I was to head down to the capital city of Phnom Penh for my annual physical and dental examination. It began like most other trips with a bike ride into Siem Reap. About 20 minutes into my ride, I was passing by a high school, about to ride through a gap with a student riding his bicycle on my right, and another student riding her moto on my left. Just when I was between them, the student on my left turned right into a book store, this resulted in us colliding and me falling off my bike. I lay on the cement, just a few scratches on my knee and foot, laughing to myself at the situation, every set of eyes within yelling distance was staring. I hopped back on, gave everyone a nod and was off, no words were spoken. The student that collided with me had turned around and was blood red in the face. I’ve fallen off bicycles more times than I could ever count, but I doubt that she has ever had an accident with a foreigner before!
Minor bike crash!
Surprisingly, one of the sickest times I’ve had in Cambodia, was when I was in Phnom Penh for my medical check up! Headache, stomachache, diarrhea all night long, heat rash, and I had just been in an accident with a moto on the way there! No worries though, an air conditioned hotel room is more of a cure than any medicine could be. Unfortunately, during the 7 hour bus ride home, I was struggling. Luckily the diarrhea was cooperating, but my head was pounding, stomach was nauseous, it was a long hot ride. Then I biked one hour back to my site having only eaten 5 cookies in the past 24 hours. Back at site, I had a few middle of the night sprints to the outhouse, one time I had to wash off my feet afterwards (remember i’m squatting over a hole), and another time I had to wash my underwear afterwards (almost made it to the outhouse!). I don’t mean to gross anyone out, but I think illness is something that effects all volunteers around the world and in order to paint an honest picture for those back home, I feel the stories should be shared! Plus, like my father in America texted me in response to telling him I pooped my pants, “If it’s not on public transportation, it doesn’t count!”
Kittens chowing down on the lizards their mom caught.
I sat at my table for breakfast, eating my rice porridge. I looked around all was normal. Suddenly, a woman who was standing and waiting for her food fell to the ground. She fainted. Everyone gathered round, fanned her with whatever objects they had and squeezed her appendages with their hands. Turns out she was pregnant, so that may have had something to do with it. Her mother came to pick her up and they went to the hospital to get her checked out.
Two village boys who live near the Health Center
“Operation walk-about” – Currently in it’s beginning stages. Usually I ride my bike if I go to other villages due to the distance and convenience, but I’ve found that even the slow pace which I ride at is too fast for the pace of life in my commune. People exchange hellos with me, but when I walk, they invite me in, share their fruit, walk with me, etc. It’s hot and sweaty, but what isn’t?!? Throw on a long sleeve shirt, a protective hat and it’s off to make friends!
Oh care packages, how do I love thee!
Some young cousins were visiting from out of town for a few days. The youngest girl, named Bo, has the chubbiest cheeks and big eyes, full of expression. She cries and screams if I get within 10 feet of her. Some of the cousins and I decided to go pick some goi fruit and little Bo came along. As we passed a fence, the dogs inside barked at us and Bo was scared. Knick refused to carry her, so she turned and stepped towards me and raised her arms. I scooped her up in my arms, elated at my fortune to get a chance to bond with this little munchkin. After we passed the dogs, she looked up at me and started crying her eyes out again, and she has reinstated her 10 feet barrier zone ever since!
Bo, a face full of expression!
The grandmother in the house next door has been sick for sometime, always lounging in the hammocks under the house. He smile and warm personality welcoming all guests who enter their fence. Recently, she has become more sick and is confined to upstairs in the house since she can’t walk the stairs anymore. He children and extended family have been coming to visit for a few days at a time to be with her, and one some days monks come over and chant with the family late into the night.
With the toys I give the children that my loving friends and family send me from home, and with movie night, I have one rule: If you don’t go to school you don’t watch the movie and you don’t play with the toys. When you return to attending classes, you can return to playing too. Everyone knows the rule and honors it. One night “Hei” (an 11 year old distant relative) got called out by one of the other kids for not going to school, but was honest with me when I asked if that was true or not. When I asked why not, he just said because he was lazy. So I told him he couldn’t watch the movie. But instead of returning to his house, he decided to stick around so no one could watch the movie, despite our asking nicely. So then, I just sat around and let things play out as they would. Initially, they were upset at me, I told them I would love to watch the movie with them, but they know the rules…no school, no movie. Slowly, they turned on Hei and were asking him to leave, but he still wouldn’t go. He left for a few minutes once, then snuck back in, so I had to stop the movie again. After that, I turned the computer around so I could watch the stairs and the movie at the same time. Finally, the older kids resorted to physically using their bodies to block off the stairs so he couldn’t come up, after a little while he began to cry and got on his bike and rode home. Mom rolled her eyes at me a bit, but rules are rules. He went to school the next day and he was over it, no harm no foul, he hasn’t missed school since!
