Thailand!

For me, it’s a good time to flee the heat and travel a little. If you’ve been reading this blog for almost two years (hats off to you, and thanks!) then you know last year at this time I travelled the length of Vietnam. This year I headed off to Thailand! I’d been to Thailand back when I was in…7^th grade, I think, travelling with my family and some family friends, however, my memories of the country are largely dominated by the palaces and many pagodas that we visited. Buddhism and the temple architecture to go with it are pretty similar in Thailand and Cambodia (though not exactly the same), so I was interested in broadening my experience in Thailand beyond the pagoda scene.

Thailand also marked, unbelievable though this seems, the first time I was really travelling alone. Upon reflection, it turns out that despite having travelled a great deal I’ve always travelled with or to someone. I was excited to see how I felt about travelling solo, and so on April 9^th I set off to Thailand.

Getting from my site to Bangkok is an arduous journey unless you fly. It can be (and was for me) over twelve hours on a bus just to get to the border. Once across, travel becomes easier – Thailand is well set-up to handle the ever-increasing flow of tourism to the country. However, I didn’t stay in Bangkok, instead starting my trip by flying (in country flight can cost as little as $35) up to the northern city of Chiang Mai.

It’s pretty there

Chiang Mai is a rather laid back city. The center is a square delineated by the vestiges of the old city wall, and inside that square everything is basically within walking distance. There are over twenty pagodas within the old city walls, so I did see some of them (you’d have to be blind not to). In addition, Chiang Mai is the ideal place for backpackers keen to spend the day with elephants or flying gibbons, or go out trekking in the hills. I signed up for a day-long bike tour around the outer parts of the city, which was a fun way to get outside the tourist bubble of the inner city. Some of it was very familiar to me—rice fields, sticky-rice and mango snacks, etc.—but we also visited a candy-making factory (they make the candy with rice flour and palm sugar), and saw more of the old ruins of the northern empire. Somewhere between the Angkor Empire of present-day Cambodia and the Siam Empire of present-day Thailand there was also a northern population called the Khon Mueang people of Lannathai, and even today many people in northern Thailand speak Lanna in addition to Thai. It even has a different script, and my guide spoke of how he wished that they were separate from Thailand. Interestingly, that desire for freedom from Thailand didn’t conflict with his own distaste for Cambodia. When he found out that I lived there, he made a face. “People in Cambodia don’t want to work with us. They’re not friendly.” He told me. I refrained from telling him that people in Cambodia say the same thing about Thailand.

Water-fight parties everywhere

From Chiang Mai I took the night train (loads of fun – we should have more trains in the US) back down to Bangkok in time to meet up with my fellow PCV and friend Christine for a day. It was good to have company because I arrived just in time for Thai New Year (which, surprise, coincides with Khmer New Year). Called Songkran, the holiday is also a very big deal in Thailand, where people turn out in the streets armed with buckets and water guns to drench one another in water, and cover anyone foolish enough to be on the streets with baby powder. Spoiler: baby powder turns into a pretty nasty paste when combined with all that water. Together, Christine and I managed to survive the celebrations, but it’s not a tradition I’m planning on taking home with me.

Bangkok is an amazing city, particularly coming from my perspective of having been in small-town Cambodia. The most exciting part for me was the public transportation. There are two different subways, an underground, a city-wide bus system, taxis, tuktuks, and an express ferry. The last one is the best deal – for fifty cents you can ride the entire length of the Chao Phraya river that cuts through Bangkok. It’s like a river cruise, only people actually use it as a means of transportation. Bangkok also is the place to go for shopping. In addition to have the Chatuchak weekend market – said to be the largest market in Southeast Asia – it also has tons of giant shopping malls, the crowning glory of which is filled from top to bottom with designer stores. Want to hit up Gucci, Chanel, Valentino, and Hermès all in one go? No problem.

The ferry express!

Another fun element of Bangkok is all the different people. People from all over the world are there, and the city is full of young people rocking a variety of styles. Bangkok also seems like a pretty friendly city for gender bending and people of all different gender and sexual identities. Setting aside the famous trans-cabaret shows, people just going about their day-to-day lives appeared very comfortable interacting with and expressing their own homosexuality, heterosexuality, transexuality, pansexuality, you name it. It was a nice change from an environment where every week I get asked if I’m married yet and why not. Obviously, I’m giving the rose-tinted perspective on Bangkok, given I was only there for a week, but the immediate visible range of different people was fun.

A shrine in the middle of the malls

Ultimately, travelling alone was less dramatic than I’d expected. I think in part it’s because I was travelling in Southeast Asia – a region known for being a good place for single women traveling, and very much in my comfort zone despite the differences between Thailand and Cambodia. I also think that, though I haven’t been literally travelling alone before, much of Peace Corps prepares you for many of the things that might mark travelling alone. I was already used to taking the initiative on almost all my decisions, figuring out how to get around, operating in an unfamiliar environment etc. I enjoyed Thailand immensely, but I’m probably not going to explicitly seek out chances to travel solo. There’s something motivating for me about sharing the experience with someone else in the moment.

