“All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” -Gandalf, Fellowship of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)

Lets chat about the Health Center (HC). I moved into my new house, at a new location, in a foreign country, with two months of language on Saturday morning…I went to work on Monday. I will tell you “Awkward” is the word that best describes the experience, but in reality it was something exponentially more. The staff were quite busy with lots of patients and the HC director who I imagine had received breifing about me was not around. I sat in the waiting room for a full work day and introduced myself to anyone who would make eye contact. 90% of the patients are pregnant women or women with infants, so lets be honest, i’m a giant foreigner who speaks jiberish…most of my days are spent silently getting stared at, frightening women, and making children cry. It’s been two weeks now and not too much has changed, I am friendlier with the staff and I think patients have picked up on that a bit so it’s not as tense. Plus, i’m either more confident with my language or I just go for broke because I have nothing else left to lose.

My HC director one day asked me to help him wire some lights that we hook up to car batteries in the HC. Finially, I have somthing to do, some purpose! Neither of us knew what we were doing and couldn’t effectively communicate at all, so we eventually tested them and blew the circuit breaker thing on this battery and the director had to bring in the guy next door to fix it. Ooops, so much for not feeling so awkward, now I just blew the only task i’ve ever been included in. Oh well, I got to meet the villager next door!

A word on confidentiallity, there is none, we had a kid injure his arm and come in for stitches and half the village was in the “emergency room” watching, but so was I, i’m not judging! Anyone can randomly walk into the HC and walk into any room of their liking without any questions asked, and a dog came in and slept for a hour or two. Lets just say i’m still figuring out the Health Center situation.

When it rains, which is does everyday, the dirt roads in town are bad. Otherwise, I like to bike around and explore and randomly introduce myself to other villages. So far i’ve ventured to about half the commune. Mostly rice fields, houses, and a few small shacks that people sell snacks out of. There is a silk factory in town, from the outside it looks like a school, but inside there are close to 100 looms and people threading fabric. One of my host Aunts randomly saw me and invited me to watch her, it was insane…so many hooks, pedals, slides, strands, bars…pretty neat stuff, I suspect that they make better wages than the farmers in town. Speaking of rain, the storms quickly approach and one will be soaked in seconds of it beginning. I have recently made it a habbit of diving into the nearest sellers shack to wait out the rain, it’s a good way to force relationships!

Massive lake in my commune

There is a man in town who speaks great english and he volunteers and teaches english out of his house for free to the children of the village. I have been helping him teach in the evenings and is has been a good way to meet some more people, get me face out there and help the kids out. I think English is important for the kids in this community because of the proximity to Siem Reap, where many tourists visit, if someone can speak english, they might be able to get a job at a restaurant, hotel, or other venue and make a better wage than working the fields like the majority of the villagers do.

My host Momma sifting rice

One day on a bike ride I saw a volleyball net so I asked someone nearby if they every play, and within a minute or two we had a game of 4v4 going. It was a blast, and to my delight it was fairly competitive and a high level of play, they rocked. Another evening, I broke out my frisbee with all the kids around my house, it was well received and everyone enjoyed it, unfortunantly, we don’t have a ton of room in the yard to spread out, so I look forward to taking it elsewhere with a little room to run around and see how they do!

Host dad and the rice shelling machine

On a return trip from the market, I passed our commune center and saw a vehicle for “world food program”, I had heard that they did work in our village, so I stopped in hopes of meeting someone. There was a meeting going on, so I waited outside for two hours and talked with the drivers, turns out one of them used to work for Peace Corps back during the K2 generation of volunteers! Small world. He spoke good english and after the meeting introduced me to his boss, not much came of that, but who knows, maybe I can be of some help to them down the road. However, afterward, I met the commune chief and the 2nd and 3rd chiefs. The Chief was a cool old guy, he was very patient and respectful. Within a minute of sitting down food appeared and two bottles of rice wine. I drank a smidge out of respect.

Two cousins

While we’re on the matter of alcohol, I have long been toiling with if I should drink at site or not since I am a health volunteer and one of the things we have been asked to promote is alcohol awareness. I have decided that my approach is to drink one drink. My aim is that I am being respectful in joining people who invite the foreigner to join then (generally a group of men who get together). It is an easy way to get to know the target population, then when they peer pressure me into drinking more I can give a short pitch about limiting the quanitity of alcohol consumption and it’s effects. Speaking of peer pressure, these guys are pros, even with my mindset it is almost impossible to turn them down, they heckle, they will pour a glass, put it to my lips, and so forth. I laugh it off, and I think as the foreigner this is more possible, for Khmer-Khmer relationships, I feel this could be seen as losing face amongst your peers, and disrespectful if someone older than you was offering.

