I realize I have not done a good job keeping up with my posts, and for this I apologize. I think it does mean, however, that I am slipping into what could be considered a normal lifestyle. I go about my days and nights fully immersed into a culture and a lifestyle that has now become familiar, and thus, with nothing to report.
I can come up with a few stories that might make you smile or at least keep you entertained. There are a handful of students from my 15 different classes that I teach who are hilarious and make me smile every day. In my highschool/adult class, there is one boy who is more advanced than the rest of the class and I attribute it to his parents speaking 3 languages in the home (English, Khmer, Chinese) and his love of American culture. He is particularly enamored with Taylor Swift, and one day he gave me what I’m taking for a compliment, by telling me, “Teacher, you dress like Taylor Swift.” Last week, he asked me for her email address. I guess his thinking was, since we’re both American, we would surely be email correspondents. After I informed him that, no, I do not know Taylor Swift’s email address, but that she probably has a fan website where you can post things, he seemed to have bounced back from his initial disappointment. The next class I taught some poetry, using a poem titled, “Swift Things are Beautiful” to emphasize grammar, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. I had the students discuss some swift things that were beautiful and some slow things that they thought were beautiful. As Taylor Swift’s #1 Fan was sharing his ideas with the class, he said a beautiful slow thing was “woo.” Now, a lot of times I have trouble understanding my students because of poor pronunciation, and I have gotten used to deciphering words spoken without an audible ending (ri, instead of rice, etc.) so I thought this was another case of mispronunciation.
“Can you spell it?” I asked.
Yep, he said, “Double u, double o.”
He meant ‘woo’, alright.
“Can you explain what you mean? What does ‘woo’ mean.”
“When the boy gets the girl to be his girlfriend.”
Dang. The kid just said that the courting process was a beautiful slow thing. Compared to my other student’s answers of ‘turtle, snail’ this was not only hilarious, but extremely insightful.
“Okay,” I said continuing the lesson, “How is wooing a beautiful slow thing?”
“Well, it takes a long time, but in the end the boy succeeds and he gets the girl to be his girlfriend.”
Other points of interest happened on Saturday. Susan and I went out to the edge of Phnom Penh to volunteer at a place called the Harpswell Foundation. (www.harpswellfoundation.org) It’s an organization for Cambodian women from the provinces who are extremely bright and hardworking to come to Phnom Penh and go to university. The girls live in a new dormitory and cook, clean, and study together. Most are getting degrees in Law, Medicine, or Accounting, but a few are also in IT programs. From here on out I will be spending my Saturday mornings teaching English to first-year girls. They seem very motivated to learn, but like almost every student that I have encountered here in Cambodia, they were very shy at first. A few icebreakers and games to broaden and practice their vocabulary opened them up a bit, and I hope to form some good relationships over the next few weeks. After my 3-hour teaching stint, I accompanied a 3rd year Harpswell scholar to visit her friend who was presenting in a Science exhibition at the Technology Institute close by. I was completely and utterly impressed with the student’s experiments who have all of their classes in FRENCH. These students have to first take intensive French classes so that they can learn science. The science fair posters were first in French, then in English, and there was no Khmer text at all. The students explained different natural phenomena in any and all of the three languages, depending on who stopped by their table. Wow.
Later that night, I attended a party hosted by a bar a few streets away celebrating the life and work of Russian artist Alexander Vertinsky (1889-1957). There is a fairly large Russian community and it seemed like they all showed up for this event. Russian food (caviar, salmon, brown bread) was served and there was homemade strawberry caramel vodka. Traditional songs were played and there was a projector showing Vertinsky’s movies. It was a nice occasion to dress up for and forget where you were for a few hours.
Sunday morning I was able to attend what I can best describe as a Buddhist church service. I accepted the invitation by a Harpswell volunteer to show up and be a part of the ½ hour chanting “Nam-myoto-renge-kyo”. After the chanting was finished, a gong was hit and then two girls came out and did a traditional dance and threw lotus flowers. The rest was mostly talking and people sharing in Khmer, but I got a few whispers down the row of seats explaining what was being said. One of the girls who speaks English gave me her card and perhaps one day this week we will meet for coffee so she can explain more about this particular Buddhist sect.
It is just a couple weeks away from final exam for my students and then the term ends right before Khmer New Year. I look forward to this because my mom is coming to visit! I am making plans for us to travel to Vietnam and I’m also planning fun things to do in Cambodia so that she will have lots of experiences and a fun time. As the closing of March nears, I realize that I should embrace every moment because I will only be here for just over 6 more weeks, then travel for another 5 and then my SE Asian adventure will be over. All good things must come to an end, and I plan on enjoying wherever I am whenever I am.
I just got in from a long weekend at Mondulkiri Province, the largest province in Cambodia and also the least populated. Most of Cambodia celebrates International Women’s Day (March 8) by taking the day off of work, and Sovannaphumi School was no exception. For further celebration, my school took a staff retreat to get out of the city and into the mountains. I was able to bring Susan along as my guest and I was grateful to have a friend with whom I could experience some outrageous and ridiculous moments. Throughout the trip we would make faces to one another or have short conversations about what the heck was going on, which might make our blog entries pretty close so if you follow both then I apologize for the duplicity.
Before I left, I knew this information: Mondulkiri is a province, it is known for its green forests, landscapes, and tribal community. I knew there was a plan, seeing as about 200 teachers and staff were making the 7-hour drive, but I didn’t know what was happening or when. I knew it cost $25 to go. I also had a feeling that Susan and I would be two of very few Westerners along for the ride. Needless to say, I was excited.