Coming back to site truly marks the beginning of the rush towards the end. Come May there is another teacher training workshop to plan, and a Camp GLOW organized by the volunteers in my province. Camp GLOW (Girls Leading Our World) is a global Peace Corps initiative in which volunteers work with young women and girls to help build self-esteem, educate on health issues, and give them tools/resources for future careers etc. We’re hosting ours at the end of May and if anyone feels inclined to donate I’m sharing the link below. Donations would help pay for the cost of lodging for the girls, food, resources like pens, markers, paper, etc. and transportation and venue costs.

Come June, my parents will arrive in Cambodia and I’m excited for the chance to show them my life here. July will be my final full month in Cambodia. Although initially we were told to plan on being in country until October, timing for incoming groups, as well as staff resources, and the Cambodian teaching schedule means that I will be leaving Cambodia in at the beginning of August. It’s hard to believe that the end is only three short months away.

Finally, I want to thank everyone for their thoughtful and insightful comments to my previous blog. I really appreciate everyone who takes the time to read about my experiences here, but I especially appreciated the responses to my last post, all of which help my ongoing attempt to process my life here.

Read more about Camp GLOW/donate here!

Check out more Thailand pictures (including me with a manikin dressed entirely in condoms) here.

It’s 6:45am and I’m sitting outside a small elementary school with the grade 4 teacher whose English class I’ve come to observe. After the usual opening pleasantries (“have you eaten rice yet?”) she asks my age.

“23.”

Children playing outside an elementary school

“Oh, you’re young.”

Age is one of the most common ‘get-to-know-you’ questions in Cambodia because it determines how you address someone. Rather than using names, you generally call someone ‘older,’ or ‘younger’ sister, brother, aunt, uncle, etc. (whether that person is actually a relative or not). So the teacher’s question isn’t rude. Nevertheless, I can’t help wondering what people think about my response. I’m almost inevitably younger than anyone expects me to be. So what does this teacher think about the fact that I’m here, young enough to be her daughter, yet telling her how to teach, calling her and her colleagues in for workshops, even evaluating her?

How would she feel if she knew I’ve never even studied to be a teacher?

Honestly, it’s relatively easy for me to do (no one ever questions my qualifications or my ‘right’ to do anything) because I am a white foreigner from a Western (English-speaking) country. I do things all the time here that I would never do in the States –things like teaching at a teacher training college, waltzing into government offices and asking to haul all of the grade 4 teachers in the district into a workshop. It’s the kind of thing teachers twice my age are reluctant to do because it violates the hierarchies of power that structure so much of Khmer society.

Students at this year’s river clean-up

To me, this feels like an unwarranted privilege, and it’s one from which people with “qualifications” similar to mine benefit all the time. A couple weeks ago the expats here organized the second annual river clean-up on a Thursday (read about last year’s here). Hundreds of students came on their school’s orders to help clean the river at the request of the expats rather than study. To the credit of said expats, they went through the government offices (Department of Education, etc) to get the appropriate permissions and letters, but I can’t help imagining whether those permissions would have been granted if a Khmer person with no connections to those offices had walked in with a similar request.

That’s not an isolated example. Every time I get permission for a workshop or start a club that breaks the curriculum norms, I feel like I’m cashing in on privileges I haven’t earned. I’m not kidding myself- I know that I’m allowed to exist outside the social hierarchies of Khmer culture because of the legacy and on-going exertion of Western power (imperialism?). I like to temper my self-condemnation for this with justifications: “No one at my school is doing x because they haven’t been exposed to the idea before.” “Part of my job is to bring new ideas and teaching styles to the school.” “If I don’t help lead this workshop it isn’t going to happen, and we’re not going to be able to start teaching English in 4^th grade as the Ministry of Education wants.” (let’s leave the politics behind teaching English at all for a different post). Sometimes I feel like I’m feeding myself Dumbledore-esque consolations. That these things are “for the greater good.” If you’ve read the seventh Harry Potter book (and probably even if you haven’t) you know how hollow a justification that is.

My co-teachers are aware of this power difference, and seemingly unresentful. A lot of the time when I’m talking to a school director or even the director of the Provincial Office of Education, it’s because Bunda, Phallin, or Leakhena (most often Bunda) has told me to go do it. “It’s better if you ask,” I’m often told. At their instruction I’ve gotten keys to classrooms, access to the school’s projector, letters of permission for them to go to workshops, and more. I like to think that because I learned the language, wear the clothes, go through the appropriate channels, work with co-teachers, and ask for their opinions that it mitigates (at least partially?) the fact that if I were Khmer I probably wouldn’t be allowed to do most of the things I do here. But just because they asked me, does that make it ok?

I’m not expressing a new dilemma. It’s a problem that’s been at the heart of aid and development work for years. To Peace Corps’ credit, I think the program’s emphasis on community integration, working closely with counter-parts and respect for cultural norms means PCVs often use their Western privileges less demonstrably. I hope we do. But the idea of change as good is central to development work. It’s the idea that, whatever you have now isn’t good enough, and the impudent belief that a 23-year-old with a BA in English and International studies can help you “improve.”

Class at the PTTC

Overall, in the instances where I can achieve something my co-teachers or counterparts want, I feel less conflicted. I think using avenues of privilege reinforce them, no matter your intentions, but I guess I feel mostly okay about it if it supports the people with whom I’m working. Where I really start to doubt myself is when I’m selling an idea that no one has requested. When I try to get each student to do something unique, something different from the rest of the class. Or ask the women in Bunda and my Women’s Club  to self-reflect and individually express themselves. Am I just imposing a value for individualism and ‘creativity’ from my own cultural background? When I convince teachers not to let students talk to each other during exams, or copy each other’s answers, am I forcing my beliefs onto them? (I may have mentioned before, but I’ve yet to encounter the Khmer word for “cheat” as in “You cheated on the exam.”)