Fighting fish
Two young women from the village were sitting at my aunts house. When they left, I asked my aunt if they were sisters. She said “no, mother and daughter!” Turns out the daughter got married when she was 14 years old, she’s now 17 with an infant.
Site one of my English students at the silk weaving factory.
I’ve been wanting to get starting on some gardening for a long time now. I met with a group in Siem Reap called HARVEST which works with Cambodians on commercial farms and home gardens. They set me up with one of their senior staff members and the following week we were scheduled to go out to see a garden together. He was going to pick me up at the market 4km away from my house, so I decided to walk down since I didn’t want to leave my bike there all day. After about 300 yards, my uncle went by in his tuk-tuk and picked me up since he was going to the market anyhow! So now i’m at the market much before my scheduled pick-up time. Luckily, one of the doctors from the Health Center has a daughter who lives at the market and sells supplies in bulk. I hung out at her house chatting with some folks, and she even invited me to leave my bike at her house next time if another situation like that arrived! I met up with the HARVEST staff member and he drove us about an hour away to a fellow PCV’s site, Jeff. We picked up Jeff and one of his fellow teachers and went to check out some gardens. It was AWESOME! There was a village education session going on in a beautiful garden, everything looked good and clean, there was even an irrigation system set up, so cool, I couldn’t get enough. There was a similar garden just up the road, so we got to check out both of them before the morning was through. The HARVEST staff member was busy in the afternoon, so we returned home for lunch, and he drove me all the way up to my house!
Home garden training.
Home garden
When we had a free weekend, PCV Jeff and I decided to visit our friends in the neighboring province of Kompong Thom. On the first bus ride, a man came on the microphone to tell everyone where we were heading, Jeff had the funny idea to applaud for him after this simple speech, when we did, a few other people on the bus joined it and we had a childish laugh. We first met Josie, a fellow health volunteer who is doing an extraordinary job at her site. An older couple near the main road lent us two bicycles so we could all ride 5km up to Josie’s village. Man-o-man, what beautiful scenery, I thought my commune was beautiful, but I had to pick my jaw up off the ground after riding around her site.
Water buffalo in the river at Josie’s site.
We popped into her Health Center briefly and met a pair of doctors who are married and were some of the kindest hearts I’ve ever met. They showed us around, then we went back to their house for incredible food on their balcony as the sun set.
The ambulance at Josie’s Health Center.
They were so patient and you could instantly see the electricity between them and Josie, my heart swelled to know that my friend had their unconditional love, and vice versa. You could see it in their eyes, in their voice, their playful banter, their generosity…it was why were here volunteering. Later, we went to her original host family’s house to hang out, they were equally incredible and love poured out of them like a river. The food was top notch, we ate like champions.
Food at Josie’s host family’s house.
Palm sugar.
At one point, there was some music blasting nearby, seeing as we weren’t far from the pagoda, we didn’t think much of it. Upon walking to get some food, we discovered a group of people observing a long haired man with glasses and a few gold teeth yelling into a microphone, behind him was a car with a homemade sign, a man beating a drum, and a unicycle on the ground. He was selling a “medicine” and was listing off all the benefits and cures, my hunch is that there wasn’t a whole lot of medical research to support these claims. A mentally challenged woman spotted the foreigners and began yelling incoherent sentences at us and holding an ear of corn up to my face. The second time she did this, I was ready and tried to take a bite of corn, but her reflexes proved to be the faster and she left us be with all her corn nibblets.
The “medicine” seller.
Later in the day we met back up with the couple of doctors from Josie’s Health Center, they wanted to take us on a boat ride down the huge river that flows through Josie’s Commune. A long skinny boat with an outboard motor that had a long shaft which reminded me of a weed-whacker. On the return trip upstream we ran out of gas, so the doctors paddled us the last hundred meters. Now we had a chance to swim! Being that I love to swim, when they gave the word, I tossed my shirt and jumped in head first! I quickly found out that the water was only about 2-3 feet deep…luckily I didn’t enter with a fully committed dive!
Temple at Josie’s site.
