because she sells a lot of things that I would otherwise buy in the market, which cuts down the amount of time I have to spend outside of the house from maybe 20 minutes a day to 0 minutes…wait, why is that a good thing?

Other than that, school has been nonexistent. I’m trying to get my library project off the ground, but there have been…complications. As I mentioned before, my school is building a new library, and I wanted to raise some funds and make it really nice. My school director was on board, but then he went and talked to the donors. The donors basically said “absolutely not, don’t let the foreigner anywhere near that building.” So that is obviously out. But my school director, being cool, said that I could take one of the classrooms and turn it into an English library, and reading room. So that is basically what I am going to work on now. And the basketball court, if possible.

What else…oh, there are new puppies at our house. Our dog gave birth to three more puppies on the 5th or May. But two have already been given away, and I don’t know if they intend to keep the third one. I hope they do because I could start training him and have that be a little personal side project of my own. I’m in Phnom Penh now and will be away from site for a whole week, so I guess I’ll find out when I get home if he’s been given away or not.

Also, starting this month, I’m going to pay my family less money in rent, and start cooking one meal for myself every day. I’m doing this because quite frankly the food at my house is not very good. It’s edible, and that’s about all I can say for it. So, I will prepare lunch for myself, in addition to breakfast. There’s a very good chance that I will starve to death before the month is out.

Beyond that, it’s still the same old stuff in Romduel.

The Distant Future

2009-06-06T22:16:00.000-07:00

5/26/09

Many people have told me over the years that I have problems “living in the moment,” or that I spend too much time thinking about things that are years away. And there is some validity to this. But in this case I think I am a bit justified as an exercise in stress relief. Living out here can often times seem a bit like purgatory. Focusing on my future and planning ahead is something that helps to remind me that at some point I will actually get out of here and get on with my life.

As some people may already know, my plan has been to eventually pass the Foreign Service Exam (officially known these days as the Foreign Service Offices Test) and get a job working for the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer. And this is still something that I would like to pursue. However...it's a bit too undefined of a goal for my tastes. Getting this job is contingent on passing the Test, which I can only take once a year. What am I going to do in the meantime? Working odd jobs and taking a test every year ( a test there is no guarantee I would ever even pass; I've heard stories of people taking it five, six, seven times and never hitting on what the testers are looking for) is not my idea of a good life. In fact, it sounds like a life that would slowly drive me insane.

I need a different goal, something that I can work towards that is much more definable, with step-by-step ways that I can go about getting to that goal. I don't understand how people can not have a plan, not know what they will be doing next year, or the year after. If I don't know those things, I start to freak out.

Anyway, this definable goal. I think I have found it. It won't necessarily be an easily obtainable goal, but with some hard work and the newfound mental maturity Peace Corps service has finally brought out in me, I think I can pull it off: law school.

Apparently, my mind works in a way that makes me suitable to be a lawyer. Various measurements over the years of personality and career aptitude and the like have indicated that law should be something I should consider pursuing. But it was never really something I considered, until I took an international law class in Japan. It was fascinating. I spent hours reading the textbook, seriously studying for a class for the first time ever in my academic career (more on that lovely fact later). When we did a mock trial, I had great fun pouring over old cases, looking for loopholes and relevant bits in past rulings to help argue my side's case. Of course, this sudden burst of scholastic achievement might be due to the fact that at the time I was attending a school that I hated any burying myself in study was the only means of escape. But I think it's possible that I, cliché as it sounds, may have found my calling in the practice of international law. But it was still a very undefined calling...until I came here.

I've seen the aftermath of human evil here in this country, and I've seen the efforts to bring the people who perpetrated that evil to justice. Sometime last month I had an epiphany. I want to travel the world and help bring war criminals to justice. This is what I want to do with the rest of my life.

Of course, I'm not ruling anything out. Joining the State Department still is something that I want to pursue. And if at some point along the way I do pass the various hurdles and get offered a job in the diplomatic corps, I will consider it at that time. But in the meantime, I am going to pursue this new course; becoming a lawyer and helping to prosecute war criminals. Figuring out how to get involved in that field wasn't very difficult. Already I have found a law school in the United States that specializes in this field. They even offer internships for students to work on various tribunals around the world. So from now on my goal is to get into this school or one like it.

But that is much easier said than done. My motivation and drive that I have awakened lately was sadly lacking during my undergrad years. I won't go into details, but let's just say that my performance in undergrad (with some exceptions) was less than stellar. Chalk it up to immaturity, personal circumstances at the time, whatever. I won't make excuses. What I'm trying to say is that my undergrad GPA sucks, and not only does it a sucky GPA but it's a sucky GPA (it's 2.8, OK? I told you it sucked) from a small state college in Minnesota. Not exactly something that will get me into a well-known and prestigious law school. But I know I can do better. When I was taking classes in Japan I nearly got a 4.0 semester GPA. And that was in 400 level classes taught be teachers who were experts in their field. I know I have the mind to get the grades, my problem is applying myself. And now that I've been out in the real world, out on my own enduring hardships in a developing country, I think I can finally pull that off.

Unfortunately, lacking the ability to send myself back in time and re-apply to a better school and actually study and go to class this time, I'm still saddled with that low GPA. For a while I considered going back and getting another bachelor's degree after leaving the Peace Corps. Peace Corps service alone should be enough to get me into a decent school, where I could transfer in the classes where I got good grades and re-take the ones in which I didn't. I'm still kicking this possibility around.

Another possibility might be open to me, also because I have Peace Corps on my resume. I keep hearing that Peace Corps service looks absolutely great on grad school applications. While I doubt I would be able to get into the Kennedy School or something like it, I think I could manage to get into a grad school and get my master's degree. If I get good grades in grad school, which I know I can do, and write a good thesis, law school shouldn't be unobtainable, right? A masters degree, even from an grad school that might not necessarily be a “big name,” and a good LSAT score (which is something I'm actually working on now) should supersede a bachelor's and a terrible GPA. At least, that's what I'm hoping.

Now that I have laid out my goals and plans, I am on the lookout for advice. I have numerous questions; the foremost being if any of this is even feasible. So I am turning to whoever happens to be reading this blog. Do you have any advice about this? If so, you know how to get in contact with me. Or at least how to get in contact with someone who can get in contact with me. And I want to hear the harsh truth, should it come to that. Because hearing the harsh truth isn't something that happens very often in this country. At the very least it will give me something to look forward to.

An Angkor Obsession

2009-05-24T02:02:00.000-07:00

5/24/09

It is pretty common knowledge in my village that I travel around Cambodia a fair amount. Weekends in Phnom Penh, visits to volunteers in other provinces, the trip to Ratinakiri, etc. When students ask me what I like to do, I tell them I like to travel. They usually reply, “But when are you going to Siem Riep?” In fact, this is one of the most common questions I get asked.

For those of you that don’t know, Siem Riep is the province in which Angkor Wat is located. And Angkor Wat is huge here. Its image is everywhere; on the flag, on official documents, on a brand of beer, on shirts, in paintings, everywhere. And the Cambodians are incredibly proud of the place. I would say proud to the point of obsession.

In some ways, I can understand it. It was a remarkable feat for a 10th century society. It remains to this day the largest religious complex on Earth. And it is a huge draw for tourist, which (in theory) will provide more money for development (in practice all the money is siphoned away from Cambodia, either to government officials who simply pocket it or to foreign companies). And it is a very important part of Khmer culture, one that most Khmer don’t get to see (too expensive to take a vacation, much less travel to the other side of the country). But the obsession with me seeing it is a bit much.

“When will you go Siem Riep? I think maybe you should visit Siem Riep. Do you know Angkor Wat? It is very famous temple, you should visit.” All the time. I tell them I want to see other places in Cambodia, but sometimes I think they really can’t comprehend why someone would come to Cambodia and not spend the majority of their time planning a trip to Angkor Wat.

Because of the way I am, I’m half-tempted to never go.

...

But of course I will! Come on, how could I come to Cambodia and not do the touristy Angkor Wat trip? Maybe as soon as next month, even. But I’m pretty sure that after I get back and show the pictures to my class, the first question I am going to get is, “when will you go again?”

Awk-waaaaard

2009-05-17T20:17:00.000-07:00

5-15-09

The other day I went shopping. I was looking for some crackers or cookies or something, anything to help me stop losing weight. I’ve dropped roughly 12-13 pounds since coming here, and that is weight I really don’t have to spare. So I dropped by one of the largest stores in the village, which coincidently is run by the family of one of my 12th grade students.

This student is one of the best students in that class; she can almost carry on a conversation, after only six years of study. When I first arrived in Rumduel, my co-teacher had her come along with us on our shopping trip to Svay Rieng town, to help get the best prices on the stuff I needed to buy. And I sent her to a career day for female students organized by the K1s. In the course of all of this, my co-teacher and I had stopped by her family’s store/house. This was probably when I first appeared on their radar.

The Cambodian educational system has a rich history of students marrying teachers. Some teachers will openly admit that they are searching for a wife amongst the students. Other volunteers have stories about counterparts and coworkers who are engaged to 16-year-old students in their class. And, of course, every family would love to see their daughter marry a foreigner. Cambodian marriages are business arrangements first, designed for the support of the parents involved. The money that the foreigner would send to the family every month would make them the richest in town. So a foreign teacher is…something of a target.

Knowing this, I still went to my student’s store. I was hungry, damn it. And I figured they would be least likely to try and rip me off. It went…a little beyond that. They actually refused to take my money. I tried to pay them several times for the rather large package of crackers I got, but they kept telling me to take it. Then the mother invited me to sit down and sent the daughter to get me something to drink. Also free.

I’ve been in some awkward situations in my life, many of my own doing. This will probably be at least in the top ten. I sat and drank my water and tried to steer the conversation towards things like my work here in Rumduel, but the parents mostly wanted to talk about things like what my parents did for work, and how white my skin was. They were very interested in where I wanted to live after I left Cambodia, too.

I got out of there as quickly as possible. They told me to come by any time. So now I am conflicted. On one hand, I really like getting free stuff. On the other hand, if I drop by another few times the parents are going to start making reservations for a band and a caterer for the wedding.

Somehow, this is one situation I never really imagined would ever be a problem for me.

Sickness/Injury Update! Again!

2009-05-05T20:30:00.001-07:00

One (1) bought of amoebic dysentery.
One (1) fever from a bad reaction to an immunization.
One (1) strep infection.
One (1) mysterious allergic reaction on hand.
One (1) incident of food poisoning.
One (1) mild electrocution.
One (1) bacterial infection of the stomach.

Summer Plans

2009-05-05T20:29:00.001-07:00

5/1/09

While technically summer vacation for the Cambodian school system is still a few months away, for all intents and purposes it has already started. School attendance is down to about half of what it was before Khmer New Year, as well as teacher attendance. I may teach the occasional class here and there, and I still go to the school every day to answer the same questions from the same students over and over and over again (have you eat rice yet?), but summer vacation has pretty much started. Which is fine, because I actually do have something planned.

One of the things my school desperately needs is a library. The current library, such as it is, is a dark, rather dank room next to the school office. The books are locked up at all times, and the teachers use the room for a separate meeting/drinking/sleeping room during the day. Basically there is no student library. I would like to change that.