Last year I had a woman come down to do a one-day workshop with the PTTC students. She is a certified ELL instructor, whose job it is to travel the world doing workshops like these. At the end of her first lesson, she tried to get the students to line up in order of their birth months. The activity was a disaster. Not only was the concept of doing a line-up like that completely baffling to the students (they’d never done anything like it before), but many of my students are from villages where birthdays are unimportant. Some didn’t know the month they were born. The teacher was dismayed by the activity’s failure, convinced it revealed the paucity of the students’ education that they didn’t understand the basic line-up idea. I don’t know if it’s a reflection of the problems in the Khmer education system or if the problem was simply that the line-up was designed for kids who were used to doing a certain type of activity. What right do I have to determine what these students ‘should’ know how to do?

Phallin and Bunda

For the most part I’ve tried to steer clear of projects where I have to work hard to convince someone they want to do something, and since leaving the lower secondary school where I taught the first year, I fell less like I am doing this. This isn’t because I’ve discovered how to avoid imposing my cultural framework on my classes or students. Rather, now I only work with young, flexible co-teachers who want to discuss new ideas with me and who have had experiences with different approaches to education as a result of growing up in Phnom Penh. But that’s part of the catch – they’re open to these things because Phnom Penh is full of NGOs (often foreigner initiated/run), changing the culture of the city.

Furthermore, it  never ceases to amaze me how hard it is to think outside of your cultural framework. I can’t, for instance, understand the point of having an exam if the students can copy from one another. When I ask Women’s Club to choose women they admire and everyone tells me their mother, all citing the exact same reasons I catch myself judging the uniformity of the response. Beliefs such as cheating=bad, and expressing individual, unique thoughts=good are so deeply ingrained in me that I can’t seem to think around them. And I wonder how much that inability influences my actions and judgments every day.

Culture is like air- most of the time you don’t even realize it’s there. And I think that the reality of this protects my privilege, because I am living in a culture where, as a Western foreigner, I get to play by different rules. Honestly, I don’t think the teacher (or anyone else for that matter) means anything by observing my youth. Nine times out of ten, my foreign status trumps my age, my gender, and my inexperience.

Culture, of course, is not stagnant and so in that sense it’s silly for me to condemn development or promoting change. However, change in Cambodia often seems to be coming from outsides forces. The factors that determine what it means to be “developed” are not equal, and “globalization” is often synonymous with “Westernization.” Somewhat childishly, I wish I felt that the value of my presence and work here, as well as that of other development projects, was more black and white—that I could draw a line that clearly delineated what is cultural imperialism and what is working with a community for positive change. Instead I feel as though there are no ‘good’ answers, and that in the end all I can say is “but at least I had questions about it!”

I’m not sure that is enough.

***

With some coincidentally good timing, one of the PC staff shared an article a few days after I wrote this post that poses some of the same questions I struggle with here. I think it contains extremely relevant research on how culture influences who people are and how we think. I highly recommend reading: “We Aren’t the World”

Bunda and Phallin met each other while studying psychology at the Royal University of Phnom Penh. After graduating, they both secured jobs down at my PTTC where in addition to co-teaching English with me, they’ve taught psychology, math, ethics, and the occasional home ec class to the trainees.  We arrived at the school together –fortunate timing for me because it meant that we were all finding our way and open to new ideas and activities.

Bunda and Phallin are from a different place and a different era than the majority of teachers with whom I work in Cambodia. Raised in Phnom Penh and born well after the Khmer Rouge, they’ve been exposed to a variety of ideas, ways of learning, and critical thinking skills. They’ve had opportunities that people growing up in the chaos post-Pol Pot didn’t have, and the urban setting of Phnom Penh exposed them to more diversity as well. Working with them is part of what gives me hope for development in Cambodia, because to me they demonstrate the way people in a deeply traumatized country can move forward.

Bunda in particular impresses me – she’s smart, and driven, and not afraid to take control. More than once she’s told me exactly what she wants me to do or not do. While that may not sound like much, as a foreigner in a very deferential culture, it’s something people rarely do to me in a professional setting and something I very much appreciate. She’s always game, whether it’s singing an English song to our class that I taught her literally minutes before the lesson, explaining how to put a condom on a banana, or figuring out how to make vegetarian food for me.

On Saturday, at 6:30 am music blasted from multiple speakers set up in a yellow and pink tent on a narrow neighborhood street in Phnom Penh. Outside, around the corner, Phallin waited in traditional Khmer wedding garb to lead the processional to Bunda’s house. Behind him, the wedding guests formed a disorganized queue of friends and family bearing gold-painted platters of fruit. Traditionally, this procession would start at the groom’s house and go to the bride’s, but since Phallin’s house is over five kilometers from Bunda’s we just picked up the fruit from where it was laid out in front of her house, walked around the corner, started some music and processed back.

