Pchum Ben

The list of holidays in Cambodia is as long as Angkor Wat is old.  While I have heard unsubstantiated rumors that Cambodia has more official holidays than any other nation-state on the planet, the fact that Cambodians tend to “take off” more than just the actual day of the holiday, usually the days before and after as well if not more.

Pchum Ben is a Buddhist holiday in Cambodia that celebrates the deceased ancestors of one’s family.  At its essence, the impetus of the holiday is that, as mortals, we can somehow benefit our dead relatives by feeding them things like rice (naturally), fruit, cakes and water (because ghosts need to wash big meals down too…).  This basic level of understanding Kate and I gained through participation in the rituals with our host family and by speaking with some of our language tutors. 

At the height of the festival, families go to their local wats at different times of the day to make offerings of food and money to the monks that, it is believed, are then directly offered to the ghosts of relatives dead and gone via the monks who are constantly chanting and giving thanks.  Offerings are also made to one’s ancestors by participating in a VERY early morning ceremony where family members go to the wat and walk in a circle around the central pagoda three times.  At each corner, it is expected that you toss a small piece of rice cake or fruit away from the temple (presumably towards the ghosts) into the ever-growing piles that reach several feet in height after the ceremony is over.  This makes the angry ghosts, those who are in the Buddhist equivalents of purgatory or hell, turn back and not harm the living.  It sounds like the prologue of a sweet fantasy novel, but its actually an amazing service to be apart of.  The smell of incense is overpoweringly thick, there are so many people waking around the temple that its difficult to take full steps and the 4am bike ride in the dark to the wat makes you feel like you are either going to a Halloween party or a midnight service on Christmas. 

The festival seems to run over a three day period, during which the Cambodian transit system goes into its “holiday mode” where the number of traffic accidents goes up drastically, the price for travel increases (sometimes by a few 100 percent) and families tend to gather together at their “homelands” or where they were raised.  My usual 3k-bikeride to town went from a relatively serene and leisurely trip to one of alert, terror and a strong desire to not cross the road at all.  Cars usually drive somewhat recklessly on the highway the runs by our house and traffic laws always have been negotiable in this country, but commuting via bike on Pchum Ben felt more like a game of high-stakes Frogger. 

On the plus side, the food is awesome – but not on account of any traditions.  Since houses are suddenly full of family members, everyone is vying for the title of best cook, and since our house in particular happened to have two Americans living there, the stakes were much higher.  We had some dishes that were truly amazing and made me wonder why we had not experienced that cacophony of tantalizing spices and flavors previously.  Roasted duck that was then stewed in a thick spicy, peppery peanut sauce, curry that would knock out your neighborhood Thai joint, and this salty, rich dish with potatoes, carrots and pork that was cooked in pork fat so long it almost tasted creamy (nom,nom!).  While we had a particularly skilled cook catering to us during PST, I couldn’t help but think that this was the food I had been waiting for.

Cambodian food in general, I must say, is something that I have generally been disappointed in as it is relatively bland and has little variety.  When you consider Cambodia to be nestled among China, Thailand and Vietnam – regular leviathans of Asian cuisine – you might assume that Cambodia is one of those undiscovered jewels of culinary awesomeness.  Not so. 

Ill leave you with some pictures of my extended family, and my Yea in particular, making traditional Pchum Ben cakes of rice, beans and pork or banana wrapped in a banana leaf and cooked until the insides become gooey and delicious. 

The whole family (in town for the holiday) and a few neighbors, getting
in on the Pchum Ben fun.   Here they are making the traditional rice cakes with pork and beans. 

My bad ass with a heart of gold Yea.  She is stuffing 

rice and filling into the banana leaf wrapping that will 

then be cooked.  Also, she got up at 3am to do this...

Just for fun, one of the geckos that lives in our house.
Its called a T'kai because of the noise it makes.
We have one that is about two feet long, but
this one stands at a measly six or seven inches...