Somewhere along the line, the school got some money from the government to build a new building. It probably has something to do with the fact that they changed the name of the school to name it after the prime minister. The new building will have three rooms, to be used as a library, a computer lab, and a sewing room. The sewing room is so students can learn enough of a trade skill so that they can be employed at garment factories, instead of having to work on the farm or, especially in the case of girls, become prostitutes. Who knows if the computer lab will actually have computers; I’m pursuing a few avenues to try and get some. But the new library is where I plan to devote most of my attention.

There are a few fundraising avenues open to us Volunteers. One is through the US embassy and I think USAID, and one is through a system called the Peace Corps Partnership Program (PCPP). USAID is, of course, the agency through which all that controversial foreign aid money is distributed. I can get some money through the embassy’s Small Projects Assistance program. PCPP is basically a website where volunteers post their proposals, and then people can donate to that project through the website. It’s a way that family and friends can help the volunteer actually accomplish something. Neither of these programs will pay the full cost of the project, however. They are contingent on a percentage of the funds being raised in the community. Other volunteers have had success doing this, and I plan to draw upon their wisdom.

Whichever way I go, My goal is to make the new library really nice. I’m thinking tiled floors (as opposed to the bare concrete of the classrooms), light fixtures, furniture, and bookshelves. There are NGOs that I can go through to get books, as well. I would also like to do a “world map project,” which is basically to paint a giant world map on the wall. That will come later, however.

Also, I’m thinking I might throw in a basketball court for the school. Sort of do an all-around “school improvement project.” This is just a tentative plan, however.

Over the next few months I’m going to start in on the proposals required for these projects. It doesn’t help that my co-teacher, and the one person in this town who speaks fluent English, is always AWOL from school. I will probably have to spend a lot of time forcing him to help. But, if I actually manage to pull this off, then maybe my time spent here will actually have been worth something. Maybe.

Still Alive

2009-05-05T20:27:00.000-07:00

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.

Sickness/Injury Update!

2009-03-10T20:00:00.000-07:00

Getting Around

2009-03-10T19:58:00.001-07:00

3-10-09

With April, and Khmer New Year, coming up fast, most people are making travel plans. I figured I might as well take this opportunity to explain to people back home about how we get around here in Cambodia…and how much it sucks.

There are three ways to travel in Cambodia: taxi, van, or bus. I don’t have any experience with the buses here; none run to Svay Rieng, and I haven’t traveled anywhere where I would need to take them. From what I’ve heard traveling by bus in Cambodia isn’t that much different than by bus in the US. But I do have plenty of experience with traveling by bus or taxi.

First, you start your journey with the driver trying to rip you off. Unless you know the driver personally, or there is a fixed rate from your location to the destination (and the driver knows you know it), the driver will try and charge you more because you are a foreigner. And all foreigners are rich! Of course they can pay $15 to go to a town half an hour away. Usually the price is about $2, sometimes less. This negotiation and attempted rip-off is always a fun way to start a journey.

The vans and taxis themselves are usually Korean-made vehicles manufactured sometime in the 1980’s. The condition of them is a crap-shoot; you may get lucky and find one that has padding on the seats, or you might get one with rotted food under the seats. And air-conditioning? Forget it.

Once you have found a van or taxi going to your destination, and have negotiated the price down from whatever outrageous figure was thrown at you to begin with, you will then proceed to sit in the hot sun for anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour and a half while the drivers try and find more people who want to ride. Fixed departure schedules? What are those? The vans will eventually leave when they are full. And by full, I mean FULL. A normal, five-seat car will not leave until there are four people in the backseat, two people in the passenger’s seat, and the driver and one other passenger in the driver’s seat. I once rode from Phnom Penh to Neak Loung (the worst place on Earth) in a car that not only had all this, but also someone riding in the trunk. She rode back there for an hour. I hope she at least got a discount.

Vans, on the other hand, will be PACKED with people. It’s impossible to try and figure out how many will be shoe-horned into the thing, but when they run out of space on the inside, they will put more people on the roof. I’ve ridden in vans with people hanging out the windows and maybe a half-dozen up on the roof. Obviously, riding in a van like this is incredibly uncomfortable. You are either smashed up against the window and another person, or between two people. If you are claustrophobic, these vans would probably trigger a panic attack.

Basically, traveling by vans or taxis sucks. With busses you at least get your own seats and air-conditioning, but they cost more and you will have a five-hour ride to look forward to. With all of this it’s a wonder I even bother to travel at all. But going through all this still beats staying at site indefinitely.

It's all Downhill From Here...

2009-03-01T17:47:00.000-08:00

3-1-09

Today I saw a cow poop on a chicken. My life is now complete.

Sickness Update!

2009-02-21T02:00:00.001-08:00

Another sickness update! Here's what I've contracted so far:

One (1) bought of amoebic dysentery.
One (1) fever from a bad reaction to an immunization.
One (1) strep infection.
One (1) mysterious allergic reaction on hand.
One (1) incident of food poisoning.

Major Excitement at the Homestead

2009-02-09T17:36:00.001-08:00

2-8-09

Big excitement at the house last night. One of the neighbor’s bulls kept trying to come into our yard, and wouldn’t leave. The dogs would go berserk, and my host sisters and I had to swat it with sticks to get it to leave. And it would keep coming back, too. No matter how many times we chased it out it kept coming back. Quite the night. And yes, I know how sad it is that most of my excitement these days is livestock related.

UPDATE: When I was teaching my English Club class this afternoon the same damn bull came back, but this time he was leading a herd of about five or six other cows. They stormed around the yard for a few minutes, chased by the dogs, before the family drove them off. But that bull kept coming back again. So the family tied it to a tree this evening, and I guess we’re keeping it. Does that make my host family cattle thieves?

Buddhism

2009-02-09T17:34:00.000-08:00

2-7-09

I realize I haven’t really written about what it’s like to live in a Buddhist country. I’ve written about Pchum Ben and other major festivals that I’ve experienced, but not really about the day to day stuff that makes living in a Buddhist country unique.

The first thing I noticed was how different Buddhism is here from what I saw in Japan. The Buddhism that came to Japan passed through China first, whereas the Buddhism that is here in Cambodia came directly from India. Buddhism in China and Japan are strongly influenced by Confucianism, Taoism, and other Chinese beliefs, whereas the Buddhism here has none of that, and is strongly influenced by Hinduism. The major difference is architecturally. The Temples that I saw in Japan were built with dark wood, and had an earthy feel to them. The Wats here are all painted with bright colors and have a very Indian feel to them. Of course, the Wats here were almost all built within the last twenty years. The Khmer Rouge, being communists, weren’t very big on religion. Many Wats were destroyed, and the monks suffered many…indignities.

But Buddhism is worked in so deeply to the fabric of life here that not even a genocidal communist regime could drive it away. Today there are Wats all over the countryside. I can think of three just within the immediate area of my site. And the monks are an important part of society again. Every day you can see them out begging alms from the town.

Becoming a monk is something that a lot of young men do for a few years. It really is a good opportunity to improve your life here. For one thing, you get free room and board at the Wat. For another, you get a lot of opportunities that you wouldn’t have otherwise had. I’ve spoken to a lot of monks who took the vows simply because then that they would have an opportunity to go to University. Some larger Wats have schools on the temple grounds, so that the monks can get an education. I teach at one in Svay Rieng town on Sundays. For some, becoming a monk is the only way that they would be able to get an education. For others, they became a monk simply because there family could not afford to feed them, much less send them to school.

There are also those people who became monks because they fell in with the wrong crowd, and their parents sent them away to the Wat to keep them out of trouble. If you go to a Wat, chances are you will see at least a few monks with tattoos, or obvious old wounds. There are at least two obviously ex-gangster monks in my class alone. Generally they are pretty nice guys now.

Other than the monks and the reverence showed to them by the general public (there is a whole level of formal speech that you need to use when addressing monks), Buddhism in the general public isn’t that in your face. People usually have a small shrine at their house that they will place food and money in for offerings, and they often attend major shrine festivals (Phcum Ben, Katan). But that’s pretty much it. It isn’t like a Christian or Muslim country, where the devout go to the religious institution of their choice at least once a week. Granted, elderly Cambodians are more likely to spend a fair amount of time at the Wat, but younger people just generally go about their business.

Except for the belief in ghosts. Ghosts are a major part of Buddhist and Cambodian folklore, and I get asked about them a fair amount. When I tell my students that I don’t believe in ghosts (I actually take a sort of agnostic view towards the subject, but for the purpose of this writing that is neither here nor there, and would be too complicated to explain to my students given the language barrier) they look at me like I’m stupid. Like I’m telling them that I don’t believe that the sky is blue. Or like telling devout Christians that you don’t believe in God.

So I guess living in a Buddhist country isn’t that much different for me after all.

Some Observations

2009-02-09T17:31:00.000-08:00

2-4-09

My family has five dogs. For people back home, this might seem excessive. The reason that they have so many, however, is not because they like dogs, but because they are terrified of being robbed. Most families here are. In fact, I don’t know a single family out here in the country that doesn’t have at least one dog running around. Most dogs are mangy and underfed and will chase you sometimes if you are on your bike. I’m lucky enough to live with a family that can afford to take care of their animals. The dogs, all five of them, get a big bowl of all the leftover rice and other food at the end of the day. Since there is no refrigeration here, the food would spoil anyway, but you can’t see the ribs on my families’ dogs, which means they actually get enough to eat.

Speaking of the animals and my family being able to take care of them, I’ve never seen animals that were better taken care of than here at my house. At current count, the family has five dogs, one cat, four cows, and countless ducks and chickens. There was just a major hatch of chicken eggs too. It’s really hard to count them all, but I’ve estimated that there are at least 30 baby chickens running around. This is not counting the five that my host sister raised after the mother abandoned the eggs. Those are still running around, hopping up on tables and on to people’s laps when they are sitting at the table or laying in the hammock. Now my family is trying to get them to sleep out in the chicken coop in the backyard instead of in the storage room where we kept them when they were little. They are having none of that, however, and will hop out of the coop and come running back across the yard, then congregate around the door to the storage room. They usually get their way.

I may have mentioned that one of our cows gave birth a few weeks ago. Because the calf was born on a Saturday, my host brother named it “sau,” which means “Saturday” in Khmer. But there was a problem, since one of the other cows had been born on a Saturday as well and was already named Sau. So my host brother named the new calf “Sau 2.” The “2” is pronounced in English, of course, just to make things really ridiculous.

As long as this is an animal-heavy blog, I have noticed that the chickens will sometimes get into fights. What could chickens possibly have to fight about? I mean, their brains are the size of peach pits, and all they do is wander around, eat, sleep, and shit. What in this existence could there possibly be to fight over?

Getting back to the dogs for a second, their primary purpose is a deterrent for thieves, and to serve as a doorbell. They bark a lot when strangers show up. They don’t like strangers coming around the house, which is cool because I’m not necessarily fond of it either. When people come around the house they tend to stare at me for a few minutes and then turn to my family and say something along the lines of “did you know there’s a foreigner here?”

