Mystery Meat

Besides the wats, the other part of this week’s Pchum Ben I have seen is that families all get together and come back ‘home,’ wherever that happens to be. Now that I have been here a week and a half, I have met five of my mom’s seven siblings and lots of cousins. It was quite a lucky break because a couple of my cousins who study in Phnom Penh speak quite good English. Being the only native English speaker around, it is a special treat to be able to chat about more than what you ate for breakfast and how many siblings you have.

The penultimate day of Pchum Ben meant a big get-together for my whole family. And, my family decided, there could be no better way to celebrate than to deconstruct an unidentified creature in the backyard. I came downstairs from my afternoon ‘nap’ to find my mom and assorted relatives all hanging out on the back stoop, chopping up various bits of anatomy. They told me a word in Khmer that I did not understand, and my mom assured me it was not pork, beef, or chicken, so it should be fine for me to eat. The concept of vegetarianism is very foreign in Cambodia, to say the least. To be helpful, one of my cousins fished into one of the bowls of meat and held up a severed head for me to see. At first I thought it was an eel. Eel is fairly common in the markets here, and we’d even had eel the other night for dinner. I had managed to avoid most of that, serving myself the banana flower chunks from the eel soup instead, until my mom said I hadn’t eaten enough and plopped a big slice of eel into my rice bowl. But no. I had told my cousin the English word for eel, and he assured me this was not it. Then I thought maybe it was some sort of reptile, although it looked awfully slimy. Then I spotted a ribcage tossed to the side. Less of a ribcage and more of a...shell. Yep, my dictionary confirmed it – it was a turtle shell. Oy vey...and what could I do but smile and nod. I will leave the rest to your imagination.
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Khmanglish of the week

POP-UP
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Wat Outing

Today (October 8, I’m writing and posting later) is the final day of Pchum Ben, the second biggest holiday in the Khmer calendar (after Khmer New Year in April). This holiday is about ancestors and the gates of hell opening...well, Wikipedia can explain it better than I can. All I really know is what I’ve seen over the past week, and that has involved going to a lot of different wats. I’ve now visited four different wats (Buddhist temples) with my family. I think I’m finally starting to get a hang of the routine.

First, around 9am, my host mom tells me we are about to leave, so I should hurry up and get ready. If I’ve been given advance notice, I’ve already gotten into my wat-going attire – a white dress shirt and one of my two nicer sampots (traditional Khmer skirts). Then I sit around for maybe 30 minutes more while my family goes about the business of getting ready. It reminds me of waiting for my family back home to get ready for Church on any given Sunday. We all pile into the car, up to seven or eight people in my dad’s Toyota Camry. Here in Cambodia, it’s pretty typical to double-up the passenger seat and put at least four people in back. Luckily, the furthest drive this week was only about 45 minutes. (Actually, to tell the truth, I LOVE riding in cars here. I get to tour the countryside, and it’s one of the only times I get AC, so I don’t mind the crowding.) Once we arrive at the wat in question, we all pile out, grab an assortment of food from the trunk, and shuffle into the wat’s secondary building, sort of a dining hall for the monks. There are quite a few rules about eating in the monkhood. Monks only eat one big meal a day and are not allowed to eat anything between noon and dawn the following day. When they go out into the community to ask for offerings, they carry big silver bowls to collect their daily food. They are not allowed to take food into the main sanctuary building, so there is another area with a raised platform where the monks sit and eat and a lower area where everyone else can congregate. We take our shoes off at the door and claim an area of the grass mats on the floor by dropping off our assortments of offering items. I follow my host mom up to the altar area where we kneel and do three bows to show our respect to the Buddha. Somebody then hands me three sticks of incense, which I hold between my palms while somebody prays. Then I put my incense in a pot of sand to burn.

Now we start sorting the food and money offerings. We make a tray of all the items to be offered to the monks, and eventually we present it to one of the more senior monks who is in the hall accepting things. The seniority of the monks is very apparent, since they sit on their eating platform in descending order of age and/or importance. During the Khmer Rouge regime, the Buddhist establishment in Cambodia (in addition to the education system, the family unit, and so much more) was systematically destroyed, including disrobing and execution of monks, so the senior monks often appear to be fairly young. At each of the wats, probably 75% of the monks were actually young boys (maybe 8-18 years old) who often become monks either to receive schooling or to bring honor to their families. Anyway, the exchange of the offering involves some of the grandfatherly types who hang out at the wat making a presentation of our gift, including the amount of money, the name of the family, and where the family is from. Two of four times, this presentation has happened on loudspeaker. To actually give the offering is quite simple. Two or three people lift up the tray in the direction of the monk, and everyone else touches the people who are touching the tray. Then the monk touches the tray, and the transfer is complete. Now the monk can leave and the food can be set out with all the goodies brought by other families for the monks’ lunch.

