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!

Things that are not weird in Cambodia

There are many things that are not weird in Cambodia. One, for example, was that yesterday there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of pineapples in my aunt's driveway. (My aunt lives right next door and I spend a lot of time sitting in front of her house with my 'cousins' or chatting with them at mine.) There were three different minivans loading up the pineapples, and by loading, I mean packing the entire van from floor to ceiling, making a pile out the back tied down to the open trunk door, and making a mountain of additional pineapples on top. Granted, Cambodian manoa are a lot smaller than the pineapples we would buy in America, but still, they manage to fit a lot of those suckers in!



Some other things that don't seem weird:
- Not going out past 6pm. What could there possibly be to do in the outside world past dark?
- Extremely loud music. All the time. All day long. This is generally for some sort of gathering - a wedding, funeral, new house celebration, or other party. The exact volume of the music is hard to describe, but it usually involves speakers that start to sound very distorted. It also usually a some point or another involves the Khmer remake of that Pitbull song...One Two Three Four, Muay Bee Buy Buon, I know you want me...
- Meals being a bowl of rice with toppings, instead of rice being an accompaniment to meals. It just makes sense.
- Not having internet. Or newspapers really. Or any source of information. Life goes on.
- Stopping to chat with 3 or more different group of people on your way the 500 meters to the market. Relationships, they keep telling us, are the most important key to our success in Peace Corps. IRBing!

Just another day.

The Verdict

First, does everyone realize what a worldwide phenomenon Justin Bieber is? He is on the radio in Cambodia. No joke. There is a Khmer language remake of "Baby," but they also like to play the original. The original is really better. Maybe if you were in Cambodia for a couple months you'd start to like it. I'm just saying, it's a possibility.

ANYWAY....Kampong Thom! or K. Big, also affectionately known as the 'Nebraska of Cambodia,' is where I will be spending the next little bit of my life. You can Google it, I assume, but basically it's dead in the center of the country and is conveniently about halfway between the two big tourist cities of Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. My site is right on the main highway between them, meaning it will be easy for me to get around. This also means a lot of foreigners are going to be seeing me riding my bike to school in my sampot while they relax in air conditioning and enjoy some Khmer music videos. I got to see my new town for a couple days last week, although I'm going to reserve judgment until I can get a better look around.

In other exciting news, as of today I'm now the owner of a phone that should allow me to access the internet from some various not-so-populated areas of Cambodia. We'll see how things pan out, but it should mean that I'll at least be able to check email a little bit more often...just saying.