The other day a guy came around trying to sell my family a gas stove. They took great pleasure in informing this chump that they not only had a gas stove, but that the Peace Corps had given it to them (which is sort of true, I guess). Then they guy tried to sell it to me. I pretended not to understand. My host brother told me after the guy left that it was probably stolen and/or busted anyway.

February is already here, and after that comes March. March is, for all intents and purposes, one of the last “regular” teaching months that we will have. April is not only the hottest part of the year, but it is also Khmer New Year. There is a weeks worth of official national holidays, but from what I’ve heard from the K1’s, school for all intents and purposes shuts down during that entire month. In May school starts up again in theory, but who knows how many students will actually show up. If parents are going to pull their kids out of school to work on the farm, this is going to be the time they do it. I’m not exactly sure when the rice planting begins, but I do know that attendance is going to drop quite a lot during that time.

Changing topics a bit, I’m currently laying here in the hammock writing while my family goes around doing chores. They like to keep the radio on while they do this. I had thought that Japanese television was one of the worst forms of mass media, but Khmer radio is starting to edge it out. In the morning they play Radio Free Asia, which is great. They are getting local and world news. But after that, the radio station will play Khmer pop music (I’ve got some things to write on that subject, believe me), or the program that I am currently listening to. From what I can determine, this program is devoted exclusively to people in the studio calling up random people on their cell phones and asking them what they are up to. Since the network isn’t the most reliable on Earth, there are a lot of disconnects and dropped calls, so there is a lot of dead air. The people being called almost always have their radios on in the background to, so there’s lots of echo and interference. This program goes on for hours.

However, every few days the radio station that my family listens to will broadcast a program that consists of questions being posed to lawyers, foreign and Khmer, about the Khmer Rouge. Since the trials have finally started, there is a lot of public interest in the legal system. The questions mostly address issues like, “how can I find out where my family member was killed,” or getting access to prison records.

I may have mentioned this before, but my family puts up a student during the week that lives very far away from the school. I think he’s related to the family. They also serve lunch to two or three students who I think are in a similar situation. One thing I’ve noticed about these students and teenagers in general around here; they are very, very, very bored. When they aren’t in class or their private lessons, or doing chores, they simply have nothing to do. Right now the two students are wandering around aimlessly with their hands in the pockets, staring at the wall. Sometimes they will open up the top of the water filter and stare inside. They do this once or twice an hour. They also like to stand and watch me use my laptop. They get this look of hungry envy on their faces whenever they see me using something electronic to amuse myself. We really do have it much easier than they do.

Well, that’s enough writing for now. Lunch will be served soon, and I’ll probably bike into Svay Rieng town again today, since I don’t teach. I feel a bit bad for leaving town whenever I have a free day, but quite frankly there’s nothing for me to do in town, and biking to the internet place in Svay Rieng is a perfect way to get exercise and kill an afternoon. Costs only a little over a dollar, too. I try to limit myself to twice a week. During the summer though, who knows?

A day in the Life Of...

2009-01-27T22:30:00.001-08:00

1-27-08

My schedule is largely determined by what month it is. Since the school I work at doesn’t have enough room for all students, the day is divided in half. Seventh through ninth grades meet for one half of the day, and tenth through twelfth grades meet for the other half. Every month they alternate the half of the day. For example, this month the tenth through twelfth grades have been meeting in the morning, from 7:00 until noon. Then the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades come in from noon until 5:00pm. Classes meet for two hours twice a week. Since I only teach for the Upper Secondary School (grades 9-12), this means I have all afternoon off. Next week, at the start of February, this will change, and the Upper Secondary School will meet in the afternoons. This means I can sleep in. I like when they meet in the afternoons better.

Either way, my routine pretty much remains the same, but the times I do things changes. Usually I wake up and have breakfast at my house. My usual breakfast consists of apples I buy in the market, peanut butter I buy in Phnom Penh, and a glass of condensed milk and Ovaltine. If I am out of any essentials, I go to the market in the mornings. If it’s a month where school is meeting in the mornings, I then go to the school and teach. If it’s not, I’ll usually hang out at home and read for an hour or so. Then I’ll exercise and study Khmer. These two activities usually eat up an hour and a half or so. Around 11:00 or so, lunch is served. And then I’ll go to the school. If it’s a month where school is meeting in the mornings, I’ll come home around noon, eat lunch, read for an hour or so, and then exercise and study.

We usually eat dinner between 5:00 and 6:00. This is also usually the time that the cows come home. If you ever heard the expression “…until the cows come home,” now you know what time they were referring too. After dinner I’ll hang out with the family for a bit, then turn in around 7:00. I’ll listen to the BBC for an hour (Newshour comes on at 7), then watch an episode or two of whatever TV series I’m working my way through on DVD. Lights out is usually around 9:30 or 10:00.

On the days I do teach, I usually teach two or four hours. If the teacher I’m supposed to teach with doesn’t show up, which is frequently, I’ll sit around the school reading and trying to talk with any students who are brave enough to practice their English. I don’t teach on Mondays and Wednesdays, because the classes I regularly teach don’t meet those days. Mondays I will just sort of lounge around, watch DVDs, read, or go to the market. Wednesdays I will lounge around in the morning, and then go to Svay Rieng after lunch and kill the afternoon at the internet café.

Saturday and Sunday I also don’t teach at the school, but these days are pretty busy in their own right. I’ve started up informal, voluntary English lessons for students in my class who want them. These aren’t private lessons, and I made it very clear to the students that they shouldn’t skip their private lessons to come to mine. It’s more of an English club for a small number of motivated students. I’ve only been doing it one weekend, but it seems to be a success. I teach one class on Saturday and two on Sunday. Sunday mornings I eat breakfast in the market and then bike the 15k to Svay Rieng town. I teach a class at the wat there for the monks. Then I’ll do some shopping if I need to, swing by the internet café for an hour, then head back to Romduel for the rest of my day. Sundays are a bit busy.

Soon, I’m going to start up a karate class for students and teachers on the weekends. I’d like to get it going this coming weekend. For now it will only be on Sundays, but at some point I’m going to shuffle around the schedule and teach karate on Saturdays as well. I’ve got permission from the school director to use a classroom at the school for these lessons, so hopefully it will be a success. A lot of students have expressed enthusiasm for it. Also I’m probably going to merge the three informal classes into one after I get a good sense for how many people will be coming to them. There will be a little bit of a gap in ability, but since these are the really motivated students I don’t think they will have any problems with helping out their classmates.

In my free time, now that I have a laptop, I mostly watch DVDs or read. It’s not a very exciting life. I am going to start traveling more, probably after our In-Service Training next month. Kampong Cham and Prey Veng town are first on my list to visit. And at some point in the near future I’m going to go back to Kampong Channang to both visit the volunteers in that province, and to go back and visit my training host family. They called me the other day to wish me a happy New Year (they are of Chinese decent).

So that’s pretty much my life out here in Svay Rieng. Sometimes the volunteers in this area will get together in Svay Rieng town to hang out, but with K1 leaving in a few months that won’t last much longer. And when they are gone, I’ll be the only volunteer in the entire province. As far as I know, I’ll also be the only American too. The other K2 volunteer who was here went home last week. Not that I’ll be completely on my own; there’s a K2 volunteer, Michael, who technically lives in Prey Veng, but since his site is closer to Svay Rieng town than Prey Veng town (not to mention being on this side of the Mekong ferry), his provincial town is actually Svay Rieng. So I’ll really be the only one here on paper.

When summer rolls around, I plan on traveling abroad. Originally I was planning on Mongolia, but I don’t think that’s in the cards for me this time around. A lot of K1’s have gone to Malaysia, and apparently it’s not only really cool but also really cheap. Vietnam and Laos are also on my list of must-see places. Also I want to visit eastern Cambodia, where it is the mountainous jungle that everyone back home seems to imagine that I am living in now. And I suppose at some point I’ll have to get up to Siem Riep and see Angkor Wat. I doubt my students would forgive me if I never saw it.

Things That Annoy Me

2009-01-22T22:43:00.000-08:00

1-23-09

Things have been a bit frustrating as of late. Not for any one particular reason, but it’s normal to feel like this every now and then. And so, as a cathartic exercise, I’ve decided to make a list of everything that annoys me about living and working in Cambodia. Please bear in mind, on the whole I’m happy here, and have absolutely no regrets about joining Peace Corps or coming to this country. But sometimes you just need to vent.

Things that annoy me:
-Children screaming “Hello! What your name! Money!” at the top of their lungs every single time I ride past. One particular group has been doing it every day since I got here.

-Students asking the following questions every time they see me. I try and make myself available during the school day for students to come and practice their English and ask questions. I don’t know why I bother with this, since it is the same four or five students day in and day out and they always ask the exact same questions. I will list the questions I get asked almost every day, with the same grammatical mistakes that the students make no matter how many times I correct them:
“Have you eat rice yet?”
“How much did you [bicycle, watch, glasses, book I’m reading, anything they see me using] cost?”
“What time do you eat breakfast every day?”
“What time do you eat lunch every day?”
“What time do you eat dinner every day?”
“What time do you wake up?”
“What time do you go to bed?”
[These five questions are almost always asked one right after another.]
“Can you eat rice?” [The real meaning of this one is “I don’t think you can eat the food here.]
“When you come to my country, how do you feel?” [I still haven’t been able to come up with an appropriate answer to this one.]
“When you teach all the students at Hun Sen Kampong Chak High School, how you feel?” [They love rattling off the full name of the school.]
“In your country, do you have [pigs, cows, chickens, electricity]
“Which student at Hun Sen Kampong Chak High School will you marry?”

-Related to the asking of questions, what really annoys me is when I answer them and they say “yes” and immediately launch into the next question. I know they didn’t understand the answer, but they don’t care.

-People who visit my host family and stare into my room like it’s the doorway to another world.

-If I’m lying in bed with the door open, visitors staring into my room like I’m an animal in a zoo.

-People asking my host family “can he eat Khmer food?” when I’m sitting right there and eating Khmer food.

-People asking me how Cambodians can become rich like all Americans, and then acting like I’m lying when I tell them I don’t know.

-When my co-teacher skips class to play volleyball with the other teachers.

-Students who believe I can teach them to speak perfect English through osmosis, or with my magical foreigner powers.

-Always getting charged more in the marked because since I’m an American I must be rich.

-Being expected to skip class and get drunk at 10:00 in the morning with the other teachers when they find an excuse to have a party. Which is once or twice a week.

-People spitting in public. This happens at home too, but it’s still a pet peeve of mine.

-People grunting at me to get my attention.

-The lack of personal space and privacy.

Now, lest you think things are all negative here, I’m going to list the things that are awesome. I feel that the things on this list, while fewer, far outweigh the previous list.

Things that are great:
-My host family.
-My community.
-The experience that I am getting.
-The interesting people I will meet.
-The interesting places I’ll see.
-The fact that as a recent graduate and with the economy the way it is I have a guaranteed job until 2010.
-The fact that I’m in an exotic country while some people I went to High School with are still living back in my hometown.