Our house! Here you can see the front porch, the
table where we typically eat all meals and the rice paddy
beyond on the side of our house.  The buildings beyond
are actually a high school where we practiced teaching
during training. 

Boost to morale and R&R

One of the larger and more looming requirements to Peace Corps service is passing a language test towards the end of one’s PST.  We all study the language of Cambodia, K’mai (or Khmer if you like, but nobody pronounces it like that here) for about four hours a day during training.  Peace Corps’ tried and true approach to language learning is fantastic because you get to practice what you have learned with your host family or by buying something at the market only minutes after having learning it.  In some ways this is more stressful because you often “forced” to use the language simply by living your daily life around town (buying laundry detergent, food, using transportation), but it typically seems to help people practice and retain vocabulary and grammar. 

Peace Corps wants all of its volunteers to learn the language of your host country so that you can be the most effective volunteer you can be.  To that end, we all are required to take and score a minimal passing score on a nationally administered speaking and comprehension test.  Many trainees want to do well on this as it is one of very few chances to really demonstrate what you have learned in a quantifiable or qualitative way given that Peace Corps seems to be vastly compromised of Type-A personalities. 

We all also want to do well because we want to learn the language; we want to be able to communicate in a basic way with our new families and co-workers; we want to make proud and impress our language teachers, who act as big brothers or sisters, cultural “hand-holders” and mentors all at once.

On one of our last hub-site days towards the end of our Pre-Service Training, we were all heading to our hub-site with bags packed for a short but much needed two-night vacation away from our training sites.  We also would find out the scores of our final language test taken just a few days before. 

Proudly and happily, Kate and I did very well and attribute a great deal of our success to having who I consider to be the best LCF/Language teacher in our group – thanks, Savin!  My wife is a rock star at life and stands out as one of the best speakers in our group of sixty.  Opening our envelopes and doing better than we hoped on our language test was not only a big boost, but also a huge relief, it was one of the last big obstacles in our way of being sworn in as full-fledged volunteers. 

If that wasn’t enough, I finally received a package from my mom that I had been waiting for, for several weeks.  Thanks, mom! It’s amazing how a jar of one’s favorite peanut butter, some hard candy and a bag of (still crunchy) double-stuffed Oreos can make the problems of the world fade. 

That night the three-fold boost to my morale was complete when we got to our hotel room to find…wait for it…a hot water heater.   Some of Cambodia’s better hotels have these little individual hot water heaters built directly into the water line of a shower so it warms the water as it flows.  Now, you may have heard me complain a few times about the stifling heat and unrelenting humidity…indeed it feels like I have not been dry since disembarking from the airplane from Bangkok.  But, it had been over two months since my last hot shower.  All the bucket showers and St. Ives exfoliating scrub cannot make you feel as clean or as human as a hot shower.  I really recommend everyone reading this blog to go two months without a hot shower, simply because on day 61 when you take a hot shower you may understand the meaning of life.   

As if my super-fun weekend of awesomeness could get any better, the next morning we headed out to a small little getaway town in southern Cambodia that is dotted with cafes, restaurants and shops run by expatriates from various Western countries.  Over the next 24 hours I would gorge myself on the damn-near closest thing I will get to BBQ ribs, decent burgers, pancakes (pumpkin spice and with chocolate chips no less!!!) and for my wife, fru-fru frozen drinks. 

I am not sure if I ever really understood the term “recharging your batteries” in the same way that I now do.  Making small talk with some British pup owners, watching rugby and drinking very cold beer and enjoying the company of some of my closest friends I have made in country was an amazing way to unwind and gear up for the last push of training.  

Cambodia's Biggest Problem...

No its not education, its not corruption, its not even the hat or the bugs...Cambodia’s largest problem preventing them from climbing the global ranks to “developed” status is undoubtedly its extensive and widespread lack of padded and cushioned seating. 