Saying the vows

In the tent, Bunda was resplendent. Normally she doesn’t bother with make-up, but a Khmer wedding demands not only a range of outfit changes but make-up that would put a theatre company to shame. Bunda and Phallin’s wedding was a blend of modern and tradition, with the added twist that Bunda is Christian. After the guests were seated, Bunda, Phallin, and their immediate family sat on the stage at the end of the tent, where through the blasting microphone I made out vows I actually recognized: “Do you, Kong Titbunda, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband?” “I do.”

After the morning ceremony, which included other traditions such as pretending to cut the newly married couple’s hair, and collecting some of the fruit we’d brought in to give to the bride and groom, we ate breakfast at round tables of six to eight people before leaving. There are more ceremonies that take place throughout the day for family, but for regular guests the celebration recommences in the evening.

Those wild young folk

Although all the weddings I’d attended before this had been outside, in Phnom Penh, you rent a room for the evening party. Waiting at the balloon archway in new clothes, Bunda and Phallin greeted every guest who arrived, standing outside the entrance for about two and half hours. Inside, we ate a traditional Khmer wedding feast (largely meat dishes – starts with a big fried fish, then a chicken, then beef stew/soup, etc).  Finally, Bunda and Phallin entered, now dressed in white, to walk down an aisle of guests throwing jasmine and rose petals. They walked three times around a center table ladened with fruit, while their friends impeded their progress by demanding they kiss -  a rather bold, and modern request that they fulfilled by chastely kissing on the check. Then they climbed onto the stage to feed one another fruit (another tradition), before throwing the bouquet (a new addition to the wedding ceremony). Young people of both sexes crowded to catch the flowers, and it was caught by a tall young man who then dutifully handed the bouquet back to Bunda.

The evening ended with dancing, a mix of traditional songs and new hits (including the ever-popular Gangnam Style), the dance floor dominated by young people with cameras, smart phones, and iPads excitedly recording the event. “Make sure you put the pictures on facebook,” Bunda told me, as we posed together at the end of the evening.

The best part of the ceremonies for me was watching Bunda and Phallin next to each other as they weathered the long series of events that comprise a wedding in Cambodia. Every so often, Bunda would lead in to whisper in Phallin’s ear, causing mutual smiles to spread over their faces. They’re a team, the kind of couple who supports and appreciates each other—a rare pair no matter where you are in the world.   I’ve been fortunate to be a small part of that team for the past year and a half, but perhaps the best part is that I know they won’t need me. They’re strong and motivated together, and I know that they’re going to go places and change things long after I’ve returned to the United States. I can only wish them all the best.

Want to see the rest of the pictures? Check them out on facebook here.

Reunited!

In the end of January, my college roomie and best friend Katie Willingham and her mother came to Cambodia. While I was finishing up some work at site, they toured the ruins of Angkor and the northern province of Siem Reap before we were reunited in Phnom Penh! From there we traveled up to the far north eastern province of Ratanakiri – renowned for precious gems and (illegal) logging –, before coming down to Kampot for the end of their trip. Needless to say it was an amazing experience being able to share my life here with Katie and her mom. I asked Katie to do a guest post about her time here.

Being scholarly.

When I studied abroad in Oxford and Kaija came to visit me, we took pictures under the Bridge of Sighs, drank beer in the Eagle & Child (Tolkien’s old Oxford haunt), and wandered the courtyard of the world-famous Bodleian Library. In Kampot, Kaija took me and my mom to a cafe where we drank coconut water straight from the source. Well, sort of a cafe, but really the second I say cafe I’ve already misrepresented this experience. The coconuts were on a cart, actually, not inside a glass case like where they keep the muffins in Starbucks. And where we sat wasn’t even inside, more like the whole place was a patio, with a roof but otherwise totally open to the outside. And that’s just one thing. One tiny piece of experience, one word that felt like the most appropriate choice and yet somehow, still fell painfully short of the truth.

Delicious!

I don’t and didn’t really concern myself with having some kind of “authentic” experience of Cambodia, because I think that whole project is inherently fraught with superficiality, as if there could be some kind of distinction drawn between an experience I had that was “inauthentic” and one that was somehow an “authentic” cultural experience. But here I am still struggling with a whole different kind of authenticity. I believe my experience was real in every sense, that each place we visited was different and affected me differently whether it was from one stall to the next in the market or from one province to the next all the way out to tribal villages in the far corner of Rattanakiri, but how do I explain that or express it in a way that feels accurate? Mostly I issue various disclaimers–fumble, adjust, and modify everything until I notice my audience has lost interest. I can’t blame them. When someone asks you your favorite part of the trip it’s because they don’t want all the details, they want me to get to the point, skip to the good stuff, but I don’t know how.

Scale that temple

The most honest thing I have found myself saying often about Cambodia is that I have never felt safer traveling anywhere in my life. I grew up in affluent New York suburb, but my parents still insisted someone walk or drive me home after dark in the neighborhood. Once someone left the spilled contents of a wallet on our lawn, presumably taking any cash or credit cards and wishing to ditch the evidence. In Cambodia, when my mom and I looked lost in Siem Reap, multiple people tried to help with directions, pointing and gesturing when they didn’t know much English. Maybe it’s because foreigners stick out like crazy there and because people really want the tourism business to succeed. They want people to have a great experience and come back and tell their friends, bringing more money into Cambodia. It’s always different to live somewhere rather than just visiting, but as a traveler and a guest, it felt really welcoming and I didn’t really care what the reasoning was. It was still real.