What I've Been Up To

2008-12-23T23:37:00.000-08:00

12-19-08

I haven't written anything for a while. Quite frankly I haven't really felt like it. That sort of thing happens to me, I've found. I'll faithfully record my observations for a month or so, then lose the urge to put things into words. Then, when some time has passed, I'll force myself to write down what's been happening and suddenly I will want to write more.

Quite frankly, I haven't been up to much. Except for a few activities, I have spent my time in Romduel or down in Svay Rieng. Peace Corps policy is that we don't leave our sites for the first three months of service, barring medical leave or official Peace Corps activity or travel. Yet I have managed to get into Phnom Penh three times during this “lockdown,” so in practice very few people go the full three months without anything coming up.

Back in November I went into Phnom Penh to take the Foreign Service Exam, which was cool because it was given at the Embassy. Technically, on that day, I went back to the United States. And then I went into Phnom Penh to get my hand looked at. In case anyone was wondering, as it turns out it is not a fungus after all, but an allergic reaction to something. It doesn't itch or hurt or anything, it just looks really gross. It's all yellow and bubbly and looks like I've got gangrene or something. The Medical Officer gave me a steroid cream that was pretty effective at making it go away. However, over that last few days it has come back. Quite annoying. I hope I don't have to deal with this thing for the next two years.

The other time I got to leave site was for our “In-Service Language Training,” which was basically a one-day reenactment of our pre-service training. The one I was in was held at in Takeo province, to the south-west of Phnom Penh. The training thing itself was frustrating, but the pizza I ate on my way back through Phnom Penh more than made up for it.

Other than that, I've just been going to school six days a week and teaching for a few hours. The rest of my day is taken up with reading or exercising. However, my house finally got electricity earlier this week. I can now keep my laptop and my Nintendo DS charged, so things are looking up, entertainment-wise. Cheap, 24-hour electricity, straight from Svay Rieng, which gets it straight from Vietnam.

The only other reportable activity was the “Girl's Day” put on by the K1's here in Svay Rieng. This event was already in the works when us K2's got out here, but the K1's were nice enough to let us join in. Basically, each of us brought in three female students to Svay Rieng on this day, and the students were able to meet with female Khmer professionals from around the town. For example, there were women attending Svay Rieng University to talk about admissions, a nurse from the hospital, a woman from the bank, and our very own Peace Corps safety and security officer, to name just a few. I thought it was a really big success; I should also stress that I had no part in helping to plan or organize it. I just brought some students from my school and helped with little things.

Lockdown ends the first week of January. Personally, I'm planning on waiting a few weeks until I go into Phnom Penh, but go I will. The lure of western food and the chance to get away from everything for a few days is a powerful lure. I just with Phnom Penh wasn't so expensive. But I guess that's the life of a volunteer abroad.

What I Have to Work With

2008-11-22T21:39:00.000-08:00

11-19-08

Probably the most obvious challenge to teaching in Cambodia is the schools themselves. From what I understand about the rest of the world, Cambodian schools are fairly similar to schools in most other developing nations. There is a large courtyard (which turns into a swamp during the rainy season) around which six long, rectangular buildings are arranged in a semi-circle. The buildings themselves are divided into the school rooms, and nothing else. Each building has either five or six classrooms. Like all the other schools that I have seen in Cambodia, the buildings are all painted yellow. The walls and floors are bare concrete, with the exception of one building, which is made of wood and has a dirt floor.

Each classroom is crammed with bench-desks, with very little room to move in between them. Sometimes students are crammed three to a desk. The class sizes are large, but not completely unmanageable; maybe thirty to forty kids per class. There is a high drop-out rate between the Lower Secondary School (grades 7, 8, and 9), and the Upper Secondary School (grades 10, 11, and 12). This is mostly due to parents pulling their kids out of school to work on the farm full time. They don't think that their children need to continue their expensive education when they are simply going to be working on the farm for the rest of their lives.

Pretty much the only materials I have to work with in each classroom is a white board, which ranges in quality from poor to unusable. There are English textbooks, which were put together with the help of the British a few years ago. They are not necessarily the best English textbooks on Earth, but for someone like myself who has never taught English before they are a good starting point. Fortunately my co-teacher is perfectly fine with deviating from the book and doing our own thing with the material.

Not all teachers are of this opinion. Even at my school there are English teachers who simply drone monotonously from the book, and the students usually learn nothing from these lessons. These teachers are usually not trained English teachers, but teach other subjects and have been made to teach English because that was the only job open. Some of them can't even speak English. Other teachers are simply going through the motions while they work on getting a different job or into Svay Rieng University. These are the teachers and classes that would benefit the most from a Peace Corps volunteer helping them to co-teach, but they are also the most resistant to new teaching techniques or to the perception that a foreigner is going to “steal” their job. And of course there are other worries too.

One of these teachers is a women, and when I observed her class it was very clear that she was highly uncomfortable with my presence. Even walking to and from class with me was extremely embarrassing for her. This is, of course, tied into gender relations in Cambodia, which is a subject for another entry, but it is clear that I won't be working with this teacher. She has plans to move away at the end of the year, so I don't feel too bad about not being able to teach with her. Still, it is too bad.

The students themselves are a story unto themselves. They are the ones who's families' care enough about education, or have enough money to send them on to Upper Secondary School. So they are for the most part fairly well behaved and eager to learn. All students are required to wear uniforms; dark pants and a white or light-colored shirt. Given how poor some of the families are, the uniformity is somewhat lessoned since students wear whatever their families can get them. You can easily tell which students come from the better off families because those students have two or three different shirts that they wear to school.

I have been pretty lucky in my school; the school director is willing to support me when I make my own schedule, and my co-teacher speaks very good English and is eager to learn and improve. He really cares about teaching, which can not necessarily be said about all the teachers. Getting to know this school has, of course, made me much more appreciative of the schools back in the United States. Even the poorest public schools back home have more resources than this one. Not to say that poor schools back home don't have other problems that aren't present here. But Chosen Valley High School doesn't so bad anymore.

Oh man, this place really must be changing me.

I Can't Teach you English, Stop Asking

2008-11-22T21:36:00.000-08:00

11-11-08

Many people have been asking me to describe what it's like to teach English in Cambodia. This is a subject that would take me many hours to fully detail. But, I'll try and touch on the basics of what sort of things I go through on a daily basis.

First of all, everyone here wants to learn English. And they want you to teach it to them. Never mind time constraints. Never mind that you might not actually know how to teach English one-on-one to someone. You will teach them English. At least, that is the common attitude. I've had so many people come up to me and say “oh, you are a foreigner, you speak English, please teach me.” And I tell them, “well, I can't, because I'm not an English teacher. I'm here to help your teachers teach English better.” This is usually followed by a look of intense confusion. “When will you give private lessons?” “Never,” I reply. “But...I want you to teach me English,” they retort. The first dozen times or so that this happened, I pretended to be angry so they would leave me alone. The next few dozen times I didn't have to pretend.

The reason people keep asking me to teach them English privately is that private lessons are always given by teachers. And they are not so much private lessons, but real lessons that just happen to be given outside of class. Students are required to pay money to come to these classes, and if they don't come they fail the class. Now before you judge, keep in mind that there is always a reason for these things. Teachers here literally do not make enough money from school to live. They give private lessons to supplement their limited income. Out here many of them farm too, because they still can't make enough money.

Another reason is what I like to call “The Myth of Barang Osmosis.” In case I haven't mentioned it before, “barang” is the Khmer word for foreigner. Literally, it means “French,” but since the only foreigners that most Khmer saw for about a hundred years were the French colonial authorities, that's what they call all foreigners. But the myth that people seem to believe is that I hold some sort of magical secret that will allow them to learn to speak fluent English in a month. Or that just by seeing my hair and listning to my voice, they will somehow be able to understand what I am saying and then speak it themselves.

For the first month, I actually tried giving a private English class. My co-teacher said that many students wanted to study with me, so I should give one. I think he was just trying to be helpful, or he still didn't fully understand what I am here to do. Either way, those language classes were a circus. The room was packed with probably sixty or seventy students, most of whom couldn't speak a word of English because they had never paid attention in class before and/or their teachers couldn't teach for crap. I gave it a try, but teaching to that kind of group would have been impossible. Towards the last few classes, junior high kids were coming in, probably told by their older siblings “the foreigner is going to teach us English!”

I put a stop to those, and have tried to explain to all my classes that I can't magically teach them English, and that in fact I am not in Cambodia to teach them English. My job here is not to teach English, but to help the teachers teach English better. I still don't think they really get it. And I don't like turning them down. I'm worried that I'm going to get a reputation around town for being mean, for selfishly hoarding the secret to speaking fluent English in a month. And it's hard, especially when you come across students who generally want to learn, and just can't grasp why I can't teach them.

During the first few weeks, when my co-teacher was having students introduce themselves to me as a way of gaging their English ability, some of them would say things like, “I want to learn English so that I can get a job with a foreign company, and then my family will have enough to eat.” How am I supposed to respond to that? I can't teach them! I am not a trained English teacher, I'm not even an English major. I'm just a recent college graduate with two months of training in co-teaching. Yes, I'm a native speaker, but what good does that do?I tried to explain it to the students by asking them what they would do if thirty people came up and asked them to teach Khmer. Because of their lack of critical thinking skills, they didn't see the connection. So I have simply stuck with repeatedly informing them that my job is to help the teachers teach English better, not teach it myself.

And yet, I just know that many of them are wondering, “why won't the foreigner just teach me English?”

Crash Update

2008-11-22T21:34:00.000-08:00

11-11-08

A quick update on what I know about the recent helicopter crash in my district.

The crash site itself was extremely close, maybe about two kilometers away from my house. I've been out there already, and the wreck is pretty badly mangled. The tail of the helicopter is intact, but the rest is just a big mass of twisted metal.

The police have a pretty large presence around the crash site, but for the most part I haven't seen too many of them about town. This is certainly the most exciting thing to have happened in this part of Cambodia in...ever.

The man who was killed, Hok Landi, was the chief of the National Police. He's been a big name in Cambodian politics for nearly thirty years, and was a powerful ally of the Prime Minister. You will have to do your own research on him, since I can't discuss politics on a public blog. But I can tell you what the reaction from people I know has been.

Hok Landi, for whatever his other activities, was Svay Rieng's native son, and had funneled a lot of generosity back into the province. Particularly to the local religious institutions. Half of the buildings in the wat I teach at, including the Buddhist High School itself, were built with money he donated. When I went to see my co-teacher yesterday, I found him in tears. He had lived at the wat when he went to university, as so many other poor Cambodians have been able to do. He remembered Mr. Hok Landi coming to the wat many times and giving out gifts. He was devastated by his death.

Which I guess just goes to show that nobody is black and white. People just are...until they aren't.

We're on the map now.

2008-11-09T22:03:00.000-08:00

As you may or may not have heard, the chief of Cambodia's National Police was killed in a helicopter crash. What you probably did not hear was that the crash happened not only in Svay Rieng province, but in Romduel district, just a few kilometers north of my house.

I was in Svay Rieng town overnight, staying at a wat for the Katan Festival, and I haven't been back at site yet. So I don't know what's been going on up there today. But this is Big News around here; the chief was a rather infamous figure in Cambodian politics.