There were so many absurd moments that I feel like a list format would be best. For the 7-8 hour bus ride, 3 hours were taken up by long rest stops that included full meals and a leisurely stroll through a market. The other 4-5 hours were spent listening to passengers on the bus singing karaoke, telling jokes, sharing funny stories, or playing games over the loudspeaker system of the bus—all in Khmer, of course. There was some respite from the joke-telling and song-singing when they played movies, TV shows, and music videos all quite loudly and all very Khmer.
The rooming situation was Susan and I with two other staff ladies who were very nice and shared some food with us. They also happened to be early risers and insisted that we wake up at 5:30am, even though we didn’t have to be ready until 7. I tried to ignore the, “Valerie…wake up now. Hurry you get ready” every five or ten minutes following 5:30 and it seemed that they too ignored my response of, “not yet, I have an alarm set..I take a short time to get ready…” So up we got.
We saw two areas with gorgeous waterfalls and drove through many mountainous (hilly) landscapes. The dust was thick through these parts, and I finally understood why people would wear a facemask. Later in the day I blew my nose and realized exactly how pervasive this reddish brown dust actually was. It was great fun to be a part of a stereotypical Asian tour bus. We really did get stop alongside many sights, file out of the bus, snap numerous and repetitive photos, and file back on the bus. Susan and I were hailed into many pictures, being a part of the sights ourselves.
Finally I’ll get to the food. Since this was a Khmer vacation that I just happened to be on, I did what the Khmers did and ate what they ate. I bought some wine that has a cobra and scorpion in it, with the scorpion’s tail nestled nicely between the cobra’s jaws. One of my co-workers, Arun, gave Susan and me some guidance as to what to buy, what we were eating and what people were talking about etc. He picked out food for the table and we shared boar-skin soup and deer meat for the table. On Saturday there was a big party that included: dancing, drinking, roasting an entire cow, and drawing a raffle. I indulged my hosts by eating some cow liver, but declined on the stomach, lung, and intestine. The actual meat of the cow was very tasty. The Khmer dancing was very similar to my experience at the wedding. The raffle had a lot of small winners and a grand prize of a big standing fan. I won a small prize: a tube of toothpaste. Having been up since 5:30 thanks to the roommates, I was pretty beat by the time the party ended at midnight.
The ride back was almost identical to the ride going, except this time on the rest stops Susan and I became more adventurous with our food choice. For lunch we had a bamboo shoot that was filled with sticky rice and beans and was really filling and tasty, followed by some mango and sugar cane, and all topped off with a tarantula and cricket! I was content just to look and take pictures of this, but a co-worker was telling me of the medicinal properties that the people in the provinces believe tarantulas to have. Apparently if you have a cough and you eat the butt, then it will make you feel better. I settled on a few legs and shoulder regions. You only live once, right?
Anyways, it’s good to be back in my apartment and it felt great to get back to my students. Plus walking around school I see more familiar faces in my fellow staff. I don’t think I’ll be having boar skin or cow innards again any time soon, though.
I write to you on a cool Friday morning. I’ve found my favorite times of day are before 10:30am and after 5:30pm. The sun is gentler and there is actually a breeze so I relish these moments, spending the majority of my time outside or on our balcony.
It’s payday today, which means I’ll swing by my school and receive a nice envelope filled with straight-up U.S. cash. I feel like this is how every job should pay their employee; no checks, no taxes, no paper trail...just plain bills in a plain envelope.
I have had a great week of work so far. Teaching the younger kids was a bit daunting at first, but now it’s just fun. Walking into a classroom and having kids swarm around me yelling out, “yayy teacher! Hello teacher! Teacher so beautiful!” doesn’t do much for classroom management, but it does boost the ego quite a bit. A few girls in particular have found me fascinating as they have also started up the daily mantra, “we want to kiss the teacher!” This left me super uncomfortable—being used to having strict rules about giving students or campers only side-hugs and having those lines clearly marked. I looked to the Khmer teacher in the room and she just smiled, so I let the girls give me a kiss on both cheeks and my forehead, as per their request. I think they also wanted to kiss my chin, but unsure if they meant chin or lips, I drew the line and said that it was time to start class.
Other than that, there isn’t too much to report. I’ve been filling my days with going to the pool, playing volleyball with a school outside of town, trying new places for dinner, cooking for myself, and reading. Yesterday, Susan and I decided to try a new means of travel, one very popular by Khmer young boys. She rode her bike while I sat on the back part. We’ve seen this many times, with sometimes three or four young boys piled on, so we thought, why not give it a try ourselves? Well despite getting lots and lots of stares (more than usual) it actually turned out pretty well. That is, until we came to a really busy street and we had to come to a complete stop. Well, balance is pretty difficult to achieve with me sitting sidesaddle on the back, and as we were at a standstill, we kind of started leaning to the right a bit too much. I realized we were going down, but it was one of those moments that even though you know what is about to happen, you can’t do anything to stop it. Susan was able to hop off awkwardly while I fell on my bum in slow-motion with legs high up in the air. WELL. needless to say, I think we made a lot of people smile that day. Chuckling to myself, I walked the rest of the way home and met up with Susan a few minutes behind her.
***I do have lots of fun things to look forward to in the upcoming months—my mom is visiting during the middle of April, which just happens to be Khmer New Year so I have lots of time off of school and it will be really lovely to see some new sights with her. Perhaps we will take a trip to Vietnam as well! Also, Susan and I have come up with our May travel plans that include India and Nepal. I have some friends in India and we will most likely spend our time in Mumbai and Delhi with a trip to the Taj Mahal in Agra. In Nepal, we plan to do a 16-day trek to the base-camp of Mt. Everest. After a month of travelling, I will return home to the states in early June. I’m really excited about all of these plans and experiences to be had, but I do miss everyone at home!