My former co-teacher Borin at his wedding last year

Yet, ironically, this moment follows on the coat tails of several magnificent highs. First, my former co-teacher at the lower secondary school, thanks to his own talents and the dedicated coaching of his current co-teacher and my site mate PCV Maria, was recently hired to be permanent Peace Corps staff. It’s a job that means a huge leap in his social standing and, given how very infrequently PCVs see tangible change as a result of their service, really validating to see someone’s life being directly improved by the organization. Obviously we can’t hire all the teachers of Cambodia to be PC staff, but I like to think that his years of working with the PCV before me, myself, and Maria helped him become the kind of person Peace Corps would hire.

And on a completely different but equally exciting note, yesterday I also had the privilege of meeting the Acting Director of Peace Corps, her counselor, and the Regional Director for Southeast Asia. Basically the bosses of my boss, and her boss’s boss. We’re talking the woman who runs the entire organization from Ecuador to Cambodia. In and of itself, this was amazing – they were personable, “down-to-earth”, and straight from Obama’s inauguration (the ceremony and balls of which they’d attended). They were also all women, from the Acting-Director, to the Regional Director, to our Country Director. Talk about a validating experience.

Funnily enough, the only moment I felt like I fumbled the conversation was when the Acting Director asked me about my biggest challenge in Peace Corps (a question I’m going to have to get better at answering). I replied with something about the adjustments you make going from the relative freedom of college to the constrains of a host family with an 8:30pm curfew, and family members who enjoy detailing your weight loss or gain to the entire neighborhood, hoping it didn’t sound like I was a party-girl lamenting the loss of her night-time gallivantings. If only she’d asked me this morning – is there any more high pressure challenge than the split-second choice between sitting upon and kneeling before the toilet? (apologies if that was too much for any readers!)

I could have talked to her about the way I had just spent my morning in the Provincial Office of Education (POE), attempting to get permission for my co-teachers to do observations of the Grade 4 teachers who we just finished giving a second training on their new  curriculum (read about the first one here). We spent the three days almost completely re-teaching what we’d taught before because lines had gotten crossed on when they were supposed to start and almost all of them had only taught one or two lessons since we’d last seen them in September. Then yesterday, it took me all morning, plus several impromptu meetings with various POE officials just to get the (pre-written) letter, printed and signed. But it would have been hard to encapsulate that challenge in a brief response.

Even here, I’m not really capturing the essence of what makes all these little steps challenging – the way things don’t go like you think they will, even though you know better than to think that they will go a certain way to begin with. Peace Corps for me is in many ways not individual big challenges but lots of little, wearing challenges that chip away at your desire to be the person who gets up and goes every morning to throw around your status as an outsider as a way to catalyze change. I recently listened to an interview with a top ranking member of the Foreign Service who talked about why people rotate posts so often. I’d always wondered, and her response in the interview was that it was partly because they’d found their staff couldn’t continue to generate new and create ideas after three or four years in one place. You start to become the system in which you’re trying to work.

Always great

Obviously it’s different for the individual person, and this isn’t a post detailing my burn-out. I’m actually really excited by the next six months and the plans I have for it. Maria and I recently completed our hands-on science club, which was a ton of fun (I never tire of the mentos and coke experiment). Despite the headache at the POE, we did get the letter permitting observations and my co-teachers –who continue to be absolute inspirations –Maria, and I will be getting to see how the new Grade 4 book is actually doing in schools (wish us and it luck). I guess ultimately, the challenge I should have expressed was the way in which what can feel like a very predictable job – get up, go teach English, go have 4 hour lunch, teach some more English, come home, eat with host family – nevertheless still manages after all this time to make me feel like a fish out of water. However, in keeping with the yin-yang theme of this post, the flip side of that is that means I still have plenty to learn.

Most excitingly of all right now though is that this up-coming week features neither classes nor workshops, but rather a visit from the one and only Katie Wilingham and her mother. After spending this past week touring around the temples of Angkor, they’re coming down to Phnom Penh where we will be reunited after far too long for some travels to the province of Ratanikiri – home to what I here is a gorgeous crater lake. Stay tuned for the picture-fest of a lifetime!

Hurray!

A while back there was a request (demand?) for a video of me doing some Khmer dancing. Here’s a very brief clip of me dancing at a Khmer house warming party. House warming parties are very similar to weddings – although smaller. They’re catered with hired singers, karaoke, and everyone dressed in their bedazzled finest. Here, I’m next to my host brother.

Some Khmer script. Fun fact: Khmer doesn’t use spaces between words. Just between sentences.

As many of you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about words and language. Being in Cambodia, conducting most of my life in a second language, has only increased my interest in the way that we use language and its influence on us. Inspired by this article in the New Yorker (it’s long but completely worth the read), I thought I’d share some of my reflections on Khmer. It should be noted before I start that everything I say here needs to be taken with a grain of salt. I am not fluent in Khmer, and I’m basically illiterate, so there are undoubtedly many nuances to the language that I’m going to undersell. My reflections are based on my experiences talking with and listening to people in my community, and may not be true beyond even that sphere.