There was a big storm last night, and that's more than likely what caused the crash. But the news is reporting that some eye witnesses saw the chopper's tail on fire before it hit the ground, so the government is going to be doing some serious investigating. I'll try and get an update up as soon as possible.

The Minefields of History

2008-10-25T22:34:00.000-07:00

10-26-08

The history of a place and a culture has a profound impact on every facet of life, both in major attitudes and in tiny, everyday events. Six months ago I had no idea that the history of Cambodia, be it the years of French colonialism, the war in Vietnam, and the Khmer Rouge, would be something that would have an impact on my daily life. But here I am, attempting to help rebuild in my own small way an educational system that was completely dismantled thirty years ago. The various things that I have observed are a direct result of that history. Without understanding it, there is no way I would be able to function in this society.

As you may know, Cambodia was a colony of France, along with Vietnam and Laos making up what was then known as French Indochina. However, Cambodia had the rather unique experience of actually asking to become a colony, rather than having colonial status forced upon it. For the previous several centuries, the remnants of the ancient Khmer empire had been reduced to a vassal state, passed between Vietnam and Thailand in their various wars. Seeing an opportunity to break this cycle, the King appealed to the French, and Cambodia became a French “protectorate.”

Like every state touched by colonialism, it had a profound impact on the culture. Just the other day I had an elderly woman come up to me in the market and start speaking French to me. I replied in my simple Khmer that I was in fact not French, but American. She looked disappointed. To advance during those years you had to speak French. This would of course become a major liability twenty years or so after independence, when the Khmer Rouge killed anyone who displayed knowledge of a foreign language. The ones who still speak it either concealed it during those years or fled to the refugee camps. Maybe someday when my Khmer is better I'll track down that old women and hear her story.

The last vestiges of French colonialism can be seen in the strangest places; old French-style houses along the side of the road, some words of the language, and official signs and documents that are still in French. And to those who say that nineteenth century imperialism was all bad, it's because of the French colonial empire that today I can buy delicious, freshly-baked baguettes in the market each morning. Thank you, French imperialism.

Understanding the history of a place can also help you reconcile attitudes and actions that you might find disturbing or “wrong.” Here in Cambodia, when travelers need to “relieve” themselves, they usually do it right along the side of the road, in broad view of everyone. At first I found this to be pretty gross. However, this area of Cambodia was on the receiving end of some of the heaviest indiscriminate carpet-bombing since World War II. US B-52's, believing that Svay Rieng province was the headquarters of the Vietcong, dropped thousands of pounds of bombs with little regard for where exactly they landed or what happened after they did. Also, the Khmer Rouge laid thousands upon thousands of land mines during their long, grueling retreat across Cambodia is the face of the Vietnamese invasion. And they didn't necessarily leave good documentation about where those mines were laid, either.

The unexploded ordinance and land mines have been mostly cleared from this area of the country, but my point is this; up until recently, going off into the woods to relieve yourself was a good way to get your leg blown off. And so, today Richard Nixon is the reason I have to pee in full view of whoever is coming along on the road. And why when I explore around the community, I find several small, circular lakes in the middle of rice fields that I doubt formed naturally.

These are just a few of the everyday things that I have come across. What happened here during the Khmer Rouge regime and the years of war and horror that followed are so deeply ingrained in this culture that it's impossible to separate the two. But if you didn't understand it, there would be no way that you could do any good in this country.

War?

2008-10-18T20:19:00.000-07:00

10-17-08

If you have been able to follow the news out of South-east Asia over the last few months, you will probably have heard that Cambodia and Thailand are in the midst of a border dispute at the moment. Over the last few days this dispute has grown to include shooting, and Thailand has urged all its citizens to leave Cambodia. While I'm not an expert on the dispute, and have been rather cut off from the world at large, I will do my best to explain.

The dispute is over an ancient temple complex on the border, named Preh Veher. The temple dates back to the Angkorian period of Cambodian history, the same period that saw the construction of the great temples at Angkor Wat. When the French, bless their hearts, drew out the border between Cambodia and Thailand, they arbitrarily set the border along a cliff face near the temple, but never actually determined which country the temple complex should belong to.

Cambodia took the case to the International Court of Justice, arguing that since it was the ancient Khmer empire that built the temple, it should be awarded to Cambodia. The ICJ agreed and decreed that the temple should belong to Cambodian. However, it said nothing about the land around the temple, leaving the sort of legal ambiguity that people wind up dying over. As some have, in this case.

There have always been some sensitivity about these issues between Cambodia and Thailand. And nationalism, a relatively new force in this part of the world, tends to be taken to extremes when the past is invoked. For example, a few years ago Cambodian media mistakenly reported that a Thai pop star made a statement to the effect that Angkor Wat was Thai. A Cambodian mob responded by burning down the Thai embassy in Phnom Penh. So emotions run a bit high at times.

Back in July, for whatever reason, Thailand decided to send troops into the disputed zone. They seized the temple complex and established a base there. The Cambodian military surrounded the temple and the standoff was on. Over the last few months, there have been instances where shooting almost began for one reason or another. The situation had seemed to calm down a bit when ASEAN stepped in to try and bring both sides to the negotiation table. However, over the last few weeks there were a few more incidents, culminating in the fire-fight on the night of the 15th.

Nobody knows what really happened that evening, nor what side started shooting. My guess is that some idiot on one side or the other didn't have his weapon properly safetied and tripped over a rock. That's usually how these things get kicked off in a situation like this. After about an hour of exchanging gun- and rocket fire, five Thai soldiers were wounded and two Cambodian soldiers were dead.

The Cambodians are pissed off about this. Even down here, about as far away from the Thai border as you can get, the police are suddenly more visible, and people are all wondering if war is coming. Some of the rhetoric out of Phnom Penh is a bit concerning too, with the Prime Minister stating that every single Cambodian citizen would fight Thailand if it came to war. The Thai, for their part, say that they will not back down or leave “their” territory. Of course, the Thai Prime Minister is currently facing massive popular demonstrations against his government and the possibility of being forced from office. So who knows how that will affect this?

I don't believe that either side actually wants a war, but I also believe that neither side wants to be the first one to back down. Fortunately, it seems that cooler heads have prevailed now that the shooting has stopped. The two on-site military commanders have agreed to conduct joint patrols of the area, in an attempt to keep anything like this from happening again. With luck, ASEAN or the UN will be able to get negotiations on resolving this thing going.

If it does come down to a shooting war, we will all probably have to leave. I really don't want that. Ironically enough, every single evacuation plan that the Peace Corps has, be it for political unrest or natural disasters, call for us to consolidate in Phnom Penh and then evacuate the country over land to Thailand. If Thailand and Cambodia are shooting at each other, that would probably not be the best way to go. So if we do have to evacuate, I'll probably just stay here and hop on the bus when they pass by on their way to Vietnam.

I highly doubt it will come to that, though. And I'm certainly not worried about my safety, being on the other side of the country from this whole thing. But it certainly has made these last few days a very interesting time to be in this region of the world.

The First Week

2008-10-18T20:16:00.000-07:00

10-16-08

Well, I have been in Svay Rieng for about a week and a half now. It's been quite a transition from training to actually being a volunteer. I suppose I should go over exactly what has transpired over the last several days.

We left our training villages and all congregated at the hub site for two last days of Peace Corps stuff. We had a day of lectures followed by a day of meetings with the school directors from our new places of work. This was somewhat awkward as practically none of them spoke English, and my Khmer is only good enough right now for basic communication. At this conference we worked out a few issues, such as what exactly we were going to be responsible for at our new schools, and what we were not allowed to do. Also we worked out exactly how we were going to get to our sites and when we were expected to be there.

The next day was our swearing in ceremony, held at a rather swanky hotel downtown. The acting US ambassador was on hand to do the actual swearing in, and the new Minister of Education was also there. The Minister is an interesting guy; he's only been Minister for a few weeks now, but he has been involved in building the educational system in this country up from nothing ever since the war ended. He speaks English and French and who knows how many other languages. After some speeches, we took the oath of service, and were officially Peace Corps Volunteers.

From there on out we were on our own. I didn't have to be in Romduel for two days so me and some of the others who have sites in the south of the country hopped in a taxi and headed to Phnom Penh. I took this opportunity to stock up on stuff that I knew I probably wouldn't see for the next three months; Oreos, peanut butter, Ovaltine, stuff like that. And then on Monday I hopped on a taxi again and made my way out to Romduel.

There are so many things that I need to describe for people back home that I don't even know where to start. One of the greatest things about my arrival was finding out that one of the five dogs my family has gave birth to puppies after I left. They were three weeks old when I arrived, and their eyes hadn't even opened yet. There are three of them, and I had named them Porthos, Athos, and Aramis.

The first week was primarily meetings held at the school between me and the various teachers. I also went to the various classes that my co-teacher teaches, which means that I will be primarily assisting in these classes, at least at first. Peace Corps wants us to branch out and work with as many teachers at the school as we can, so I still don't know exactly what my schedule of teaching will look like. As it is, though, I am already giving an English lecture to various teachers that want to learn from 11:00 until noon, then co-teaching or observing other teachers until 5:00 (school goes from noon until five here, with the lower grades meeting in the morning), then teaching another basic English lesson from five until six. It looks like this will be my schedule six days a week, though I will probably tell my co-teacher I don't want to teach the private lessons on Saturday.

On Sundays I will be biking to Svay Rieng town, about 15 kilometers away, to help my co-teacher teach an English class to monks at the main wat in Svay Rieng. This is something I sort of fell into; my co-teacher and I were in Svay Rieng to buy me some stuff for my room and we paid a visit to this wat. As it turns out, my co-teacher had worked with many of these monks in the past to help them with English. When they asked me to help them out, how could I refuse? Besides, it will be a great opportunity to learn more about Buddhism and the life of monks. Also being in Svay Rieng every week will give me an opportunity to go to the internet cafe and check my e-mail.

Over the next several weeks I will try and write more about what life is like here in rural Svay Rieng, what it is like to teach at a Cambodian school, and other observations about my life here. If you have any questions you specifically want me to address, you know my e-mail. Send them in and I will try and answer them all. For now, I have a coconut waiting for me to eat it.

The End...of Training

2008-10-02T03:10:00.001-07:00

9-30-08

Somehow, two months have gone by, and so Pre-Service Training is over. Tomorrow we leave Tek Phos and the other two training villages permanently and go to the hub site for a few days of seminars, and then we swear in. And then the next day we go directly to our sites. It's been quite an eventful two months to say the least.

It's been a really long two months, too. In some ways I can't believe that training is over already, but then when I think back to events like the Kampuchea Adventure (X-TREME!!!) or even the site visit, they seem like quite a long time ago. I can barely remember the first few weeks we were here; it's ancient history.

I am ready for training to be over, and I am ready to leave Tek Phos. This place has been really great for training, and my host family in particular have made things so much easier. I'm really looking forward to coming back in a year and talking to them when my Khmer is good enough to carry on more than just a few sentences of conversation. I'm thinking in six months to a year I'll come back here.

