Welcome To The Family

Hello all! 

I am writing to you all from under my mosquito net in bed with a cold.  After over three weeks in Cambodia my body has finally succumbed to the assault on it by foreign germs and the drastic changes to my environment.  Unfortunately I was not well enough to go to my language and technical training sessions today, but happily Kate’s computer was close enough to reach from the bed to hijack for a few minutes. 

Its hard to “catch you up” on what has been going on for me over the past few weeks, but I will try to hit most of the high (and low) points. 

When we first arrived in country, we had a few days to get acclimated to our new environment as well as the climate of a volunteer’s life that Peace Corps Cambodia helps to set.  After those precious few honeymoon days of air conditioning, Wifi hotel rooms and the relatively cosmopolitan feel (and cuisine) of Phnom Penh, we were shipped out to our more rural and decidedly more Cambodian-feeling training province.  After only four nights there it was time to meet our host families and break up into even smaller training groups that were based mostly on what you would be doing in Cambodia for the next two years. 

Kate and I are both education volunteers – specifically she will be focused on training Cambodian (or K’mai – this is actually how the term “Khmer” is pronounced and is used when referencing Cambodia’s language, people and overall cultural institutions) teachers to be effective English teachers.  My job is to teach English alongside a HCN (or host country national for those not yet fluent in Peace Corps jargon) and to work on or establish various youth development projects as those needs present themselves to me over my two years of service.  To that end, approximately one half of our PST (or pre-service training) over the next two months will help us to become familiar with teaching practices and the educational system and nuances in Cambodia.  The second half of our PST focuses on language skills and cultural immersion, to which having and living with a host family plays a very large role.

Our host family is small and unique in comparison to our fellow PCTs (Peace Corps trainees, we are not officially sworn in until we complete PST – you follow?).  At the heart of our family is our “yea” or grandmother.  She has an older grandson who occasionally stays with us when not in Phnom Penh on our small “farm” that mainly cultivates rice in the paddies that surround our home.  We also have a sister, though the relationship to our grandmother is somewhat unclear, if indeed there is actually a familial relationship at all.  We do know that the majority of her immediate family lives just next door, but that our sister, named “Mom” (pronounced “mum” - try to keep up) is basically here to cook for us and tend to other jobs that our yea can no longer do...which really isn't much, she has got to be about 75 or 80 and I saw her pull out a huge clump of weeds the other day that I know would have given me issues - I also recently saw her walking to our fence with a handheld hoe in her hands to do who knows what.  These two ladies are both very sweet to us and cook incredible K’mai dishes that include tons of local veggies, fish, pork, beef, chicken (less frequently as it is expensive here) and the occasional oddball dish like fried ants or chopped up frogs.  I should say for the record that I have not had a meal here that I have really disliked.  Everything is served with rice in Cambodia, so we always must eat our food atop loads of white rice. 

During dinner on our first night with our new family, my host brother who speaks a little English, told me that after meeting my family and a few of the neighbors, my yea and her friend (we call yea 2) each ran over to each others’ house to tell the other that I bore a striking resemblance to the current King of Cambodia.  At first I was honored and touched that they were giving me such a lofty compliment so soon after meeting.  After some more broken English from our brother, I realized though, that the main reason I looked like this King Sihamoni, was because we share a similar balding pattern.  Oddly enough, I felt even more at home that my new family, much like my actual family, would make open jokes about my baldness.  I knew that this would be a good home and family for as long as we would be able to stay here. 

Kate and I live in a more remote part of the town/village than do many other PCTs, so we bike to our language and technical classes twice a day each is about a 4km round trip.  We often ride to children yelling “hello” or “what is your name?” – the extent of the English training that they have reached all the more reinforcing the need for Peace Corps volunteers to teach English.  I will try to write a post specifically about our “mission” here soon. 