I first noticed this grave issue upon first arrival to this great country and have only continued to see the plight of this countrywide deficiency.  Anyone who has been to Cambodia and sat in a hotel chair, attended any kind of function at the Wat, sat in one of those little plastic chairs (that are definitely not weight-rated for Americans, I have broken two now…) or eaten dinner sitting K’mai style (basically sitting on top of a large wooden-slatted table, cross-legged for the duration of the meal) knows exactly what I am talking about.  I have had more cases of numb-ass, feet falling asleep and bottom bruising in my last two and half months than the rest of my combined life. 

While my primary assignment in Cambodia is to be a PCV and work on education and youth development initiatives, I am seriously considering writing a grant to import some American-standard padding for chairs, beds and vehicles in Cambodia.  There is actually probably a study somewhere out there demonstrating the correlation between the rising prosperity of a country and increases to the “cushiness” of its seating.

My frustration with this issue is only exacerbated by the fact that I have lost about 20lbs. (seemingly all from my ass, and thus my last remaining natural padding is gone) and my daily 10-12k bike rides (the seats are horrible…).  While in our training village it was difficult to choose between the stone seats around the dinner table and the unyielding, unpadded desk chair at our house, our new home will have several options ranging from a wooden slatted day bed or wooden slatted “sofas”, though the term sofa should not apply to something as torturously uncomfortable as this. 

Maybe the reason Cambodia has so many issues is that nobody wants to sit down at a desk or around the negotiation table long enough to get anything done.  I think if you really want to make a country more prosperous and democratic, give them nice chairs and padded seat cushions for their places of work, they won’t even want to leave to go home on their scarcely padded mode of conveyance to their even crappier padded kitchen table only to lie down on their rock hard or uneven wooden beds.  Problem solved...

Site announcement and visit!

I realize that my blog has suffered over the past month – I was kind of surprised to see that my last post was about killing the rat (which is still kind of awesome, I think…), mainly since so much has happened since then.  It not like I have been bored twiddling my thumbs, from permanent site announcements, to vacations, to swear-in and moving in to our new home, I have a great deal to talk about.

In fact I have been trying to keep in mind those little details that make blogs so entertaining so that I can recap when I finally put pen to paper, err…fingers to keys.  So I will try to give you a shotgun blast of updates over the past month and will ambitiously state that I will give you a retroactive post per day for one week. Ready set go.

Almost one month ago Kate and I gathered with our fellow trainees for a particularly special hub-site day, when all of the trainees from our group pour in from the three training villages to a larger central town.  As with many important milestones in one’s Peace Corps service, we were all simultaneously feeling a variety of emotions on our tuk-tuk ride in (Have I mentioned these yet?  Tuk-tuks are Cambodia’s approximation of taxis in the US, but that scarcely does them justice.  Imagine a motorcycle rigged to pull a small carriage and you have it.  They are really for shorter distances, but we sometimes test their abilities with trips of 20-30km.  Also, they would fit about four people in accordance with American definitions of comfort – we tend to have about six or seven in them on a regular basis).  As we enjoyed the wind in our faces from the bumpy, open-air ride to town, I remember literally being able to parse out the various emotions – excitement, confusion, relief, calm and some serious apprehension about finding out where we would each be spending the next two years of our lives.

So few moments in life are a true crossroads, where you can literally peer down different paths and see how the future will likely unfold based on a single decision or event.  Peace Corps as an organization must realize the power of these events because it seems like once you hit the send button on your electronic application you are subject to one every other week. 

The majority of the day was a typical site visit but we sat through each presentation or session with the impatience of children, only one thing on our collective minds.  Safety and security session, medical session (one of my favorites, our Medical Officer has an amazing balance of humor and knowledge that allows her to talk about chronic diarrhea, snake bites and skin irritations in the most comical ways), lunch, etc…but early in the afternoon we gathered in our main meeting room to see where everyone would end up.  The staff had outlined a giant map of Cambodia in tape on the ground with flags to mark the possible sites for the sixty of us PCTs. 