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I just recently learned was called ‘linguistic relativity’ – the idea ‘that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world’ (Wikipedia). I just recently read up on this and it sounds like there’s not a lot of hard evidence for the idea that the specific language you speak radically dictates your understanding of the world, but I do think that it shares interesting correlations. As I noted in a post over a year ago, conversational Khmer doesn’t bother very much with tenses. You can indicate past and future, but people rarely do when speaking, and I don’t know of any way to express time through tenses with the degree of nuance afforded by English. (ex: She had been planning to go visit him, before I invited her to my house. – and who knows if I got that grammar right). In part no doubt due to my own lack of fluency, I find it hard in Khmer to conceptualize and express long range plans or anything older than the recent past. Beyond my limitations though, I think that these are genuinely difficult to express in Khmer. Correspondingly, long term planning and reflection aren’t very common among the people with whom I have experience.  It’s probably a bit of a chicken v. egg conundrum as to how these relate to each other. More surprising to me, however, is the ways in which this limited expression of time isn’t much of a problem. There are undoubtedly confusions, but they’re cleared up quickly. I’m continually fascinated by how little I actually need tenses when speaking Khmer.

Average traffic in Phnom Penh

Languages reflect their cultures, and Khmer is no exception. I finally feel like I’m at a place where I can start to notice more of the ways people choose to express ideas, as opposed to simply grasping the basic meaning. One of the things I’ve noticed the most is how often people speaking Khmer don’t express responsibility or blame towards a specific individual.  For example, a couple weeks ago I was taking the bus up to Phnom Penh. In the crowded jumble of unregulated traffic just outside the city, we suddenly came upon some traffic police with a small barricade in the middle of the road. Although every other vehicle around us was allowed to continue past this block, the traffic police decided (for reasons that remain obscure) that our bus should (left) turn onto a small side street. In the mess of all-direction traffic, the bus bumped someone’s fender. In Cambodia, if there’s an accident you’re not supposed to move anything until the police come a sort it out, so our bus, now diagonal across most of the street, stopped and the traffic police discussed (for a long time) what to do. By itself this story is sort of a fun example of the way in which authority is sometimes mismanaged around here. But of even greater interest to me was the way in which the situation was described when everyone on the bus whipped out their phones to tell their families we’d be late getting in. Around the bus, I heard many people explain that the “police let/allowed us to stop” (Poli owie yuhrng chop – in my rough phonetics of khmer).

Another example is the way my host family talks about my host brother’s many evenings away at the bars. Both he, his wife, and their son, all tell me that his friend (or sometimes even more obscurely “they’) call him to hang out . Ex: “Where is host brother?” “They call him to hang out.” He doesn’t choose to hang out, he doesn’t even go, rather he is called. By and large, the Cambodians I know are not confrontational people. If you can avoid conflict, then that’s usually the best way, so it makes sense that you’d reflect that linguistically too. If you obscure the agent when you’re speaking then it’s not really anyone’s fault. To me, this can be frustrating. Generally, I tend to place a lot of value on individual responsibility – a product of my own cultural upbringing. So when I hear my host brother is out drinking, I want him to own that decision. When we get arbitrarily pulled over by the police, I want people to say “A couple of traffic police decided to make the bus turn”.

Khmer has 35 consonants (featured here in fancy script -left, and regular script – right)

However, on further reflection, I wonder how my own tendency to speak Khmer from my individualist perspective might make me sound rather rude. The way we talk about my host brother being called to hang out means that we’re not supposed to blame him for being there – it’s somewhat out of his hands. Because I sort of tend to blame him anyways, I’ll try and put it in a different context. When other PCVs are in town, I’ll go out to dinner with them and get home around 8:30pm or even 9pm – that’s late, and if I were a good Khmer woman, I would never go out like that by myself so late. I get a pass because the people in my town are familiar with the fact that foreigners tend to stay up and out later. However, when I say “I’m going to eat dinner with my friends and come back late,“ I  wonder if it sound a bit like I’m flaunting the choice in my host family’s face. As for the traffic police – well, given the way authority can be used here, it’s probably wiser to not blame them.

Mostly, all this reflection on the way culture and language relate to one another in Khmer highlights to me the depth of culture and its nuances. I have no way of knowing how the ways I choose to express myself sound to native Khmer speakers. I think most of the time, people follow my intent and forgive me any tonal blunders. The way I’ve learned to not be put off when someone abruptly tells me in English, “I want you to help me do x” when I’d prefer to hear “Would you help me with x?”  Much as in the case of culture itself, I find I don’t notice many of the linguistic nuances of English, until I’m outside of it. In fact, it wasn’t until I started writing this blog that I realized how trapped I was by my own language. I don’t know how to talk about the tendency in Khmer to avoid apportioning responsibility without the sense that I’m also making a judgment (and maybe, despite my efforts, I am). It’s a problem I run into frequently when talking about ‘saving face’ –  a concept incredibly important to Cambodian culture, and yet something that, when I say it, seems to come with a note of derision stemming from my own culture perspective on the matter.  Yet, I don’t have a better way to describe the phenomenon.

I may think that there are limitations to the Khmer language, and yet even in a language as vast and flexible as English, I feel as though I’m inadequately expressing myself and my experiences in Cambodia and with Khmer culture. Which I guess goes to show that you can always learn more about languages.

Here it is!

