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!

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.