Updated on 8/25/13 – Pictures have been updated, thank you so much for the birthday wishes, another wonderful birthday abroad!
First, let me tell you a story from our day off last Sunday. I met some fellow Trainees in the morning for a bike ride, we stopped at a few temples to take pictures and the second one had some music coming from a distance. Some of the group turned back, but Mary, Rachel and I decided to attempt to locate the music thinking it may be a wedding or some other party where they might want a few foreigners to join in. What we found was even better, and something I never expected I would see during my Peace Corps service…we turned the corner as large speakers blasted high paced dance remixes and two full sized trampolines with full nets around them and a tall shade cover over the top. My jaw hit the ground, my family in America had a trampoline for about 4 years, during which my siblings and neighbors probably spent about 15 hours a week each on that thing. We asked the woman there if we could jump, she invited us on, and within minutes we had a group of children flipping, spinning and laughing with us. Tough life, I know. After jumping for several hours and exhausting an entire camera battery, we biked home for lunch and an evening of volleyball at a trainee’s house. This Sunday the 18th, a few of us rode our bikes to the next town over to check out their market and hit the trampolines on the way home. I bought some fruit in the morning to share with the kids, and got a picture from the week before printed out for the mother, she got a kick out of it (credit to Rachel for the idea!).
Some Trainees at a nearby Wat.
Adorable
Trampoline’s with some new friends.
Besides being super cute, I witnessed him do 5 consecutive back flips.
Mountains and rice fields on a bike ride.
The weekend of Aug 11th we went for a field trip to Phenom Phenh to visit two “museums”. The first one was in the city and was a old high school that was turned into a prison and torture facility during the period of the Khmer Rouge. It was shocking, the pictures were raw and unfiltered (headless bodies, cut throats, piles of bodies at the mass graves, etc.) one of the rooms still had dried blood splatter on the ceiling. According to our guide only 7 people out of 10,000+ who went through there survived, two of them were there that day selling their books and telling their story…remarkable. One man was kept alive because he could fix the typewriter that the soldiers used to record confessions, the other man a painter and did portraits for the KR leaders. From there we took a bus 15 kilometers south of the City to the site of the mass graves where they took people from the prison to be executed. It was gruesome. We heard recordings of survivors and accounts of people who has seen the carnage afterward or were part of the excavation team. Trucks of prisoners would come in by night, blindfolded and handcuffed they would kneel them down at the edge of the grave and kill them with blunt objects to the head/neck or cut their throats…bullets were too costly and were needed elsewhere. There was even a large tree next to one grave where soldiers would hold babies by the legs and beat them against the tree before putting them in the grave with their mothers. I can’t even fathom something like this, much less that our host families all experienced it. This week during training we had our host families come in and talk about their experience during the KR with the help of our teachers as translators. The stories we heard are so beyond anything I could imagine, my host father alone had 20 deaths within his extended family.
Skulls in the memorial stupa
Items that have surfaced from the mass graves.
One of 7 survivors at S-21 with a Trainee
Rules at the S-21 prison
My older host sister, “Tome”, received excellent news that she was awarded a scholarship to a university in Vietnam…and class starts in 7 days! It was great news, but she was also the person in Cambodia I was closest with, so it was tough to see her go and to say goodbye. We celebrated the night before with friends and family and ate a big meal. I wrote her a letter and gave her some money, because I saw others giving her money that night and thought it was probably customary. The silver lining of the situation is that I get to practice my Khmer for three weeks without a strong English speaker in the house, and it will be an easier transition to my new host family in 3 more weeks! My other host sister, “Be Dowl”, has since opened up (I think our parents force her to sit with me to practice her English) and we get along great, she has a smirk that lights up my world, I will never forget her ear to ear grin when I make her giggle. I feel as though I have also been able to get closer to my host parents, we work through awkward conversations slowly with charades and the words I know, but those moments are really meaningful to me and I’m glad they are patient and understanding.
Celebrating “Tome’s” birthday and going away to college
This week in training we got into the community for two events which was a bit nervous, but they are doing a great job preparing us for life at site (I think!). The first event was groups of 5 taught a 45 minute class about basic nutrition to high school kids…completely in Khmer! It was a challenge, and our teachers helped us with the scripts which we were forced to read some of, but it was great practice and a good learning environment to work out our nerves. Second, we set up stations for mothers with children 0-5 years old to come have their children weighed to see if they were suffering from malnutrition, get some education about breastfeeding and proper nutrition, and we put on a demo about cooking nutritious rice porridge. It went OK, we still don’t have the Khmer language skills to make things run smoothly, but it is interesting and a good learning experience to struggle through it. And if you were wondering, the porridge wasn’t too hot or too cold…it was juuuuust right Goldilocks!
Our baby weighing station.
Rice porridge demonstration.
On Sunday the 18th, after a morning bike ride, I was wrapping up lunch with my mother when she mentioned she was planting rice in the afternoon. I asked if I could help and much to my delight she said yes!!! At 2pm, I had my bike loaded up with water, had my long pants and sleeves on and my hat and off we went. A short distance away from the house my family owns 6 rice fields. I’m not familiar with the ins and outs of growing rice, but the step we did on this day was called “stoal”. We took a dense clump of young rice sprouts from one field and re planted them into the next field over spaced out. I surmise that the rice with then take root and fill in the space until you have another dense field, then you rinse and repeat. My mothers instruction was short and sweet, she gave me a 20 second demo with Khmer words I didn’t know, then started. I watched her for a second, but the field is under water so I can’t completely see what is going on down there, eventually I got close, she corrected me a few times on my technique and then complemented me on being smart, but I couldn’t help but think that at harvest time they would have a big dead strip down their field where I planted. My host father soon came to the field to help also. Several farmers and other folks walked by and we all had a good laugh at the newb in the rice field. My parents were worried about me getting too tired and kept telling me I could go home, but here I was…my bare feet ankle deep in a Cambodian rice patty, plowed that same morning with cows, the mud squirting between my toes, a faint breeze to break the heat, dried mud on hands, a sore back, surrounded by lush green rice fields and palm trees, working side by side with my host parents of 5 weeks, dipping blades of rice into the soft mud filled with frogs, tiny crabs, snails, cow poop, fish and I’m sure more I didn’t see…I didn’t know what to expect when I joined the Peace Corps, but that was pretty cool, and I wasn’t about to leave until my host parents made me!
The rice field I spent 3.5 hours planting
This week we had interviews with our program directors about our permanent sites, it was a bit crazy to think that a 15 minute conversation will impact our lives for the next two years, but it’s out of our hands now, I have faith in the personal to match us up appropriately and place us where they see best. On that same note, we will find out where we will be moving to in a week and a half and will be moving there in 3 weeks…3 WEEKS!!!!!!! Insanity. I can’t wait to get there and start building relationships and put myself into crazy awkward situations and conversations against my better judgment.
I couldn’t resist posting this.
Cutie pie at my teachers house.
Joely the Goalie 