After a stretch of updates on site, it’s time to take to the roads of Cambodia and tour the north! This past week was Cambodia’s Water Festival, which celebrates the flow of the Tonlé Sap river changing directions. Last year, in deference to the number of people killed in floods up in Siem Reap and other northern provinces, the festivities (though not the vacation) were cancelled. This year they were cancelled again to mourn the death of King Sihanouk. Apparently, Water Festival is the holiday to cancel if you want to acknowledge tragedy in Cambodia. Denied once more the chance of seeing Phnom Penh’s boat races in honor of the event, two fellow PCVs and I instead headed up to the north-eastern province of Mondulkiri.

Aaaand here’s the town. Mostly all of it.

When I told my host family I was headed there, my host brother told me a handful of pertinent facts about the province. 1) there are a lot of trees, 2) the dirt is very red, 3) there are very few people. All true. The provincial town of Mondulkiri is what you might call (if you had horses in Cambodia) a one horse town. An eight hour bus ride of pain from Phnom Penh, the town is quiet, calm and relaxed even for Cambodia – which is saying something.

Ta-da!

Thanks to its size and remoteness, Mondulkiri isn’t very equipped for tourists. There are no tuktuks, and as PCVs banned from moto riding, this limited our options to walking. Fortunately there area is picturesque. Mondulkiri has a number of famous waterfalls, one to which we could walk. Said waterfall, in addition to being pretty, also boasted an elephant that we fed and got to ride. I’d ridden an elephant before, so I was less enticed by this prospect initially. However, this ride offered an opportunity my  previous elephant riding had not: to literally sit on the elephant! Ahhh to live in a country where no one sues. Riding the elephant was fantastic, and slightly intimidating, given that every time she turned her head I sort of wobbled along with her. Fear not though, I managed to not fall off

Coffee…drying, I guess?

We also walked to a coffee plantation. I was excited about this because despite my ability to advocate for shade-grown coffee and lament the destruction of the rainforest, I didn’t actually know what a coffee tree  looked like. You learn something new every day. There weren’t any tours so my actual coffee growing knowledge hasn’t expanded that much, but we were able to wander at will and the place was beautiful. Coffee beans prior to whatever process they go through to be consumed are much bigger than I expected.

Delicious, no?

Food in Mondulkiri was the same as food across Cambodia, where local fair is instant noodles fried with meat (chicken, pork, or beef) or rice with meat. However, the bus stop offered one Cambodian delicacy I had yet to personally encounter: tarantulas. Basically, anything edible is well…edible around here, and the bus stop had a big bowl of live spiders. While not brave enough to eat one myself, I did purchase one for a fellow PCV. Initially, the seller tried to give me a live one. Being inexperienced in the art of spider-snack preparation, I asked her what I was supposed to do with it. She told me to fry it, and as there isn’t really a frying place available at the bus station I can only assume this means that people buy them live here, transport them (still alive) back to their homes, and then prepare them.  Ponder that on an eight hour bus ride Eventually, I got a pre-fried one, which brave PCV Christine ate. As you might expect, they apparently taste like chicken. Most of these things are just horrible because of our mental preconceptions. That being said, mental blocks are powerful. You’d have to pay me a fair bit to get me to eat one – and I’ve had caterpillar.

Back at site, I’m trying to capture the winter holiday spirit, but it’s difficult to imagine that it’s snowing somewhere in the world. I feel like I live in perpetual July/August. Instead of Christmas and cold, December means wedding season is in full swing, and while there aren’t any major holidays here for a while now, that doesn’t mean there won’t be plenty of celebrating, which means everyone can look forward to more pictures like this:

I call it my Khmer Frida Kahlo look.

Couldn’t get enough of Mondolkiri? Pop over to the facebook album for more photos.

My life in Cambodia is an ongoing series of classes: the formal classes I teach at the PTTC, the tutoring I do at Epic Arts, the mini-English class I teach to my co-teachers, and most recently a Women’s Club. I originally wanted to do club for the women at the PTTC to build on what the Club Samakey former VSO volunteer Charlene and I did with all the students last year – team, trust, and group work building exercises with an aim towards increasing the students’ confidence. Much to my delight, however, my co-teacher Bunda (who you may remember from the workshop we did on the new 4^th grade English curriculum) told me she was interested in helping out.

Bunda and myself during the teaching workshop

Bunda brought a whole new dimension to the club because she knew that one of the things about which the women at the PTTC were most interested in learning was women’s health. I am, of course, immensely qualified to teach women’s health thanks to the one semester of Women’s Health and Reproduction I took in college. However, sparse though my own knowledge on the subject may be, the fact remains that that course, my general sex ed knowledge, and my magnificent googling abilities mean that I actually have access to more information than most of the women at the school. Couple that with the fact that Bunda can help me explain and brings some of her own knowledge to the table and you’ve got yourself a women’s health and confidence club!

The group is in its initial stages, but interest has been high. In addition to team and trust building exercises, we’ve talked about women we think of as our heroes (almost everyone chose their mother), and just last week we began going over women’s basic reproductive organs. The students are wonderful with how willing they are to put up with my butchered Khmer explanations.

“This is the uterus – it’s like a house for the egg. Every month your body makes the house as comfortable as possible for the egg, but  if you don’t get pregnant then it cleans the whole house out,” I declare, waving vaguely a picture on power point. “Your cervix is like the gate, and the vagina is the road!”