Hide and Seek

A young gentleman I met in the first week asked to give me a tour of a local wat that has an ancient temple since he wants to eventually be a tour guide. On my bike ride to the wat, I passed some of my cousins and three of them joined me for the haul. The temple was cool to see and the Wat was beautiful as always. After our trip, he asked if I would like to meet a volunteer English teacher in his village, I obliged and to my delight she speaks great, clear English with a strong vocabulary, we exchanged numbers and headed home.

The food in my family is similar to that of my previous host family. Every morning, my host mother makes an enormous batch of rice porriage that she sells to the village. That’s usually my breakfast, a piping hot bowl of salty rice with liver, stomach and intestines! I’ve come to love it and look forward to it.

I get to see this every night.

I have laughed to the point of tears twice in Cambodia. The first was during training, listening to a fellow trainee laugh when I tricked him into eating salt when I told him it was sugar. The scene for the second time is as follows. I am sitting on the wooden slatted floor of our stilt house with two young cousins (each around 10 years old) playing cards under an LED light connected to a car battery. We had been playing for some time when the girl cousin ripped a fart. There is no denying it, farting is hilarious, we giggled. Then it smelled, we made faces and chuckled. Then they told me that in Khmer it is called “poom”, we kackled. Then I told them that in English it is called a “Fart”, with that all three of us were laying on our sides in tears.

“If you aren’t in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?” ― T.S. Eliot

Shortly after swearing in we were loaded into vans and shipped off to site! Because my site was so far away, we drove for a day, then spent the night in a hotel in Siem Reap City. It was a nice debrief before setting off on our own and one last night to spend with my teacher “Savin” who I greatly admire and who delivered us to our sites. We were greated in Siem Reap by 4 volunteers from the previous generation who were in town to travel out early the next morning. We all got dinner together and it was wonderful to pick their brains before going to site.
Bright and early the next morning we loaded into the van and drove a short distance before turning down a paved road, after 1km it became dirt, then had pot holes…big ones…the going got slower and my smile got bigger, this is what I had in mind for a site! Eventually we rolled up to my house where lots of people were at my future host mothers food stand. I got a quick tour of the yard with the other 3 volunteers before they loaded back into the bus from whence they came. HOLY CRAP! The food stand suddenly had multiplied with people and kids, oh my gosh kids! I decided to put myself on display early and stuck with the crowd so everyone could stare and chat, eventually one of the kids and I went for a bike ride around town and he showed me where the Health Center was located, an elementary school, and the community center. It was fun to be on my bike, and the kid had a big ol “new toy” smile the whole time, we had fun, I still adore him as my first friend. Cambodian families are large…and all live together…I think my mother is 1 of 9 children and each of them has several children, so there is a solid group of cousins around at any given time, just like my family in America!

Playing cards with some cousins

I have a few pictures, but i’d like to tell you about my house. It is a glorified Appalachian Trail Shelter, so I feel right at home! It one story, elevated on concrete stilts about 6 feet off the ground and is constructed of wooden planks to make up the 3 sides and floor, with about 1/4 – 1/2 inch gaps between each plank. The roof is nice for the village (many of the houses are layered palm fronds), made of some sort of brick tiles and there are only a few leaks when it rains and none of them are in my room. The house itself is simply one large platform and there is a small room built into the corner which is my room and I think was originally constructed for the newly married daughter to have some privacy with her husband. Currently, my host sister and her husband sleep in the food stall by the road, so i’m not positive if I kicked them out of the house yet. My host parents and host brother simply roll out a palm frond mat on the floor and sleep under mosquito nets, they’re pretty hardcore people! The bathroom is a small outhouse down the yard a little ways from the house with a squat toilet and a water cistern where we take bucket showers. The yard is mostly dirt and there is dirt under the house where we sometimes hang out at a table or two. Behind our house is a pavillion overtop of a large machine where villigers bring their rice to my father to run through the machine which removes the husks from the individual kernels of rice. In the front of the house is a small concrete building where my mother cooks food and sells stuff. The only market around is a considerable distance away down my bad dirt road, so my mother makes a living by buying from the market in surplus, then selling the goods from our house, so the rest of the villigers have a convenient place to get supplies.

