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.

Highlights of the past two weeks

*Disclaimer – since I’m without internet at my training village, I’ve been writing blog posts and have not been able to post them. I’m going to go ahead and post a few things for your enjoyment. Ready, set, enjoy!*

Hello again from Kampong Cham! It’s been almost two weeks since my last internet foray, but I’ve got the whole day off in the “big city” today, so I’m going to try and even upload some pictures. No promises. What do people want to see? Pictures of my host family and village, pictures of the other Peace Corps people, or maybe pictures of the giant horned beetle that was hanging out on my roof the other night? And what is interesting to hear about? Can I start taking requests?

A few highlights of the recent bit of training:

- Being on a bus that broke down for three hours on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere. This might be more of an ‘important points’ highlight than a ‘best things ever’ highlight, but it turned out to be something of an adventure. About 8 of us were on the same bus coming back from our site visit, and we all found it at least moderately humorous to be stranded in the middle of nowhere in Cambodia. An elephant being walked down the main highway passed our bus. Like you do.
- The plate of crickets that showed up at my table at dinner the other night. Now, I’d actually eaten a cricket when I came to Thailand and Cambodia back in 2004. A bunch of Peace Corps-ers also tried them (along with palm-sized grilled tarantulas) the second day we were here at a bus stop. For some reason, though, having them put in front of me at dinner was still hilarious. They’re really not bad.
- The spider that was wandering our classroom on Wednesday carrying an egg sack the size of a silver dollar that hatched tiny little spiders all over the backpack of another PC-er. Let me tell you, those buggers are FAST.
- My trip last weekend (by ‘weekend’ I mean our day off on Sunday) out to the fields around our village. With my family on a series of motorbikes, I rode my PC-issue mountain bike out through the big rubber plantation just outside of town to a series of dirt paths winding through a massive set of corn, soybean, and pineapple fields. (Pineapple fields, by the way, just look like very tidy rows of spiky pineapple tops. The pineapples grow underground. Who knew?) Because the fields are built on a higher patch in mostly pancake-flat Cambodia, you could see for miles. The soil around this province is supposedly notoriously rich, and, at least last weekend, it was dark red-brown and very moist-looking. Not too shabby if my food is actually coming from there. Anyway, the fields were beautiful, but we were actually headed out to a temple back in the forest. It turned out to exceed my wildest dreams, emphasis on the wild. What seemed to be the main temple was built inside of a mock pirate ship in the middle of a lake/moat where some children were playing and some ladies were washing clothes. On one side, a series of giant lily pads created a walkway up to another temple, this one in a more traditional form outside. Also part of the complex were a giant statue with one figure pointed skyward and an even more giant statue of a rabbit. Why the rabbit? I have no idea, and my family couldn’t tell me either. But we have some excellent pictures to prove it.

Normalcy

So now that I’ve been in Southeast Asia about a month, certain things pretty much normal, for example, seeing a pickup truck full of fish unloading at the market or having gigantic spiders wandering around the classroom without anyone flinching or watching 5 people riding a single motorbike or having children run to the road to scream Hello!!! Hello!!! when I ride by on my bike. A lot of ‘normal’ things from home are also now extremely rare. The big one here: Internet. Let me lump in with the Internet any source of general information. I could be debating with some of the other Trainees in my village about what exactly Dengue rash looks like, for example, but we can’t really Google it or have someone look it up on their iPhone or even go to a library with books on the topic. (Speaking of Dengue, yes, they have it here. Yes, three people in our training class have already had it. Yes, there is a fairly decent chance I could get it, but it is survivable).

Anyway, that said, the internet is magical for short period of time. When you’re sitting in front of a computer all day, even TMZ, Facebook, and Gchat can’t deliver enough information to keep you occupied. In Cambodia, I get to log on to a week’s worth of news, decide what’s really important enough to warrant loading with a 5Kbps connection (as opposed to trolling TFLN or MLIA for 2 hours), and then I get to forget it and interact with real people most of the time.

As you can imagine, things like hot showers, air conditioning, Pringles, ice cream, toilet paper, and going outside past 6pm are also luxuries to be had once in a while whenever we’re in the ‘big city’ (aka Kampong Cham, a town of about 60,000 people).

It’s flabbergasting (I maintain that I am supposed to be immersing myself in a new language and have no requirement to use English correctly) how quickly little things can make your day, really, when you’re even a little bit used to a routine. Sitting in my bed under my mosquito net listening to music and doing Sudoku in my sarong has become a treat a few times a week. A couple days ago, my little 2-year-old host cousin (my mom’s sister’s grandson who lives next door) came over and sat in my lap for about 5 minutes. That was the most human contact I’d had in one day since I left home, and let me tell you, it was awesome. Speaking of awesome, this week also led to the discovery of a little thing we like to call Ahvultihne tuk dah goh tuk gah (iced Ovaltine with), also known as liquid cake. It is roughly the tropical equivalent of hot cocoa on a cold, snowy winter night and is extra good because it is drunk through a bendy straw. I am not ashamed to admit that I spend a decent amount of time planning my afternoon trips to the ‘coffee shop’ to get a glass. Come to think of it, pretty much any delicious food can make my day – tropical fruits, occasional French-fry like potatoes at dinner, fried noodles, or maybe some grilled rice and bananas wrapped in banana leaves. Hands down the most delicious thing I’ve eaten here so far is this the pumpkin and coconut milk soup (baw baw l’peu) that I’ve had twice. The second time I got to make the coconut milk for it by soaking and squeezing shredded coconut through what I’m fairly sure was a pillowcase. Yeah.