One of the slideshow pictures we used – this was of particular interest because many of the married* women at the PTTC use the calendar-based contraceptive method without really understanding the cycle.
*I say married because unmarried women in Cambodia ‘don’t have sex’

Some of this isn’t new to them. In biology, students are shown basic pictures of reproductive organs, but many have forgotten the essentials and most have never heard about anything beyond the existence of a uterus. We talk about all sorts of questions, “Why am I tired and upset during my period?”“Why doesn’t it come regularly?” “Why does my stomach hurt?”“If you drink beer is it over  faster?”

The other popular topic of discussion is about vaginal infections, which Bunda tells me (and I’ve heard from other people as well) is a real source of concern for women in Cambodia. There’s a cultural of silence surrounding this health problems—much as there still is in the US. In a country where douching is common, with a temperature and humidity ideal for growing all sorts of bacteria in damp places,  most of the women in the group seemed relatively familiar with the symptoms of infections. What wasn’t clear to many were the causes.

The group is very educational for me as well – adding all sorts of delightful new words to my Khmer vocabulary I’m particularly grateful to Bunda for volunteering her time to do the club, as well as her suggestions for how we make the curriculum relevant to the specific concerns of the women at the PTTC. And, most especially, for transforming my tenuous analogies for body functions into actual explanations!

And while I’m being grateful – happy Thanksgiving to everyone back in the States!

The image that appears in all public buildings.

I’m a bit late in getting this post up, so by this time many of you are probably already aware that the former king of Cambodia passed away on the 15^th. King Sihanouk was 89 when he died, and today would have been his 90^th birthday. Yes, he was born on Halloween and it’s coincided nicely for volunteers because his birthday has been a holiday for a long time. This is the last time that we’ll get off for his birthday though, because now it will be his death day that becomes a holiday.

King Sihanouk is a somewhat complicated figure in Cambodian history. He became king when he was young (19), and in his early years he won the hearts of the majority of Cambodians by orchestrating the country’s independence from one hundred years of French colonialism. He also worked to regain large amounts of Cambodian territory (including Siem Reap – the province of Angkor Wat) back from Thailand, which helped endear him further to many Cambodians. He  had an on-off relationship with his role as monarch of the country. (Fun fact! Sihanouk held so many positions since 1941 that the Guinness Book of World Records identifies him as the politician who has served the world’s greatest variety of political offices- thanks wikipedia). He abdicated the throne at one point to run for prime minister, before becoming king again, and joined the Khmer Rouge when the group was in its infancy out in the countryside. To his credit, he split with them and was even held against his will for a while before escaping to China, not to return until after the end of Pol Pot’s time in power. He’s been a rival and an ally to the current Prime Minister Hun Sen, and judging by the fact that his death made BBC world new headlines, he managed to make quite a name for himself in the political world.

A younger king, reclining on his throne

It’s been interesting to see the way in which Cambodia handles the death of this immensely important man. Following his death, the country was ordered by Hun Sen into a week long period of mourning in which the tv and radio shows were advised to avoid happy programming, and we watched many old film clips of the great things he did in his life (clips that always stop right before we hit the mid-1970s….). My school set up a small shrine to him with a picture, colored Christmas lights, and paper flower bouquets made by the students. The teachers tried to wear white/light colored tops and dark bottoms, and everyone was given black ribbons to wear.

At our big central roundabout, a large shrine with a big picture and lots of flowers was set up for the duration of the week, and people were there at all hours praying and lighting incense for him. Meanwhile, it turns out almost everyone here owns a Cambodian flag and flag pole, and they rustled them out of their houses to put out along the roads.

Yet despite all of these actions, the mood of people was very hard to gauge. Cambodian culture tends not to be very emotionally demonstrative. One co-teacher explained to me that crying or showing too strong a feeling can be interpreted as being weak. So while I assume people were saddened by his passing, all the cues I would normally rely upon to identify grief weren’t there. Indeed, my host family laughed awkwardly when we were watching Sihanouk’s son (the current King Sihamounie) cry over his father’s body on the tv. I doubt they meant it as a form of disrespect, but it certainly indicated to me the degree to which visible emotions made them uncomfortable.

As you can see, the public buildings image hasn’t been updated in a while.

The other element in all of this has been the challenge of speaking. After being here for over a year I’ve begun to feel relatively competent in my language skills. However, there is a completely different set of vocabulary that you are supposed to use when talking about the king. I remember during my training when I first arrived in Cambodia, my language tutor attempted to teach me some of these words. “Don’t worry about it, “ I assured him,  “I just won’t talk about the king.” Well, I ate those words these pas t few weeks as I tried to converse with people about the death. Special words for the king include pronouns, the verb ‘die’, the word for his body, and much much more.

With the combination of the holiday Pchum Ben (the week of the 15^th) and the ceremonies for King Sihanouk, schedules and school have all been a mess. On the bright side, I took the time to go up to Phnom Penh for a quick break. It’s nice visiting there because it reminds me just how much more I prefer my site. I’ll have to go back again at some point soon though because King Sihanouk’s body will be on display for the next three months. The newspaper I read about it said they would ‘probably’ use chemicals to preserve him. Let’s hope so.

(Also, Happy Halloween!)