At some point in the late morning, the wat grandpas start leading the whole ‘congregation’ in chants. Some are responsive, so I try to mumble along a bit. Others are recited, so I just sit in my feet-tucked-back, hands-together, head-bowed position. The chanting continues on and off, and closer to lunch time, somebody hands me a bowl of rice and a spoon. The first time this happened, nobody explained it to me, but luckily, I was pretty sure I was not supposed to start chowing down. No, the first bowl of rice has to get into the monks’ begging bowls. When I was in Thailand for the summer, we offered rice to monks two times, and they just filed past us while we knelt on the ground and put handfuls of rice into their individual bowls. Here, at least during Pchum Ben, it is more of a free-for-all. See, Khmer people are not really fans of the whole ‘standing in line’ idea. The monks’ big bowls are set out on the table, and people start to go down the row, putting a spoonful in each one. Getting started on the first bowl is the hardest part, since the end of the table is a mass of people all pushing to get to their rice spooning. After I have braved the crowd and spooned in my rice, I go back to sit. More chanting ensues. Eventually the monks arrive, and there is more chanting, now a sort of back-and-forth between the congregation and the monks. After maybe 30 minutes or so, the monks are finally allowed to eat, and I can finally break my sompeah (hands together in front of my face). Unfortunately, I have to leave my feet tucked to one side the whole time the monks are there. I’m working on building up the stamina of my back muscles. After the monks are finished and have filed out, the leftovers are redistributed to the crowd in a surprisingly orderly way that makes absolutely no sense to me. Then we get to eat! A whole array of dishes is laid out for each family, and everybody digs in together. I’ve had prahok, the pungent, disreputable fish-paste that is occasionally called the cheese of Cambodia, three times this week. And – I’ll tell you a secret – I might actually like the stuff. Finally, there is a blissful car ride home in AC and a mandatory afternoon nap to recuperate from hours of sitting and to sleep off the food coma.

First Day of School (or: Nobody Told Me the Prime Minister Was Coming!)

October 1 – Back to school day for children across Cambodia. First day of school as a teacher for me. Well, first day AT the school in that capacity. In reality, there was no actual school - no classes that is – just one big, very long ceremony this morning. I showed up to the school, as requested, at 6:45. Now, I am much more of a morning person here in Cambodia than I am stateside, but having to actually get up and moving at 5:30 is something new. Having to dress up in a sampot and try to ride my mountain bike in that long skirt was something of a challenge. Of course as I rode along the main road towards school, I passed herds of students headed in the same direction, just waiting to witness the awkward barang trying to ride a bike. I arrived, parked my bike in what seemed like an appropriate place, and ran into one of the English teachers I had met earlier. I asked where I should be going, and he motioned me into the school director’s office. There, I was plopped into a plastic chair where I proceeded to sit for the better part of an hour while preparations were going on around me. The head English teacher found me there and explained that I should wait a bit longer because in just a short while, the students would all come sit down to listen to the Prime Minister’s address. “Oh.” I thought, “Ok, I guess the Prime Minister must give some sort of radio address to the school children of Cambodia on the first day of school.” After all, our high school is named after the prime minister, as are many of the high schools in Cambodia. And, if I’m not mistaken, the largest single part of Cambodia’s national budget goes to education. I started to get suspicious, though. Security guards and fancy cars started showing up. The frenzy to stop the microphone feedback heightened. I started to wonder...is the Prime Minister coming to our school? Maybe he visits one school each year, and it just happens to be this one? Peace Corps Volunteers past have many stories of being left out of the loop, but is this something I could have missed? Oh crap. I’m all wrinkly from my bike ride. I only took 15 minutes to write my speech. Oh CRAP!

As it turned out, the ‘Prime Minister’ who was addressing the students was not the Prime Minister at all, but the district governor. The ceremony involved me sitting in front of, oh, I guessed about 800 of my school’s 1400 students who all squatted obediently in the dirt in their school uniforms. I got a plastic chair up on the school office terrace, the makeshift stage for the day’s events, next to some of the school officials. Then we had to stand up to listen to the national anthem. Trust me, if you are the only barang for miles and you are standing in front of 800 Khmer school children and you are so much taller than all of the other teachers that you look like a giant, 800 Khmer school children will laugh at you. And you will have nothing to do but laugh at yourself too. After that, it won’t seem so bad that you have to give a 15-sentence speech in broken Khmer. At least all the students will listen to you, which they certainly won’t when the not-actually-the-Prime-Minister gives a speech lasting more than an hour.*

Afterwards, I did actually get to talk to some of the students, which was exciting. For one, it was exciting that they were actually brave enough to talk to me in English. As we all quickly learned during our practicum teaching week, this is no small feat for a Khmer student. Two, the 5-odd students I talked to could actually speak some English! I mean, a little. And they were 12th graders are probably some of the best students in the school, if I had to guess. But hey, it’s a start. I guess that’s where I come in...