Then the rains came, slowly at first, but picked up once we were back to the doctors’ house. We waited it out at their house for an hour or two, but the day was getting late and we hoped to catch a ride into the Province Town before dark. We had to say goodbye and head out in the rain. Now, I haven’t mentioned it yet, but Josie’s bicycle had been having a little problem since we arrived…the left crank arm kept falling off…and it’s not so easy to ride a bicycle with only one pedal. I decided to take Josie’s bike and get a head start on them down the road since we had a considerable distance to cover to get out to the main road (around 8km). Allow me to set the scene: I am a tall foreigner riding a bicycle with one pedal, standing on the pedal and using the other leg to skate like a skateboard, it is pouring down raining, we are 5 miles deep into rural Cambodian rice farms, and I passed by two men walking the other direction herding about 30 water buffalo, with a big smile I asked them in Khmer “Where ya headin?” Then in the distance behind me, two other foreigners approached, soaking wet, also speaking Khmer. Josie strapped a bungee cord to the back of her bicycle, and to the front of the broken bicycle I was riding, and she began towing me down the red dirt road. For the two men herding the water buffalo, besides the slack jaw, you could look into their eyes and see their brain sparking trying to make sense of what was happening before them. Just another day in the life!
Dry Season
The day after leaving Josie’s site, Jeff, Josie, and I embarked to pay Spencer a visit. This requires an hour tuk-tuk ride into the country side, so we got up early to get things going.
Spencer and Jeff
We acquired a friendly driver and set off over the bridge. Going up the small incline of the bridge was no problem, but coming down the small incline on the other side proved difficult since the brakes were not working. Our driver did his best, but between a guardrail and a van there simply isn’t enough room for a tuk-tuk. We scraped alongside the length of the van and took off it’s side-view mirror as the grand finale. The drivers pulled over to hash it out, and in the meantime, the tuk-tuk driver called us a friend to pick us up and take us instead. The ride out was beautiful in the early morning and Spencer’s site was no exception. His house was rustic and reminded me a lot of my living situation, he’s roughing it a lot more than he’s ever eluded to! His host mom dished us out some sensational food…we ate so well on this trip! Spencer worked as a beautiful school which was donated from the Princess of Thailand, and so students often travel from far away to study here. At Spencers house, he has two host siblings, but there was an abundance of outgoing high school girls who all called him brother, and he called them sister, it was endearing! All of them wore the matching purple Washington visors that Spencer’s mother had brought for them during a visit.
Walking around Spencer’s school
Spencer’s sisters!
We all walked to the school for a quick tour, the girls were super excited to talk both English and Khmer with us, they called us brother and sister, and they loved taking pictures! From there we moved to the temples at Spencer’s site, supposedly some of the very oldest in the country, quite incredible and a nice stroll through the surrounding woods.
Pose 1
Pose 2
Joel, Jeff, Josie, Spencer.
Spencer showed us a tree that one could chew on the bark and it tasted sweet, almost like an artificial sweetener, it reminded me of sassafras.
Spencer eating the sweet bark.
On the return trip we ran into our tuk-tuk driver from the morning, he told us he ended up paying the van driver $40 for damages…close to a weeks pay.
Recently, my work has taken me into the elementary schools around the commune, with a focus on teaching nutrition. After some education about the three food groups and why we should eat them, we begin drawing. Each kid divides a piece of computer paper into three sections, labels it with the three food groups, then we draw pictures of various foods in each group. My goal is that they have a personal reference guide in order to understand how different foods fit into the different groups. And what kid doesn’t love to draw!
Teaching nutrition. The three food groups.
Puppies!!! 7 of them!
After meeting with my tutor to study, she told me to pick some “breeng” fruit from her tree. Some kids gathered and after a little peer-pressure, I climbed up the tree and plucked a sprig of the berries. I quickly had to abort the mission, I was only in the tree for about 30 seconds total, but had some 50 of the large, red, biting ants in my pants, shirt and hair. After dancing around like Elaine from “Seinfeld” for a few minutes I had killed them all.
I finished my “ball in a cage” carving after maybe 25 hours of whittling. Turned out better than I had imagined!
Finished the ball-in-a-cage.
Volleyball season! Quickly coming to an end by the approaching wet season, since there courts are set up in the rice fields. Some courts I will play on, other ones are simply too bumpy, rough, and uneven that I don’t trust my feet with the running and jumping requited for volleyball. In one series of 5 games, my team was down 0-2 in games. In the third game I was warmed up and it was my turn to serve…we took the game 15-1. In the next two games both teams wouldn’t let me serve, my team did pull it out 3-2 in games to win the series though. Since that day some of the villagers have asked for serving lessons, and I never get tired of my cousin (from the other team) telling me how bad his forearms hurt after that game!
Fighting fish
Boys collecting the fighting fish in a pond behind the school.
I was returning to my site from Siem Reap on my bicycle. A young boy was riding his bicycle in the other direction. A gremlin like smirk overcame his face and he extended his hand with an open palm. My smile also curled from ear-to-ear and extended my hand with an open palm. BAM! High five. No words were exchanged. I smiled for the rest of the day until I fell asleep.
Joely the Goalie 