I especially want to come back and finally be able to ask all the questions that are a bit too embarrassing to ask now, such as finally figuring out what it is my host dad does for a job. Or finally nailing down just how many host siblings I actually have. For the first week or so I thought I had four, but two of them have never been seen again or even mentioned to me. So these are some of the questions I would like cleared up. And I would like to adequately express my thanks to my host family. And learn their names.

I also need to go around and actually get pictures of everything. I don't think I've taken a single picture since I got back from Tonle' Bati. Actually gettiing pictures online is pretty tricky, and I probably won't be able to get any pictures I take today up for another few months, so I usually don't carry my camera with me. But today I am going to make myself go around and take pictures of Tek Phos. So at least I'll have something to remind me about this place that has been my home for the last two months and will always have a fond place in my memory.

Pchum Ben

2008-10-02T03:07:00.000-07:00

9-30-08

I haven't been able to write very much over the last few weeks, for various reasons. Training stuff has kept me busy, of course, but there have also been family obligations that go along with this season. The last half of September is Pchum Ben, a traditional Khmer holiday season that was rolled up by the Buddhist cultural juggernaut when it rolled through this part of the world two thousand years ago.

Pchum Ben is like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and Halloween rolled up into one great 15-day stretch. The reason for the celebration is that at this time of year the spirits of our ancestors are released from “Hell” (a state of suffering brought on by doing bad deeds in life and not accruing enough merit) to return to the wat in their hometown. It is the responsibility of all Khmer to go to the wat at least once at 4am to provide food to these spirits. The traditional food that is provided is tiny balls of sticky rice, prepared the day before. Why tiny balls? Because the spirits have small mouths.

That is the “Halloween” aspect of Pchum Ben, and one I unfortunately never got to participate in. I told my family I would like to go to the wat at four in the morning and help, but my host brother overslept and didn't take me. But I did get to participate in the “Christmas” and “Thanksgiving” aspect later in the day. In ancient times, Pchum Ben actually lasted three months. The practical reason for this was to keep all the monks inside the temples. Poor farmers were allowed to plant a small rice crop in the wat, and the monks all had to stay inside to prevent them from trampling the rice plants. Consequently, the townspeople had to bring them food during this time.

Today Pchum Ben only lasts fifteen days, but it is still the responsibility of the citizens of the local town to provide a large meal for the monks every day. The villagers are divided into groups; here in Tuk Phos, each group provided food to the wat at least three times. There are at least two ceremonies during the day that I know of in which food is provided. I went to two of them in one day. They are...quite something. For one thing, they are not actually in the wat itself, but out in sort of an open shed with a smaller shrine inside. There is a long, slightly raised area where the monks sit, and then a large open area facing it where everyone else sits. The food is piled up in front of the monks, who always get to eat first.

The unfortunate part about Pchum Ben is that all this activity at the wat means that the loudspeakers are going almost non-stop during the day. I don't know what Buddhism was like before the invention of microphones and loudspeakers, but these modern conveniences have certainly been embraced by the pagodas. There is almost always prayers and recorded music blaring out of the loudspeakers, starting at 4:00 in the morning and continuing all day long. Fortunately I don't live close enough to the wat for this to seriously affect me, but those that do are pretty cranky about it.

But anyway, the service itself. It starts with making an offering of money to one of the old men who are in charge of these sort of things. They then read a short blessing over you, and you go and sit down on one of the straw mats covering the concrete floor. The problem is that it is forbidden to sit with your legs open, or to point your feet towards the front, so you have to sit with your legs folded underneath you and to the side. This is incredibly uncomfortable, and you will be sitting like this for quite some time. Then the monks come in. The old men and the monks alternate between leading chants that can last almost twenty minutes each. After all this the monks dig in to their food. I read that the monks look forward to Pchum Ben every year for precisely this reason; they get some pretty good food out of the deal. After the monks have finished, they leave, and everyone else eats the leftover food. And that's a Pchum Ben service.

In the final, most important days of Pchum Ben, there is a lot of travel in Cambodia, because tradition dictates that you go back to your hometown and pay homage to your ancestors at your family's traditional wat. Your ancestors aren't going to come find you, and if you don't give them food they are going to be pretty pissed. And pissed-off ancestral spirits can wreak a lot of havoc with your life, or so I am told.

Pchum Ben ends today, and coincidentally so does our training. So the last few days have been spent mostly with our families, participating in various aspects of Pchum Ben. I think this was pretty good timing on the Peace Corps' part, but it's still going to be hard to say goodbye tomorrow.

Permanent Site Visit

2008-09-11T22:51:00.001-07:00

9-12-08

I just got back to Phnom Penh after visiting my future site out in Svay Rieng. Over the next few months I'll probably write a lot about my house, my family, and what life is like in one of the poorest provinces in Cambodia. But for now, I'll just record my initial observations.

I really like my site. I have no complaints and I think I will really be happy and busy there for the next two years. My host family is an older family; the father is probably in his 60's, with the oldest brother being 30 years old. My host father, Mr. Sam Sarin, is the deputy district governor of Rom Duel district, which gives me ready access to more resources than I might otherwise have. Sadly, his wife died a year ago, so I have no host mother. He has three children. The oldest is 30, like I said, and is a teacher at the primary school. The daughter is 27 years old and works around the house, cooking and cleaning and generally being the new mother of the family. The youngest son is 26 and is also a teacher. He teaches chemistry at the lower secondary school.

So basically I live with a family of educators, and it shows. The family's land has an actual classroom on it, right outside the house. Not only do the members of the family teach private lessons out there, but many other teachers from the school come out to use this facility for their private lessons. Amazingly, my host brothers do not charge for their private lessons. In addition, my co-teacher told me that the family provides food to students that don't get enough food at home. This family is really committed to education, and I imagine I will really come to appreciate this fact over the next few days.

The town of Rom Duel itself is about 15 kilometers north of Svay Rieng town, easily within biking distance. I get a good feel from the town; it's mostly stretched out along the road leading north out of Svay Rieng. It's pretty small, population-wise. Most families are farmers, or at least farm to subsist their other occupation. I'm fairly certain that there are more water buffaloes than people. But the people are friendly; they all wanted to know why I was there and when I would be coming back to stay. The other teachers I met were also eager to work with me; many of them were also eager to give me Khmer language lessons in exchange for English lessons.

The family has five dogs, which is fairly excessive even by Khmer standards. The dogs are all really well-fed and spoiled by the family. They also have really ridiculous names; two of them are named Arigatou and Hashinomoto. One is named Chai-Li, and I don't remember the other dog's name, but the fourth has the best name of them all. My host brother named the dog Nicholas Sarkozy. The family eats outside, underneath the house, like most Khmer families. The dogs will all gather around and stare at you while you eat. You will look over and there will be five pairs of eyes all staring at you...it's actually a bit disturbing. And the dogs bark a lot at night, so I'm not sure how much of a problem that will be.

My bedroom is my only real complaint about the site; it's a tiny concrete-floored cell underneath the house. Chances are I will sleep in there and that's it. I will need to find somewhere else to be “my space.” Which is fine, I guess. But my bedroom situation is completely outweighed by the bathroom I have. My bathroom not only has a western-style sit down toilet, with a sprayer, but also a shower with water pressure and everything. It is an incredible luxury that I was not expecting. People are jealous.

The provincial town of Svay Rieng doesn't have a lot going for it. There is almost nothing of interest to see and do there besides visit the market and try and find things that you couldn't find back at the market at site. Other than that Svay Rieng doesn't really have anything going for it besides a few NGO's and a nice missionary family from New Zealand that we were introduced to. Oh, and a shop that sells cookies. But other than that there is almost nothing to do down in the provincial town.

And that's about it for my initial observations. I'm really looking forward to moving out there in a month. But for now, we've got two days in Phnom Penh. Time to go eat burgers.

The Little Things

2008-09-11T22:50:00.000-07:00

9-2-08

As usual, it's the little things about life in a foreign country that jump out at you the most. Here is a collection of some of the little idiosyncrasies that make life in Cambodia what it is:

Cambodians love karaoke. It has well and truly swept the nation. Every open-air restaurant seems to have a machine, and most houses and families have at least one DVD of songs. Usually when darkness falls (around 6:30 every night; this close to the equator there is very little change in this) the sounds of music and (sometimes very poor) singing will echo across my neighborhood. But if you are planning a karaoke trip, be warned: “karaoke bar” is almost always synonymous with “brothel.”

Tek Phos is a district town, the equivalent of a county seat back in the states. However, it is located well away from any of the main roads, so it is pretty small. This is about as rural as you can get and still be in something that could be considered a “town.” There is, however, a rail line that runs from Phnom Penh to Battambang that passes through town. The area around the tracks sometimes seems a bit sketchy. Also there is a big pile of trash and massive potholes; I call that area the Narrows. I have to pass through the Narrows to get into town, unless I want to take the really long way around. Most times I opt for the long way.

As I may have mentioned before, you can't go anywhere in Tek Phos without children screaming “Hello!” at you. Everyone knows this word, and they use it as much as possible. Therefore, it is pretty easy to know when one of the other trainee's is in the area; you just listen for the screaming kids.

Not that we are that difficult to spot. The Peace Corps gave us all mountain bikes of the kind that no Cambodian has. They also gave us helmets and told us in no uncertain terms that we could wear them or go home. Add into that the fact that we usually are going somewhere that requires us to be dressed in slacks and a button-down dress shirt, and the Peace Corps has ensured that we look as much like dorks as possible when we have to go somewhere.

At some time in the distant past, the Peace Corps would issue volunteers motor bikes; those days are long past, and for good reason. If we tried to ride a motor bike, or moto as they are called here, we would probably die. There are no traffic laws outside of Phnom Penh, and the ones in Phnom Penh are more suggestions than actual laws. The rule is; the biggest vehicle has the right of way. Also, everyone uses their horns as much as possible. Moto accidents kill lots of people every day; we are expressly forbidden to even touch one.

On a more somber note, it has become more and more apparent to us just how much the past has touched everything in this country. Like most Cambodian men, my host father usually walks around at home without a shirt. It was pretty obvious to me after seeing him without a shirt that at some point he has been wounded; I'm no expert, but I was pretty sure that the wound on his shoulder was a bullet wound. He confirmed this last night when, unbidden, he started talking about his wounds. He told me more earlier tonight. From what I have gathered, he was definitely shot by “the Vietnamese,” and that it happened about twenty years ago. I don't know what capacity he was operating in when he got shot, and I don't plan to ask. Other trainees have similar stories; one was shown pictures of his host father's past in the military, official or otherwise. And another trainee has a host father who is missing a leg. What happened in this country affected everyone, and continues to do so today.

Having said that, Cambodia is an up and coming country. Everyone is optimistic about the future. NGO's are doing more and more work here, and tourism is on the rise. Phnom Penh is a boom town, and I have heard that many of the other large cities are as well. The younger generation in particular are optimistic about their future; most dream of going to the larger cities for school, and many parents encourage this thinking. I have no doubts that Cambodia's future is bright. I just hope I'll be able to help it along a little.

Kampuchea Adventure...X-TREME!!!