My car battery and shelving

The rest of my room. Clothes trunk, water filter, and bed with mosquito net to the left.

Inside my house

 
My mother runs the show, she is dominate in the family and I think is well known and respected in the village. My father is a little shy and quiet around everyone, not just me, but we are warming up to each other slowly. My younger sister dropped out of school in 9th grade to help work in the food stall and is recently married. My brother-in-law workes around the house in the food stall and helps my father with the rice processing. My younger brother dropped out of school in 6th grade to help work in the food stall and recently spends much of his days at the canals fishing for small fish which he sells for $0.50 a kilogram, or we eat them at the house. It was a very tough transition into this family for me since I became so adjusted to my previous family and was just starting to find a rythm. I generally don’t eat with the family, just at the “bar” with the customers, and the family members are busy running the business so I don’t get to spend intimate time with them. Also, there are always villagers coming and going, so there is a lot going on, and at anytime there are 5-20 cousins around.
My house, my village, and the entire commune my health center services does not have electricity. Instead, we use car batteries and all the lights and electronics have alligator clips to attatch to the battery terminals instead of plugs on the ends. On my first day, my mother took me down to the market to buy a car battery, a light, and an inverter to charge and electronics. Some of the female cousins piled into my uncle’s tuk-tuk to join the affair and the boys rode their bikes into town with me. The older couple in the market was funny and friendly, and I always pay them a visit when I venture down to the market for business. My family rents DVD’s of various dubbed asian sitcoms and movies and has a small DVD player which they hook up to the car batteries and watch movies every night. My first night we started watching in the food stall, then moved the equipment up into the house. Picture the scene as I describe it: A small wooden house on stilts in the Cambodian outback, surrounded by trees and rice fields. I lay on the floor on a rice mat with 10 Cambodians in my host family and some cousins, all the men and boys shirtless. The daily rain pattering on the roof and walls, out candle light shining through the cracks in the floor boards on the ground below, and we’re watching a Korean police detective show dubbed in Khmer.

View from my window of my families food stall.

My bathroom in the foreground. My grandmothers house behind it.

My first weekend I went on some bike rides to get away from the craziness for a smidge and explore my surroundings. The first road I went on was rice fields as far as I could see and eventually the road got so bad and muddy that I couldn’t continue. On the way back, I came across a group of 6 young boys only in underware, no parents to be seen, with home made sling shots shooting rocks at some fruits high in a tree to attempt to dislodge them. I watched for awhile and tried to make conversation, eventually I gathered rocks for them to use as ammo, but they still had no luck getting fruit, and I had no luck getting verbal responses. I decided I wasn’t going to leave until I got them some fruit, after spending about 30 minutes and using several long sticks I freed up some fruits for them. They didn’t share, and I don’t know what it was anyhow, but I rode away with a smile. Down another road I met a young farmer who spoke good english and very slow clear Khmer to me. I spoke with him for awhile because this road too became largely un-bike-ride-able. After some time his friend Moul came around and he is practicing to become a tour guide and we picked a day the following weekend for him to give me a tour of a local temple.

Ancient Temple

As you can imagine there have been a lot of adjustments in the first week, and there will continue to be for sometime. It was a rough first week for me mentally and i’m sure it won’t be the last. I’d like to thank my support system back home for pulling me through, all of you following the blog, my Peace Corps friends, and of course my family in America for all the love. Also, a big shout out to a volunteer from the previous generation who lives nearby. She checked in with me everynight and met up with me twice in the first week and offered her experiences, as well as an ear for my concerns. Thanks Megan!

 

An additional note

Hey everyone, just wanted to throw out an update. I have been at site for 2 weeks now and it’s been high and low so far, but mostly i’m very busy figuring out daily life. Please bear with me as I try to catch up on back logged posts, my house does not have electricity and I recently purchased an internet stick, but my commune does not get service. But more on all those fun things when I can get into town and get some delicious internets! Thanks again for following and commenting, and keep your eyes peeled for some juicy stories!

