Striking things I saw today

1. Snake as roadkill. That was a first.

2. A refrigerator. I know, I know. I was shocked too. It magically appeared at my house in the middle of the afternoon. Upon questioning my host mom, it turned out that it was a gift from ‘the people who sell medicine.’ I asked if it was because my host dad is a health center director and would need it to store medicines. No, it was for buying a lot of meds to sell to people. (My parents run a bustling clinic/dispensary out of our house.) Even further conversation revealed that the drug company (?) has also given my family two motorbikes, two TVs, electric fans, a laptop for my sister, the wall clock/thermometer/calendar, 5 huge flats of Coke, 5 huge tubs of laundry soap... As it turns out, most of the valuable items in our house are swag. Oh, and there’ll be a new motorbike coming in a few months, the 2010 model. I know pharmaceutical companies in the states are pretty messed up, but I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t go over well if they went around giving doctors TVs and motorbikes. (Incidentally, the motorbike model in question is $1500, more than the base yearly salary for a full-time upper secondary teacher at my school [and, moreover, I should be clear that all of the details contained herein – salaries, compensation, etc - are considered matters of public record in Cambodia]).

3. A funeral pyre. Last week, an elderly woman who lived two doors down passed away. There have been a lot of rites surrounding her death, most of which have been mysterious to me. (I’ve been to one funeral here, but it was a three-month funeral - in Cambodia funerals consist of multiple occasions.) I heard monks chanting next door late one night, and not on a loudspeaker, which I found strange since so far I’ve only seen monks come to people’s houses for big, very public, events. I thought at the time that perhaps someone was very sick. I’m still not sure if that was immediately after she died or if they were issuing some sort of last rites. For the rest of the week, from what I saw and heard, there were lots of visitors, lots of chanting, lots of singing in a mournful/wailing voice. (Possibly professional funeral singers? My language is not advanced enough to ask about these things yet.) Today, I passed by the house and saw that the front yard was roped-off with everyone dressed in white smocks, standing in a large circle are the fire in the center. A drum was playing a steady single beat. In India, there was a special place where cremation occurred, and it was not a place that women were allowed to go. This was happening in the middle of the morning on the side of one of the busier roads in Cambodia. I didn’t want to stop and stare or start asking questions just now, but it reminded me that I still have a lot to learn about Cambodia.