Up and Down and All Around

29 March 2010

I’ve had a pretty fantastic week. Although there have been low moments, they have only make the good ones better. I think every time I travel for a long period of time, I get slightly bipolar. Really high highs and really low lows, and this fluctuation can take place in the matter of an hour, a day, or a minute. Well I was experiencing this for the first time in Cambodia this week, and thank goodness that I have Susan here with me and that she is such a good friend. With her help, I realized that I signed up for a challenging experience that would push me to grow as a person, and this cannot happen without it being hard and going through difficult times. It being hard is what makes it worth it. So, with some newfound perspective, I have finished out the week with a healthy level of love for Cambodia.

The term is coming to a close and the students have final exams next week. I have been playing a lot of review games, and the kids are loving it. Especially when there are candy prizes for the winner. But it’s an incentive, not a bribe, right? Thursday I managed to find and buy a new pair of prescription glasses for pretty cheap and then I went to the pool. Susan met up with me and we had the place to ourselves. Susan teaches university students and she had a party for one of her classes on Friday and I came along to help serve the PB&J cracker sandwiches, cheese and crackers, and brownies before helping Susan teach the Electric slide. One of her students brought in a guitar and played while another student sang. It was pretty wonderful. I talked to two girls about how cute their shoes were and we ended up planning to go to the market on Sunday together, which turned out to be really helpful and fun. Susan and I usually get a little stressed out at the markets with the sheer amount and variety of things and the bargaining. Soit was really great to have her students, Leada and T, speak to the sellers for us and point out which things were really made in Cambodia or were very traditionally Khmer.

A pretty shocking thing happened at about 9pm on Friday night. I was walking back to my flat with a new friend Christine and she was mugged. Right outside on my street, a moto whizzed passed and grabbed her purse that had a long shoulder strap and just kept driving. Luckily not too much was in her purse, so it could have been a lot worse. Still pretty scary though. Sometimes its good to have that reminder that you are never fully safe…

I did another Saturday at Harpswell and this time we stayed to eat lunch with the girls. It’s really nice to spend time with them and get to know them better. I brought the movie Slumdog Millionaire to watch with my students while Susan taught. It was interesting for me to see that movie for the second time while in Cambodia. Some of the scenes of the Indian slum were scenes that I have seen here. Watching a person hit stacks of garbage with a metal poker to hear the sound of plastic was such a foreign sight when I watched the movie in the theatre two years ago, but here that is an everyday occurrence.

That night, we met up with a few of my coworkers to eat Khmer food. I had arranged this because it was so great to hang out with them over the International Women’s Day retreat, and I wanted to get a chance to taste really good Khmer food again. Even though we didn’t eat boar skin or deer meat, there were still unusual tastes and it was a thoroughly Cambodian day and evening. I can’t believe March is almost over. I knew this would be the hardest month for me abroad, and it has been filled with every emotion all wrapped into one. Here’s to smooth sailing in my last few months and adventures!

T-9 days until my mom arrives in Phnom Penh!

Nam-myoho-renge-kyo

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 3^rd 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.

Boar skin, it's what's for dinner

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.