I must admit, this was an exciting way to approach a potentially frightening day.  As each PCTs name was called, the rest of us cheered and shouted them on as they walked to the location of their site on the map.  I think it was this event that made me realize the strong bonds I had developed with so many of my fellow trainees – I think something happens when you are with a group of such like-minded people serving a higher cause than yourself.  Over the past two months we have all experienced many of the same bitter frustrations, sweetest of joys, and identical WTF moments.  We had only each other to lean on through all of this and the experience has tempered incredibly deep friendships already. 

When we suddenly found out in which part of Cambodia we would be in and where our site would be I was excited to learn that we wouldn’t be going far from our training village and will be serving in a nearby provincial town where Kate will be “teaching teachers” at a Regional Teacher Training Center (RTTC) and I will be teaching English at the high school.  From a work perspective, one of the best aspects of our new community is the high density of NGOs and community programs that Kate and I will have the chance to become involved with for our secondary projects. 

The day following our site announcements everyone needed to get to Phnom Penh in order to then ship out to their respective provincial towns, and from them, catch more specialized transportation to their individual sites.  Kate and I were two of six trainees that didn’t need to go anywhere, as we were already in our province and therefore didn't need to travel through PP to get to our sites.  So we spent the day beginning to survey the town in more detail and took part of the day to relax and unwind in what would soon be our new home. 

It wasn’t until the next day that we found out that there was a problem with what was identified as our new permanent home.  In Cambodia, PCVs stay almost exclusively with host families, often living in the family’s spare room or in a smaller building within the family’s compound adjacent to the main building.  Since we are serving as a married couple, Peace Corps typically tries to find a living situation for couples that allows for a bit more privacy and independence than what is typical for the average single volunteer.  Often times this means that couples get their own bathroom, kitchen and sometimes even their own separate house entirely.  At our training site, we had a building to ourselves with a bathroom and bedroom to call our own but relied solely on our family for meals and any other necessities. 

We were invited along with the PC Staff to look at what was identified as our new home.  It was the upper floor of a small family’s house and Peace Corps had negotiated that Kate and I would have the use of the entire floor as our own apartment-like setup.  To leave out some of the gory negotiation details that followed, Kate and I left that house agreeing with the PC staff that both the family and their accommodations would not be a good fit for us for a variety of reasons.  In retrospect, we are incredibly grateful to the staff at PC who helped us navigate this, if not for them we would not have ended up in “our house.” 

The second house, which would end up being our home, was a separate building on the property of a medium-sized family of six.  There was nothing further to be desired from this house – running water, electricity, several appliances already ready for our use (including a refrigerator, small TV and even a washing machine…).  The family was simultaneously welcoming, lively and generous – we were later told that we were not the first set of PCVs to live here – and we immediately recognized them as our new family.  The front yard had several of the fruit trees we had become used to at our training site, the location of the house was close to the smaller of two markets within the town limits and is only about three blocks away from a large estuary that feeds into one of Cambodia’s major rivers.  In many ways, our new living situation is perhaps the best of all worlds – a rural feel with some of the conveniences offered by a provincial town, privacy from the center of the town but close access to many different people and organizations and the luxury of being able to cook for ourselves and live privately while also having a close proximity to a great family.  Truth be told, I am almost a little embarrassed around my fellow trainees that our situation is as great as it is. 

I think my biggest disappointment is entirely self-inflicted – in many ways this reality is a far cry from the perceived image of what I imagined my Peace Corps service to be.  It is hard not to form an image of what you will be doing for two years; I had built up an image of hardship service in the middle of nowhere.  I assumed that my MacGuyver-like skills and willingness to wrestle snakes before bedtime meant that this is where I would end up for my Peace Corps service.  BUT…this is where Kate and I are needed most; there is important work for us to do here, only I may end up doing it in slacks and at the front of a classroom instead of hiking boots and in six-inch deep mud.