One of my favorite stories so far involves this very phenomenon.  As Kate and I were riding home one evening, we passed a home that always has about three or four younger children playing out front, they always see us and they always yell to us, seemingly hoping to get a “hello” back from us in either English or K’mai.  On this particular night, however, one of the younger boys was relieving himself on the side of the road, as K’mai boys –young or old – often do.  Kate rode by first waving and yelling hello back.  As I watched I noticed that we caught the little peeing boy off guard so that by the time Kate had passed and I was just next to him he was so excited to see us that he whipped around to ensure that his “hello!” was also counted.  Understandably, he lost all track of his previous task and while turning, continued to pee in a 360-degree arc around himself, spraying himself, the girl next to him and anything else within range of his stream in the process.

Our house itself is pretty plush by K’Mai standards.  We have three rooms to ourselves – a large main room where we keep our things and have a small desk, a bedroom and a bathroom to ourselves.  A disclaimer though: bathrooms here are not what you might think.  Most bathrooms here have squat toilets, often a glorified term for “holes in the ground,” I’ll let you make your own mental pictures.  Often there is no shower, but a cistern that holds a hundred or more gallons of water that is used for showering and flushing via a bucket.  We lucked out and have a “Western” style toilet that you can sit on, but we have no running water, so we still flush by pouring water in after our business has been done.  We shower simply by pouring the often cold water over our heads and bodies and since we have no running water, we use mostly rain water collected by various apertures around the house that funnel into our cisterns and central holding containers.  We use the same water to drink, though only after we disinfect it with bleach to kill viruses and bacteria and filter it through a world-class (when it works correctly) water filtration system.  We have electricity to a minimal extent, but no AC or anything like that.  Our home is very open so mosquitoes and other bugs can come freely in through the windows or open vents in the walls – we sleep under mosquito netting each night.  We also have other roommates like the two-foot blue and orange gecko living in our foyer, smaller geckos that eat the bugs (so they live rent free) as well as some other more unwanted pests that have giving way to some memorable stories.  (See my upcoming post “The Rat” for more details.)  

Beyond these amazing new memories and, now, commonplace happenings around our new home, our lives are beginning to resemble something of a familiar routine.  We wake up early (though not as early as at first when we were unused to the rooster crowing at 4:30am) and usually begin our day by going to the market or a local restaurant for  a quick breakfast.  Breakfast is the only meal we do not eat with our host family as it is not a part of the contract Peace Corps negotiates with them and allows us the freedom to sleep in somewhat and eat what we please, though its usually still rice.  We go to classes in the morning and afternoons and come home for a shower, some lunch (and sometimes a nap if its really hot!), and some study in between the four-hour language and technical sessions.  At night we sometimes linger with other PCTs in the heart of the town to grab a snack and talk before coming home for dinner at six with the family.  Cambodia is no stranger to snack foods of all kinds.  I have already established myself as a loyal customer of the “fried banana lady” who now tends to give me a few free pieces of friend potato when I buy from her.  There are also tuk-luks, or smoothies that are blended with your choices of fruit, sweetened condensed milk and ice – so refreshing after a day with full humidity in the high 90s.  I have also tried the friend crickets that taste just like a crunchy piece of fried-ness, with maybe a slightly earthy or nutty flavor.  Kate and I have also drunk our fair share of the K'mai equivalent to Starbucks: strong instant coffee with a few tablespoons of sweetened condensed milk and sugar over ice…another great way to beat the heat while simultaneously earning countless new cavities. 

Anyhow, I plan to keep up the writing as often as I have something to talk about – I welcome comments and questions if you have them.  I’ll leave you with this – my first impression of the K’mai people are that they are a generally friendly sort that are as likely to regard an American as a celebrity as they would be to invite them into their home for dinner.  While the darker sides are most certainly present, as is the case with all peoples, it would be a hard case to make to say that Americans and Cambodians are so different that we should ignore one another or not help each other when one has the need and the other the means to assist.  I am excited to serve Cambodia, and my own country, while here to my fullest effort, but I am also truly excited that I get to teach our K’mai brethren about America and in turn, to teach anyone interested and reading my blog a little bit about the K’mai.