2008-09-11T22:49:00.000-07:00

8-31-08

A few weeks ago, when we got our new schedule for the next two weeks, we were confused. There was something listed on the last weekend of August; it was called “Kampuchea Adventure.” We had to wait until our next hub site visit to find out just what this was supposed to be.

“Kampuchea (Cambodia) Adventure,” or, as I dubbed it, “Kampuchea Adventure X-TREME!!!” was the Peace Corps' way of pushing us yet further outside our comfort limit. We were told to find a partner, and then each pair was given a location in Cambodia. Our mission: to go to that location over the weekend of the 30th and the 31st. We spent the next few weeks learning “travel dialog” in our language classes and preparing to embark.

My partner, Franz, and I had drawn the ruins at Tonle' Bati, in Takeo province. This seemed like it would be pretty interesting in of itself, but there was one fact that made this a very good selection in our eyes, and that is what was between Tuk Phos and Tonle' Bati; Phnom Penh.

Before this, most trainees had only spent one day in Phnom Penh, when we first arrived in Cambodia. I, however, had had the “privilege” of spending a little extra time there earlier in the week. For a week I had no appetite and diarrhea; coupled with a 101 degree fever from a reaction to an immunization I received, it was not a fun week. Finally the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) pulled me out of my site and took me to Phnom Penh to see what was going on. And so I got to stay in the capital, at a guest house with AIR CONDITIONING, something I hadn't experienced in nearly a month. I got to eat burgers at some of the nearby western-style restaurants, and hang out in the Volunteer lounge at Peace Corps headquarters. It was pretty sweet, even with the stomach problems, which were probably caused by amoebas I picked up from somewhere. Everything was pretty much cleared out by the time I got to Phnom Penh and could provide a sample, so we will never know for sure what it was. I'm fine with that.

The point of the story is that I had a pretty good idea where all the good spots to eat and hang out were in Phnom Penh before we all got there. Our schedule was free the day before our “adventure,” so a lot of us just left a day early and headed for PP. We arranged for a driver and a van to take us all the way to PP, which is about a two-hour trip.

Phnom Penh is an amazing city, even more so after a month out in the countryside. For one thing, there are other foreigners there. I was shocked! Who are all these barangs, and what are they doing here? Why aren't people staring at them, like they do to us in Tuk Phos? And where are all the kids screaming “Hello! What's your name! Where you go!” People ignored us in Phnom Penh...it was mind-boggling.

But of course the best thing about Phnom Penh is the restaurants. There is a fairly good sized expat community in Phnom Penh, in addition to the various NGO's and embassies (speaking of embassies, the Russian one had a huge display outside their gate documenting the “human rights abuses in South Ossetia”). So, for the first time in a month, we got to eat burgers, sandwiches, chocolate, and pizza. It was glorious.

We spent a night in Phnom Penh, in an air-conditioned guest house with satellite TV, another extravagant luxury for us. The next day we arranged transportation down to Tonle' Bati. It was about an hour and 45 minutes to the south of Phnom Penh, located next to a lake. What makes Tonle' Bati worth visiting are the ruins of some Angkoran-period temples. These would have been built around the same time as the famous Angkor Wat complex, sometime in the late 12th century. The ruins were pretty neat, but they were lessened by the fact that we spent the entire time fending off kids who wanted us to give them money. It is not peak tourist season here, so we were pretty much the only people at this site, which made all the kids focus their efforts on us. We made the mistake of buying a few things right off the bat in the hopes that they would go away; do not make this mistake!

There was also a beach area where you could rest a floating platform that jutted out into the lake and go swimming, but I don't want to think about what kind of parasites you might pick up in that water. And that was pretty much the extent of the things to do at Tonle' Bati. We returned to Phnom Penh in the evening and spent the night hanging out in what is rapidly becoming one of my favorite cities.

And then we returned to the quite rice fields of Tek Phos, where everyone not only knows everyone, but knows what you and your friends are up to. I showed my host family the pictures I had taken and shared some of the Oreos I had bought in Phnom Penh. It was good to be "home".

My Permanent Site

2008-09-04T03:28:00.000-07:00

Well, I found out where I will be spending the next two years today. I will be placed in Svay Ring province (not 100% sure on the exact spelling, so I'm typing it out phonetically). It's right on the border with Vietnam in the south-east. It's known as the "parrot's beak" because of the way it sort of juts out into Vietnam. It's right on the main road between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Min City, so I'll have ample opportunity to go to both of those places. My actual site is located about 15k north of the city of Svay Ring, so if you can find it on the map just look a little bit north and that's where I will be.

Right now we are at the hub site in Kampong Chhanng. Tomorrow our teaching counterparts will arrive so we will get the chance to meet them and talk about the school we will be working at. On Sunday we will travel out to visit our permanent sites and meet our new host families. We will spend three days at our site and then two days in the provincial town with the other volunteers in our province, as well as the K1 group. From there we will go to Phnom Penh for a few days to take care of various business, including a pool party at the US ambassador's house. I plan to pick her brains for advice on getting into the Foreign Service.

I forgot my camera back in Tuk Phos, so I won't be able to get any pictures of my permanent site for now. But I have a few blogs written up that I should be able to post on Sunday. After October I will probably have even less access to the internet out there, as it is a very poor, very rural province. Should be fun!

Amoeba-tastic

2008-08-25T20:22:00.001-07:00

8-26-08

Well, I finally got sick, and it was sick enough that the Medical Officer decided to bring me down to Phnom Penh for a few days. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just say I have become intimately familiar with the squat toilet over the last week. They think I have amoebas. I’ll be here at least until Wednesday, which is fine because there are some really great restaurants here, and the Peace Corps is happy to give me money to spend. So I’m doing pretty well.

I haven’t been writing very much this last week because of the illness. I’ve also been really terrible about taking pictures; I think I’ve snapped about 20 in the whole time I’ve been here. Which is fine because there’s really no way that I have to get them online at a reasonable speed. Chances are any pictures will have to wait until after I get to my permanent site.

Well, that’s that. I’m going to go take a walk around the Independence Monument and then go watch some CNN at the Peace Corps Headquarters.

Double Post...

2008-08-18T02:52:00.003-07:00

Nothing to see here, keep moving...

Practicum

2008-08-18T02:52:00.001-07:00

8-14-08

For the last week we have been doing practice teaching at the local High School here in Tuk Phos. School technically is on summer vacation, but at the end of the school year, after the Peace Corps had met with local school officials and determined that this would be one of the training villages, the school had asked people to sign up for these practice lessons. In the United States if you asked kids to volunteer to go to more classes during the summer you would have maybe four or five kids whose parents forced them to go. Here, though, there are four separate classes, and they are all full. I had eighteen kids in my class the first day. Four days later I had 32.

My group of students is going into grade 11, which puts them at about age 16 or 17. The Cambodian Ministry of Education mandates that all students wear uniforms, so all the students wear white shirts and dark blue skirts or pants. The schoolroom itself is bare-bones; the rooms are pretty much just bare concrete with wooden desks that are probably as old as I am.

The Tuk Phos trainees were divided into four groups of three. Each person teaches for 45 minutes, and then there is a fifteen minute break, the kids come back in, and the next person teaches. So not only are these kids coming in during summer vacation for classes, but they are coming in for three-hour long classes.

I have never taught before; my “teaching experience” that I needed to accrue before being accepted into the Peace Corps was nothing like this. While we are encouraged to collaborate with our group on lessons, during our teaching time we are basically on our own. As if the pressure of teaching for the first time wasn't enough, there are also Peace Corps advisors sitting in the back of the rooms during the lessons. Sometimes it is our local LCF's, but sometimes it is some of the training staff, or even the training director. The deputy director of the school is also lurking about and watching our lessons; he speaks a good bit of English, but has a very Cambodian outlook on English education.

The only English textbook available in Cambodia was put together with the help of the British I don't know how many years ago. The book is...not the greatest. But it's all we have, and we are pretty much required to teach what it wants. I think I made an ok go of it; I chose a chapter based around a “letter” talking about employment opportunities. The first day I helped them read through it, then I had them pick out the words they did not understand. Then we defined them and worked on pronunciation. The next day we did more pronunciation work and played hangman to really get them to know these words well. This was the day that the school's deputy director sat in on my lesson. His opinion was that games were not the best way to teach the words and that we should teach one chapter a day and then move on. Whatever.

Yesterday, my third day of teaching, I had the group divide into groups and work on some of the questions related to the chapter. I failed to take into account that they all had used, hand-me-down books with all the answers already filled out. So I did some quick thinking and revised the questions so that the answers were different. By this point they were probably getting pretty sick of this particular chapter. Too bad.

Today, the last and final day of our formal teaching, I read through the story and then read it through again deliberately making mistakes. They never caught that I was leaving the “s” off the end of words, so I segued into a lesson on plurals. I think it went well. Tomorrow we have another class, but it is supposed to be an “in-formal” lesson of some kind. I'm going to send the class out on a scavenger hunt. Assuming they all come back it should be fun.

Whether or not they have actually learned anything over the last week is certainly debatable, but in the end I'm still alive.

A Day in the Life of...

2008-08-18T02:51:00.000-07:00

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.

Wat a Ride

2008-08-18T02:50:00.000-07:00

8-10-08

Here at the training village we are kept pretty busy during the week. We have four-hour long language classes in the morning, followed usually by some sort of teacher training activity in the afternoon. This takes place six days a week, so obviously when Sunday rolls around we are all looking for a chance to let off some steam.

This Sunday was no different. I slept in until the extremely late hour of 7:00am, then spent an hour and a half doing laundry (doing laundry by hand is probably the most tedious experience imaginable). After an outdoor shower by the same well I did my laundry next to, I lay down in my hammock (hammocks are the greatest thing ever) and read a book until some other PCT's rolled up. Since my house has a large “courtyard” area under the stilts and is fairly quiet it has become the de facto staging area for most group activities, which is cool. One of our LCF's (an acronym which basically stands for a language teacher) was going to accompany us on what we had decided would be a “long bike ride.”

There are three LCF's in each training village. All of them in Tuk Phos are in their 20's with the youngest, Linda (yes that's her name, I know it's not very Khmer but she is from here) being only 21 years old. She's also the coolest of the LCF's here (not that the other two aren't awesome), and she was coming along on our bike ride.

We headed in the direction of the mountains to the south-west. We rode for quite a ways until we got to a fork in the road. At some point in the past Linda had heard that there was a waterfall somewhere in the Tuk Phos area, and since she knew it was down this road we decided why not to try to reach it. And so we headed down this dirt road. We stopped at a school along the way for a break, and after making an offering to the small Buddha statue there we continued on down the increasingly narrow and rough road. At some points the road was more pothole than road, with some areas where the road was literally only about half a foot wide. Since it's the rainy season there was a lot of standing water and mud too. I am extremely thankful that I spent about a month or so getting reacquainted with bike riding, because otherwise this road would have been the death of me. I'm still a bit surprised I survived the journey. It must have taken us a good two hours to get to this place through some of the roughest roads you can imagine.

