Schedule

It’s actually cold here! Well, cold for Cambodia. The maybe two months where it is cool in Cambodia are beginning. It’s great to not be hot all the time and I actually may need to sleep with a blanket soon. Cambodian people are starting to wear jackets and complain about the cold. I’m still fine with just a shirt though.

I’m getting pretty comfortable here and life here is almost routine. At least one thing surprises me every day, but I’m starting to sort of know what’s going on. So, I can give you an overview of my schedule. In future posts, I will go into more detail about the work I’m doing, but here are the basics.

On weekday mornings I teach at the school. This usually consists of co-teaching 10th grade with a Cambodian counterpart in order to help them become better teachers. It’s a subtle, slow process. Monday is my long day. I go to the health center in the morning and then teach in the afternoon. Once my Khmer gets better, I’ll hopefully start doing some projects out of the health center. Right now, I just try to speak to people and figure out what’s going on and make connections.

I usually teach from about 7-11 and then go to the market to eat lunch with my host-family. My host family owns a pharmacy/money exchange/general store type place, so they eat lunch while they work. It’s typical for a Khmer family to do household things and run a store at the same time. As a result, stores do not offer American style service. Yesterday, I went to buy a pen and had to almost yell to have a woman come from doing her laundry so I could pay her the 12 cents for the pen.

Anyway, I usually eat with my family and then go back to school. I’m lucky that my house, the market and the school are all about a five-minute walk apart. From 1:00-2:00 I am in the English Library that was built with the help of the Peace Corps Volunteer who was at my site before me. Some days I receive Khmer lessons there and some days I offer an extra English class. It’s nice to be able to teach by myself and without the awful English for Cambodia book. The focus of the class is speaking. Typically 15-20 students show up, but I’ve only had a few classes so far.

Private classes are a big deal in Cambodia. My class is free, but many Khmer teachers offer private classes to supplement their incomes. Sometimes these classes are honest. Many of the teachers I work with charge a little, but offer the class for free to students who cannot afford it. Unfortunately, many students have to work to help their family, so just do not have the time. Some teachers, however, do not teach all the material so wealthy students have to pay for their private classes.

After my time at the library, I usually go back to my house to read and do a few odd-jobs around the house. Around 3:30 or 4:00, I go for a walk around the community. It is a good chance to get some exercise and practice my Khmer. Maybe once a week, I’ll bike to the local university to use the internet or run errands in the provincial town where the post office and the bank are. I come home around 5:30. Then, I read, shower and have dinner with my family. I spend a lot of time in my room at night because my family usually likes to watch lots of Thai soap opera DVDs dubbed over in Khmer. I can only watch so much.

I certainly have a lot of time to read each day, but I still wish I had more. There is so much to read. In addition to reading for fun, I spend a lot of time reviewing my Khmer language notes. I also try to read a little from the plethora of materials Peace Corps gave us about Khmer culture, teaching strategies and health. I also read news from my flash drive when I have electricity and I try to write a little about my experience and random things.

On weekends, I have a little more free time. I usually spend one half-day going to the provincial town or the university to use the internet. I spend the other time relaxing or talking to people in my community. Some weekends, I also take short trips. For example, this past weekend, a few volunteers and I went to Bavet, a town right before the Vietnamese border, which has lots of casinos and some western food. If you leave your passport at the police station, you can cross over to an international market in between Cambodia and Vietnam. It was fun to eat some good food and see a new place with more of a Vietnamese influence.

A few other miscellaneous things:

Interesting food: bon chio. It’s basically fluffy omelet filled with bean sprouts, meat and some other random stuff. It’s served with a spicy peanut sauce. Once the sauce is on it, it has the consistency of a watery omelet/pancake. Delicious.

Cross-cultural moment: At one Cambodian university, if you fail your year 1 medical school final exams, you cannot go onto year 2. You either have to reapply for year 1 or transfer to nursing school. Fail means get an F and, unlike America, you can get an E and it’s a passing grade. Students that failed were protesting because thought it was unfair for them to reapply with other students for year 1. The school and government argued that the practice was fair and that the country did not want unqualified doctors.

I was talking about it with one of my co-teachers. I had no problem with the policy, but his perspective was that students in Cambodia work very hard on things besides school, such as another job. So, the students should be allowed to go onto year 2 even if they don’t pass. It’s clear to me that he viewed the policy through a different lens than I did.

Also, I have some exciting projects coming up next month. I’m going to help some Cambodian teachers offer a class to university students about job interviews and CV and cover letter writing. We will offer the class again at my high school too. I’m also going to speak about saving money in America with a group of Cambodians who are learning about saving through an Ox-Fam program.

Lastly, to answer Watson’s question, I did see a Taylor Swift music video in a Khmer restaurant a few weeks ago.

I finally got a few photos up. I have not taken too many photos at my site because I don’t want to make the impression of being a camera-wielding tourist. Once I get a little more settled, I will take a lot of photos.