*No I’m serious. More than an hour.

Chamkar bai

First off, I’d like to say that I think everyone should have the experience of being an anomaly at least once in their lives. It is both a bit terrifying and exhilarating at the same time. Here, I am an anomaly without any effort on my part. It’s pretty hard to hide the fact that I’m, oh, about 8 feet tall and have glowing bright white hair. Also my nose. In America, people don’t talk about noses nearly enough. While I was in India, it was never one of the things that people noted about me (those things being that I was giant and fat and had light hair). In Cambodia, though, I am acutely aware of the fact that I have a drowmah srooit (pointy nose). According to all the ladies in my village, it is very sa-aht. Sa-aht can mean both ‘beautiful’ and ‘clean,’ so sometimes I like to pretend they’re impressed that I manage to keep my nose hair tidy.

Anyway, in our training village, I was one of 18 other barang to be stared at and gossiped about and yelled “Hello!” to. Here, I am one-of-a-kind. That makes me pretty popular. When I’m out by myself, I seem to only get staring so far. Mostly people have been too afraid to approach me. I’ve been going around with my host mom a lot, though, and that’s a different story. People have no problem at all approaching her to talk about me...while I’m standing right there. Usually the scene plays out something like this:

Woman 1 at the market/shop/coffee stand: Who is THAT?!?!?!
My mom: Oh, that’s my new daughter. She’s going to teach English at the high school.
Woman 1: Where is she from?
My mom: She’s from America. She’s working with an organization.
(At this point a crowd is usually starting to form)
Woman 2, 3, 4, 5: How old is she? Is she married? Can she eat rice? Where does she live? Does she like it here? Is she nice? Oh, she’s very fat. How much money does she make? Look at her pointy nose!


Since yesterday, the spiel has gotten even better. See, in Khmer, the word for cooked rice (bai) is different than the word for uncooked/growing rice. Also, the normal word for field (chamkar) is not the word used for a rice field. We were in a the middle of a field full of rice paddies, and I couldn’t remember what rice fields are actually called, so I called it a chamkar bai. My mom has now mentioned that to at least five different groups of people. For example, today we drove about 20 minutes down a dirt road to go offer food to monks at this wat in the in middle of nowhere. It was a very long process – giving money to various people, dividing up the cooked dishes, spooning small bits of rice into different bowls, lighting incense, offering things to the head monk, then (when the rest of the monks finally came) lots of chanting back and forth and bowing and so on. I was barely keeping up trying to just copy what my parents were doing. Anyway, somewhere during a break in the chanting, while we were watching the monks eat, someone starts asking about me. My mom launches right into the ‘chamkar bai’ bit. It gets a big laugh. Then we go back to some more chanting. It seems like I will probably never live that down, so my plan is to just embrace it, along with the rest of my anomaly identity. I’m just the crazy, giant, pointy-nosed, chamkar bai lady!

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.

The Piti Niak Smah Jet

I'm officially a Peace Corps Volunteer!

Tomorrow I'm moving to my permanent site for real. Not at all intimidating, no. Today was a free day off in Phnom Penh, so I have been shopping and interneting and eating lots of Western food. Now we're all on our own from here on out. Luckily with the help of my handy dandy internet phone I may just be able to share some stories from Kampong Thom. Here goes nothing.

Bong Srey Lin

Well I passed my final language exam, so that means this Thursday, I'll be swearing in as a Peace Corps Volunteer! (Until now, I've only been a Trainee, so I'm not actually in the Peace Corps just yet...soon.) It's taken a little bit over a year from when I turned my application, and it seems like it's been even longer.

Training finished up the day before yesterday, and just about three hours ago I was in my village saying goodbye to my training host family. The last two or three days have been somewhat bizarre and jam-packed. Yesterday, for example, I made an attempt to serve up some spaghetti and garlic bread to my family. They actually liked it more than I expected, but of course they said my tomato sauce could have used some sugar. (Sugar is included in the seasoning for almost every Khmer dish I've seen made in my house.) We also had gigantic extra jumbo shrimp for dinner the other night...at my house...in the middle of nowhere in Cambodia. I'm no expert of Cambodian geography just yet, but I'm fairly certain we're nowhere near the ocean where I live. Apparently my host dad bought them in town for $20/kilo. That's approximately 80,000 riel, waaay more than any other food item I've seen and/or eaten here.

Now we are just hanging out in Kampong Cham for the day before heading to Phnom Penh for the rest of this week. I'm going to see about getting up some more pictures up here soon and until then, I'll see what new stories I can cook up. Li howi!