But almost everywhere along this road there were either houses or rice fields. People were out in the fields planting rice, driving water buffalo, or even running small little markets. When we stopped to ask them where this waterfall was they would tell us things like “15 kilometers. Too far.” or “10 kilometers, too far. You should take a moto.” How these people not only survive but thrive out in the most rural of rural areas I do not know. We must have been a dozen miles from the nearest town, such as it was, and the roads were completely impassable by car. Hell, there were parts that were impassable by bicycle, and yet there were still houses and people out there. It amazes me.

Two hours into the trip I was beginning to think of this journey less as a fun day out and more of Linda's Death March to the Mountains. But finally we came to the wat (a Buddhist temple) and the waterfall. And, quite frankly, it was worth it. The wat was actually only about a year old, but was a pretty sizable one with fourteen monks. The waterfall was beautiful, and we were right at the base of the mountains. We ate a picnic lunch there and poked around. In retrospect I should have stayed away from the water, but I had climbed over rocks on Lake Superior, these little boulders around the base of the waterfall would be nothing, right?

After dangling my legs in the water and wetting down me hair I turned to go back to shore. Then I slipped on a rock and banged my elbow good. Some passing monks laughed at me. Monks can be jerks. After Linda bandaged me up (it was a pretty large scrape, and bleeding quite a bit) it was time for the journey home. This journey was hellish; it was the height of the day, and we were already tired exhausted from the ride out there (and injury, in my case). But, two and a half hours and one nasty sunburn later, we were back in Tuk Phos, which seemed like a metropolis as we rolled in.

I called up the PCMO (Peace Corps Medical Officer) and she assured me that no matter how dirty that water had been I probably wasn't infected with anything. And she assured me my sunburn would sting like I would not believe, since the doxycyclene we are on for malaria prevention makes us much more sensitive to UV rays. Then I had Linda help me to apologize to my host family for disappearing for the day. Not knowing that we were going all the way out to this waterfall I had not told them I would be gone for lunch. My host mom scolded me, clucked over my sunburn, then made me eat all the rice she had prepared for my lunch.

Just another Sunday in Cambodia.

My Speech

2008-08-06T02:56:00.000-07:00

8-6-08

As promised, here is the text of the speech I gave at the welcome ceremony. After every sentance I would stop and one of the Cambodian Peace Corps staff would translate it into Khmer.

Thank you all for coming. My name is Mitchel Hayden, and I have volunteered to speak to you on behalf of our group today.

This ceremony marks the beginning of an exciting and challenging process. For the next two months we, the Peace Corps Trainees, will be living among you, in your village and in some of your homes. We are probably some of the first Americans to visit Tek Phos, and certainly the first to stay here for an extended period of time. From what we have seen of Tek Phos, I can tell you that we can hardly wait to begin our stay.

Many of you must have questions; who are these Americans? Why are they here? What is the Peace Corps? How different are they from us? What will the next two months be like? I will try and answer as many of these questions as I can.

Who are we? We are Peace Corps Trainees, but first and foremost we are all Americans. But as you will find, Americans are an amazingly diverse group, and the group that will be living among you reflect that diversity. We come from many different parts of the United States; some of us from the largest cities, and some of us from the most rural areas. We are of different ages and religions. We all have different backgrounds and experiences, and none of us had met each other two weeks ago. But we are all united by one common trait; the desire to serve. Not just to serve our own interests, but by our desire to serve the world and all of it's people. That desire has led us to begin the long application process for a spot in a Peace Corps group, and months, for some of us years later, it has led us here, to you.

Why are we here? We are here to learn all that we can about living in Cambodia, but also to teach you all we can about America. For the next two months we will be studying your language, your culture, your education system, and everything else that we can fit into our brains. But we are also here for you to learn about Americans firsthand. So that you can say that you have met Americans, have talked to them, and that you now know Americans as more than just people on television or in the news. That, despite all the cultural differences, we are not all that different from you.

But what is this organization that we are here with? What is the Peace Corps? Although I have only been a part of the Peace Corps for a short time, I will do my best to tell you what it is and why it has sent us here, to you. The Peace Corps is not an NGO, but is a part of the United States government. The stated mission of the Peace Corps is to promote world peace and friendship, and to assist interested countries with their needs. This is a very important duty, and one all of us take very seriously. But most importantly, the goal of the Peace Corps is to create a greater understanding between Americans and the world. We are here to help your teachers, but we are also here to bring our two countries closer together.

The next two months will be a challange, for all of us. We are new to your country and have had little exposure to your culture. You will find that within five minutes of meeting us, we will have spoken all the Khmer that we know. You will find that we do not know how to do simple things that you do every single day without thinking. You will find that at times we will do things that Khmer people would never do. In the course of this speech I have probably broken several cultural rules without knowing it. All I can ask for is your patience and understanding. Please know that the silly things we do are not on purpose.

But every day we will get better. Every day we will return home in the evening knowing a little more of your language. We will be able to talk to you for longer, to tell you more about ourselves. Every day we will seem a little less foreign to each other. And by the end of our time here I hope each and every one of you will think of us not as a strange foreigner staying in your house, but as a son or a daughter.

We have not been in Cambodia for very long, but I can speak for all of us when I say we love what we have seen. Your country is beutiful, and the people we have met have all been very friendly to our little group of confused foreigners. Kampong Changg has welcomed us, and for that we are extremely grateful. We hope that we can live up to the kind welcome Cambodia has given us. The next two months will be challenging for all of us as we adjust to each other, but I am confident that we will leave this place as better people than we were when we arrived. And when we go out into the countryside and begin the jobs that we have been training for, I know we will have Tek Phos to thank for our success and service to Cambodia. Thank you very much.

The New Family

2008-08-06T02:54:00.000-07:00

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.

Departures and Arrivals

2008-08-06T02:51:00.000-07:00

8-3-08

It's been hard to sit down and write, mostly because I've been kept pretty busy, but also because it's all so much to take in. Two weeks ago I was just another recent college graduate, flying to San Francisco. Now I'm sitting in a hammock at my host family's house in Tuk Phos district, Kampong Chanangg province, Cambodia. Getting here was a whirlwind of activity, and it's hard not to feel detached from all that is happening around me. I went through the same thing when I first arrived in Japan. I'm guessing it will take a few weeks, if not months, for it all to really sink in. But what all has happened so far? It's been quite the journey.

I arrived in San Francisco on the 20th and made my way to the BART, San Fran's mass transit system. I successfully made it to my stop and heaved my bags through the streets, looking for the correct bus. This proved more difficult, as the instructions I had failed to mention that the bus I was looking for was actually on the other side of the street from where the station exit was. Fortunately the driver of the bus I got on corrected me. I probably looked like a huge dork dressed like I was and with all my luggage.

Somehow I managed to get to the Kabuki Hotel, a disturbingly Japanese-style hotel that made me feel like I was back in Tokyo. The hotel itself is located in “Japan-town,” and so a lot of the street signs and advertisements were in Japanese. Fortunately I didn't freak out too much over this.

Staging itself was packed with icebreaker activities, which got a bit old after a while. But it also contained lots of hard information on where we were going and what we would be doing, something I think we all really craved. I didn't really get much of a chance to look around San Francisco; I mostly stayed in the area around the hotel. A bunch of us did go out and see a movie the night before we left, so I guess that's something.

I'm going to pause to state that several cows just wandered by my house. Far from escaping cows, now I see them all the time, and far closer than many people would be comfortable with. Chickens too are always wandering through the yard and around the table where we eat. Everyone here likes to go barefoot, but it will be a long while before I am comfortable with that.

Anyway, on Monday the 22nd we boarded our plane and flew eleven hours west to Tokyo. Being back at Narita International was even freakier than being in Japan-town. Even though we only were there for two hours, it brought back all sorts of feelings and memories.

The flight to Bangkok was hellish, because I was incredibly tired but can not sleep on an airplane. But seven hours later we were checking into our hotel for a four hour stay. Like the first group of PCV's had suggested, the hotel must have been a five-star resort. It was the kind of place I wouldn't even have been allowed to enter back in the US. And the three and a half hours of sleep I got there was the best sleep I've ever had.

Too soon, however, we were up, dressed, and on a Thai Airways plane to Phnom Penh. We landed at about 9:00 in the morning, local time, on the 24th. The jet lag wasn't as bad as I expected it to be, which was good because we were going to be busy all day every day. We still are, for that matter. We stayed in Phnom Penh for the night, having some meetings, going over more information, and meeting the staff in country. We also went to the Royal Museum and took a boat ride on the Tonle' Sap river. The next day we went to the Peace Corps office, ironically located close to the North Korean Embassy. There we did even more paperwork, got some shots, our cellphone, and sat through some more presentations. There were several active PCV's there too, which was neat because we got to pick their brains. I've really got to hand it to K1 (Kampuchea 1, the first group of PCV's in Cambodia. Our group is known as K2), they've done a great job with helping us newbies out.

Some woman I've never seen before just led a cow through the gate and into my yard. I'm going to assume she and the cow are supposed to be there, because I certainly don't speak enough Khmer to ask her what's up.

After the office we loaded up all the vehicles and drove an hour or so north to Kampong Chanangg. We moved into a guest house there, and stayed for about a week. The Peace Corps wanted to keep us all in once place for a few days, because there was a national election on that Sunday, and while the chance of unrest was low, they weren't taking any chances. This guest house is also our “training hub site,” and basically HQ for K2's training. We started language classes the next day, as well as teaching workshops, history classes, and classes on how to do laundry by hand and how to go to the bathroom on a squat toilet with no toilet paper within a hundred miles.

After a week they split us up into three groups; one group per village. Two groups went to the north and south along the main road from Phnom Penh and Kampong Channang. I am in the group that got sent to the more rural district, Tuk Phos. It's to the south-west, closer to the mountains. I really like it here, cows and chickens notwithstanding. I certainly have no complaints about the family I'm staying with. But more on that later.

Some musings on the eve of departure.

2008-07-18T21:14:00.000-07:00

I’m sitting in the living room of my friend’s apartment, six hours before I have to be at the airport. I should try and sleep, but I know it would be pretty futile. My mind is simply spinning in circles. I can’t even begin to comprehend what the next two years are going to be like. I’m simultaneously in denial, excited, and scared out of my mind.

Part of my brain hasn’t even accepted the fact that I’m going to be doing anything out of the ordinary tomorrow. Another part is excited beyond belief that I’m finally going to be doing something meaningful with my life. And another part is worried for more reasons than I can count. Will I get sick? Will I get mauled by a tiger? And of course my biggest worry of all: what happens if I am as big a failure at this as I was in Japan?

I think about the future too much; it has always been a weakness of mine. But, on the eve of leaving everything and everyone I have ever known, how can I not worry? For the last few days I’ve been swinging back and forth like a pendulum, vacillating between this excitement and terror. Not that anyone who spent any time with me would have noticed, save my parents.

There really isn’t much else to say. My reasons for going through with this are many and mostly selfish. But there’s no backing out; technically it’s an option but I refuse to consider it. No matter what, the next two years will probably do more to define what kind of man I become more so than anything else I’ve ever done in my life.

I think I’ll try and get some sleep now.

This is a test

2008-07-17T19:03:00.001-07:00

This is a test post. This is only a test.

...

I'm starting to regret that title...