“If you want to travel fast, go alone, if you want to travel far, go together!” -African Proverb

Whelp, I can’t believe two months is behind us already, it gives some insight as to how fast this experience will fly even though two years seems like a long time. Saying goodbye to my training host family was tough. My dad cooked me some spicy fried rice and was wearing a Siem Reap shirt in the morning for me, after breakfast I sat with the family while we waited for the bus to arrive to pick me up, chatted up my little sis and tried to catch her smile a few more times. When the moment came and the bus honked, it was gut wrenching to leave them, my host parents walked me out to the street like it was my first day of school and waved goodbye to me as far away as I could see them. We will truly miss each other…it was a moment that felt like what Peace Corps aims to accomplish. If this is what two months feels like, I can’t imagine what it will be like to say goodbye to my family and community after two years.

Jamming out during our final night

From out training village we moved to the Capital City of Phenom Phen for 4 days to complete training and for the Swearing In Ceremony (more on that later!). We had full days of training still, but in the evenings we were able to eat some Western food (hamburgers, pizza, and dairy queen!), purchase last minute supplies, explore the city, and enjoy each other’s company before setting sail for service. One evening we were riding in a tuk-tuk and noticed a large ferris wheel and 6 of us decided to check it out. What we found turned out to be a full on ammusement park! We bought tickets and ran from ride-to-ride to maximize our time. We started with a mediocre airplane ride, headed to the pirate ship, a kiddie-coaster, then the real fun began…the bumper cars.

One the Pirate Ship

BUMPER CARS!

 

Perhaps destruction derby would have been a better name, these were legit: full throttle, lots of room to get up speed, and no seat belts. The first hit was a T-bone from the left side, followed up with an immediate right. It immediatly became evident that if you did not have GI-Joe-Kung-Fu Grip on the steering wheel you might as well be on an ejection seat. It got to the point, that I would grimmace when two of us had a full head of steam. We were stoked, if it wasn’t for a lack of time, we could have stayed there for hours killing each others brain cells! But the best was for last…the list of rides was in Khmer Script and had english translations next to them, one was simply translated as “Squirrl Tub”. Spencer and I got into one car facing each other and fastened an oversized leather belt across out laps. The attentendent came around, undid the belts and put them on TIGHT. We looked at each other and both knew right then that the pizza and dairy queen an hour before might end up on each others faces, no words needed to be spoken. The ride itself consisted of several “cars” that went around in a circle, and each “car” would rotate upside down, check out the pictures and you should get an idea. There was no one else in line, so when the ride completed, we got a “one more time” chant going and we immediatly rode again. Michael threw up.

Squirrel Tub

Posing with my dad

 

Finally the day came, on September 6th, 2013 we were sworn in as Peace Corps Volunteers by the Ambassador. The event itself was at the US embassy, and it was beautiful, the food delicious, and the staff was wonderful. Ambassador Todd spoke encouraging words, our Peace Corps Country Director, Penny, spoke from her years of experience and we took the following oath.

“I, Joel, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the Peace Corps. So help me God.”

US Ambassador Todd at our swearing in ceremony

“Our lives are not determined by what happens to us but by how we react to what happens, not by what life brings to us, but by the attitude we bring to life.”

FYI – Pictures from google images, I haven’t got to experience this first hand just yet!

 

This week we were issued our permanent site placements, something we have all been anxiously awaiting for weeks. Everyone gathered around in a circle, our information packets were handed out individually and our fates were revealed. On the wall they posted a large picture of Cambodia with all 110 currently serving volunteer’s faces and an arrow drawn to their sites. I will be placed in a Northern Provence known as Siem Reap. The province also contains the city of Siem Reap to the South which is famous as the gateway to Ankor Wat and the other nearby temples. The structure of my new family will consist of two parents, two brothers (16 and 23) and a sister (18). I will learn more as time goes on, but the human history near my site dates back over 1000 years!

As exciting (and nervous) as it will be to go to site, it was also be hard to say goodbye to my training host family who has treated me so well. Even from day one when all I could say was “Hello” and “delicious” they have been looking out for me, always moving my bike into the shade and my laundry in the sun, cooking incredible food, and including me in everything. One of the English Teachers in my same training generation will be moving into my room/house after I leave, I am so excited for her and she will be an excellent volunteer for this village and this family. I was talking with my host mother and sister about them having a third sister in the family and my host mother said “I will have one son forever.” It was a meaningful moment for me and I have truly been treated like family in Cambodia.