Me giving my speech at the opening of school:

From svay chrum lockdown

Students lining up to watch the opening of school:

From svay chrum lockdown

The side of the market in my town:

From svay chrum lockdown

The front of the market:

From svay chrum lockdown

A nice view of the rice paddies at sunset:

From svay chrum lockdown

Moon Festival:

Traditioinal Khmer Musician:

From svay chrum lockdown

My friend doing traditional Khmer song and dance:

From svay chrum lockdown

Preparing to aw amboke:

From svay chrum lockdown

Holidays

As my last post may have hinted, cross-cultural interactions have their fair share of frustrations. I am working hard to understand Cambodia so that I can do good work here and, I must admit, it’s a slow process. While all cultures are complex, I have found that Cambodian culture to be particularly enigmatic and filled with contradictions. For example, Cambodian people are extremely friendly and kind, but, historically, they have a propensity towards violence (particularly the Khmer Rouge period). This can be seen when their eyes light up when violence comes on TV (and by TV, I mean dubbed Thai soap opera DVDs that make the WWF look authentic). Other complexities include: Buddhism, Eastern communal culture (including indirectness and saving face), post-communism, what many consider to be an authoritarian government and poverty, among others.

Learning about Cambodian culture is a continual process. I try to include explanations throughout my blog for why things are how they are. If you want me to elaborate on the cultural background of something please let me know. This is helpful because part of my mission as a Peace Corps Volunteer is to share Cambodia with Americans. It is also possible that I have not considered your question and it will help me understand Cambodian culture better. I also want this blog to be entertaining so you continue to read it, so if culture interests you, I want to write about it.

So, onto the past two weeks.

Cambodia is believed to have the most holidays in the world. The past two weeks included the King’s birthday, the Water Festival and the Moon Festival. As a result, I had off from school on Thursday, then school Friday and Saturday (but Peace Corps Volunteers don’t teach on Saturdays), then no school until the following Thursday. And, this Monday we have off for Cambodian Independence Day (Though I will use the day to help one of my co-teachers train other young teachers).

On the King’s Birthday, I relaxed and spent time with my host-family and talked to various people at the market. In the afternoon, I went to a few gatherings with my host-brother. First, we went to a dinner the school director was hosting. Basically, people show up, eat and give money that goes to a poor pagoda. Then, my host-brother had to stop at another pagoda to drop off more money. There are a lot of donations to pagodas because so many were destroyed in Khmer Rouge times. Of course, in typical Cambodia spur-of-the-moment fashion, he told me that his brothers/cousins (there is little distinction in Cambodia) were having a dinner party and wanted me to come. So, even though I had already eaten and was not informed prior, I had to go. They all really wanted me to drink a lot, and it was hard to explain to them that I had to teach the next day, so I did not want to. I never realized how exposed one is when they stand in front of a class every day. I feel like if I am the slightest bit tired, or have a small cold, the students all notice.

After my classes were finished on Friday, I went to Pray Vang Town to meet up with the other volunteers from Svay Rieng and Pray Vang Provinces. It was a lot of fun. Pray Vang Town is beautiful and the hotel we stayed at had two movie channels (yes, that is a big deal for me now). It was great to catch up with other volunteers and we had a little Halloween party too at another development worker’s house.

I returned to my district on Monday because I wanted to see how the other festivals were celebrated in my village. Other than watching the boat races that were going on in Phnom Penh on TV, the Water Festival was uneventful. Next year, I will go into Phnom Penh and see it for myself.

I did get to experience the Moon Festival though. The teacher I worked with on the health projects invited me to celebrate it in his commune. Not everyone celebrates the festival every year, but when I told Khmer people that I was going to, they were very happy for me. I still do not completely understand the festival, but it involves predicting the following year in terms of harvests and rain. I intend to read more about it, but it was difficult for me to get an explanation because of the language barrier and so many monks were killed during Khmer Rouge regime, so the background of many religious customs is not widely known.

The festival was a lot of fun. There was praying, then singing, dancing and some skits. I had trouble understanding the skit though. My language skills right now are at the point where I’m decent and speaking with people because I can figure out the context, but I cannot follow other people’s fast-paced conversations and presentations. After the skit, there was more praying, some candle-lighting and then the aw amboke which means “finish the amboke.” Amboke was described to me as “plated rice,” but it reminds me of oatmeal before water is added. You eat it with bananas and it’s delicious. The bananas are soft, so they provide moisture.

I know amboke doesn’t sound that appetizing, but keep in mind I have not had western food in about six weeks. My food standards are definitely lowering and my tolerance for stinky fish is going up (I still don’t think I can handle prohap though). The volunteers who have been here for a year say they don’t even know what’s good anymore. Don’t get me wrong, Khmer food is usually delicious, but my palate is altering subtly.

That’s all about the holidays for now. Knowing Cambodia, there will be another bunch soon enough.