At Site

This past week has been a blur of saying goodbye to my training host family, meeting with my school director and co-teacher at a Peace Corps Counterpart Conference, Swearing-In, spending lots of money in Phnom Penh on Western food and “I need this to help me stay sane at site”items, and saying another terrible round of goodbyes to the other K4 Peace Corps Volunteers. Can we talk about how stellar people in the Peace Corps are? When I first showed up to our staging (a day in San Francisco where we all had an introductory session together before flying to Hong Kong) and met the 50-odd other people headed with me to Cambodia, I was pretty surprised. I thought that the Peace Corps would be full of, well, a certain type of person. The group I met was not what I expected but has turned out to be full of people who I think will be my friends for a long time (even if we do ever leave this place). We’re not allowed to leave our provinces for the next two months, so I won’t be seeing most of them until Thanksgiving, when we’ll all meet up in Battambang. Until then, there will be a lot of texting. Did I say a lot? I think what I meant was oodles and oodles of it. Thank goodness for texting. Even just after we'd all left Phnom Penh, my friend Jane (one very awesome lady who I am lucky to have as the closest Volunteer to me and within easy biking distance) and I ran into our friend Lindsay who happened to be at the same bus stop. It had been about 2 hours, but you'd have thought it had been about 2 years. We were that happy.
As for my site, well, it will probably be a little slow getting started. My new house is pretty ridiculously nice and my host family is friendly and welcoming, plus my dad is vegetarian already. Score! He’s also a doctor who runs a small clinic out of our house and is the director of the health center in the next town, so I’m excited to see if that might provide some opportunities for me to learn some things about healthcare in Cambodia. Not to mention I'm in the Peace Corps in a tiny village in Cambodia and I have the internet. THE INTERNET. Woah. I miss all the women and kids who hung around the house at my training host family’s tailor shop, but as Peace Corps has told us over and over, a big part of my job these next few months is just to meet people. They even have coinced a special phrase for this: Intentional Relationship Building. I’ll probably have loads of time to meet people, because although school starts on Friday, it will probably be cancelled most of next week on account of the big Khmer holiday Pchum Ben. In fact, the word on the street is that I will probably have a whole lot of free time the whole time I am here, so I am off to work on becoming an IRBing master.