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.
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