“Peace begins with a smile.” – Mother Teresa

This week in Cambodian updates…rubbing glitter on children, speaking Russian with a 2 star general, hiking to a mountain top temple, and how I became a balloon salesman…stay tuned for the full report!

During training this past week one of our projects was playing games with primary school children to teach them the importance of washing their hands and good hygiene. Some groups played a memory game with pictures, others colored, and two played physical games. My group did a version of “Red light, green light”…all of the children lined up at one end of the area and on the other side was a station to wash your hands and a Peace Corps Trainee. The Trainee would read off various situations (ex: after reading a book, before prepping food, etc) and the children would stay still if it was not a critical situation to wash their hands, OR if it was a time they should wash their hands, they would run towards the hand washing station until we yelled STOP! After several situations, the kids would arrive at the station and we would teach them how to properly wash their hands. Another group played a game called “glitter tag” to demonstrate how germs were spread. In this game, the people who were “IT” covered their hands in glitter, so that when they tagged someone the glitter would spread, and after the game it was visibly apparent how glitter (germs) were all over the children and the surrounding area.

The glitter tag dream squad

Memory matching game

Coloring Pictures

On Friday 8/23/13 my Host Mother’s family came to town to see their mother and simply have some family time since they all had a free weekend. The women were busy prepping lots of great smelling food and I was invited to sit with the men. I did my best to pick out one or two words in each sentence to attempt to track where their conversation was going, or at least pick up when they were talking about me. It turns out one of my uncles is a 2 star general in the Airforce and another a 1 star general in the Army. The 2 star general was very friendly and spoke English, Khmer, Vietnamese, and Russian, so he would occasionally bring me up to speed on the conversation. Much of the conversation was dominated by years past, of the civil war during the early 1970’s and the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970’s. He told me that their generation felt like a waste…when he was born he was young, then they experienced civil war and genocide during the 70’s, and it has taken decades to rebuild things to the present day. He told me about how the area we currently live in was a massive battlefield and his family was forced to flee to a nearby town where his entire extended family crammed into one house until they eventually moved into the Temple. The schools that we have been training at were destroyed by bombs. When living at the Temple, someone nearby shot a rocket at a helicopter, missed and it struck the temple compound and killed his best friend. When in school during class, there would be noises of gun fighting and explosions around and the teacher and students would have to listen for when things got too close and would leave the school. He couldn’t say enough about peaceful conflict resolution, no matter how bad things get, violence is not the option.

Holding one of our Khmer Teachers!

I celebrated my 29^th birthday the other day. I was able to wake up early to skype with my parents, siblings, aunt and uncle, and my grandmother (and my doggies). It was great to be able to “share” the morning with them, they sang for me and even had cake. During the day we had training as usual, we did language at the nearby bus station/restaurant in town as a change of scenery from the class room. After we finished a 4 hour stretch we went out to get our bikes and I chuckled that a balloon salesman must have set their balloons on the bike of someone in our group. As it turns out, that bike was mine. Some fellow trainee’s (Headed by Samantha) has snuck over and loaded my bike top to bottom with balloons. It was quite comical to deal with this in front of the bus load of people that just pulled up, fortunately, there were enough children around who were eager to take them off my hands. Samantha’s family also made me a birthday card, which included the following important advice: “No money, no honey.” I got to thinking about birthdays I’ve had during adventures…in Australia when studying abroad, during adventure races, in Maine while hiking the Appalachian Trail, and now in Cambodia, all good reminders of how incredibly lucky I am. While I am immediately limited by Peace Corps regulations, essentially I am completely free in the world, no worries, few belongings, no forced obligations, I can go anywhere I desire and can do anything I dream, and that is the best birthday gift I can imagine…absolute freedom!

Ma’Lake

They following day was my favorite day of training thus far (a day off of course!). All of the health volunteers and our language trainers drove several miles away into the mountains to a large lake (and Earthen dam, both man made during the Khmer Rouge regime), which was absolutely breath taking. We hiked around, met a few locals, rented a few bungalow’s along the lake with hammocks in them, and ate the lunches we packed. Rachel, Mary and I rented tubes and went swimming in the lake before being called in to drive to a nearby temple on the mountain top. A few hundred stairs later we arrived at the top and got some excellent pictures.

Ma’Lake

Ma’Lake

Lots of Stairs

Buddha on the mountain top