“See value in doing nothing with people. Just be present with them.” RPCV Cambodia, K6

With the wonderful coordinated efforts of fellow PCV’s, my middle school principle and a tuk-tuk driver, we put on a health fair at my middle school. Several PCV’s took time out of their schedules to make the trip up to my site for the weekend. A neighbor in my village drives a tuk-tuk, so he picked us up and drove the 7 of us to the middle school. It wasn’t long before we realized maybe we were too heavy when one of the tires started making weird noises. We stopped along the side of the road and took some funny pictures while the driver got the tire fixed at a local shop. Then we decided to split the group into two tuk-tuk’s for the remainder of the tip and the return trip. My school principle, who is also one of my English students, had the 9th grade students split up into 5 rooms, each with about 20 students. We had 5 subjects we would teach about. Each subject was taught at the same time for about 20 minutes before we would rotate the students to a different subject so they got to learn all 5 subjects. Andrea taught about germ transmission and hand washing and had the kids running around playing tag with glitter on their hands, laughing and screaming their heads off before using soap to wash their hands clean.

Jeff and Andrea

Andrea teaching Handwashing

Meghan and Emily went in tag team and taught about teeth brushing which had students singing “Happy Birthday” (the approximate length of a proper tooth brushing) and it resounded through the school grounds.

Meghan and Emily teaching teeth brushing

Josie put on a top-notch nutrition class complete with matching pictures to food groups and playing a modified basketball game to reinforce the knowledge.

Josie’s food-group-basketball

Josie’s nutrition game

Sally and Michela also tag-teamed an informative session about American Culture (The second goal of Peace Crops is teaching locals about America!) where they fielded questions about weddings, food, funerals, prices and so much more, I even heard they proposed to each other a few times!

Michela and Sally teaching American Culture

I taught about cigarettes, comparing the advantages and disadvantages of smoking and showed pictures of healthy vs smokers lungs. We performed an experiment using a water bottle with a bit of clear water in the bottom, squeezing the bottle like a lung, we “smoked” a cigarette so the smoke entered the bottle and the water would turn a disgusting yellow, a nice visual that grossed some kids out.

Comparing twins…one who smokes, and one who does not

Smoking demonstration

Behind the scenes Brett and Jeff helped out wherever they could taking pictures, herding students, keeping track of time and looking handsome as usual.

My host family likes to change things up around the yard. Most recently, they moved a table with a shade awning and built a large awning with a sheeted rubber roof along the length of the food stall. A grandfather in the village was the foreman, with the help of my brother-in-law and my father they whipped that thing together our of bamboo and sticks in a single day!

Framework for the new awning

Awning in progress

Finished awning

Prior to my American family visiting, I was chatting about it with my mother and she asked if I would be homesick after they left. I thought I would be. She agreed and said she experienced a similar thing when he left home when she was 12 years old to go work the rice fields near the large Tonle Sap lake in the middle of Cambodia. She’s awesome, she gets it, she knows what’s up, and I sure didn’t feel like I had it so bad after hearing her story. As rough as it feels sometimes, I’m really pampered in comparison to the people of this country.

Cool cloud formation and some corn

My tutor’s mother makes small rattan baskets when she is home from working the rice fields in another province. She will go away to the forest and live away from home for 5 days at a time and collect bundles of rattan. Painstakingly slowly using a knife to feel the thorns off the rattan cores. Once back home she weaves the baskets in her free time when she is not doing daily chores around the house. She told me she can make about 10 baskets in a day. She sells a single basket for 15 cents. Meaning that she makes about $1.50 per day if you exclude the days she is out collecting the materials. Keep that in mind next time you think your job doesn’t pay enough! She is my second host mother, truly and awesome and caring woman. She invited me to go sow some rice one day after studying. She lent me her clothes, a large brimmed hat and a long sleeve shirt. We biked out to her field and pumped water from a nearby canal into her field to flood the recently plowed ground. When the pump ran out of gas, she sent me on an errand to go buy another bottle. One thing I love about her is she doesn’t treat me all polite like most people do, she’ll put me to work just like she would anyone else and she does herself. Although she has several small fields, we only worked on the one that day since she didn’t yet have the $3.75 to pay for the next one to get plowed.

Style.

Following my tutors mother to her rice field

Borrowed clothes from my tutor’s mother

Pumping water into the rice field

My host mom’s cousin had a ceremony at her house and my mom went over in the morning to help with the food preparations. She was cooking up a huge batch of rice porridge in a pot situated on a few clay bricks over an open fire. The pot shifted off the bricks and spilled boiling hot rice porridge all over my moms feet as she screamed. Every sprang into action to help and was immediately calling for soap! I agree that soap is a good thing, and washing her feet with cool water was probably beneficial, but what was odd was the speed and sheer quantity of people that observed the situation and independently yelled for soap as the first action. Once settled, I asked mom how she was doing, she didn’t even care about her feet, she was embarrassed she had ruined food enough for 12-15 people.

I found my kittens, we gave them to my cousins.

I started an experimental garden behind Law’s house. I made a few small rows to plant the remainder of the corn seeds I had and am planting each row with different variables. Half of the plants I planted the seeds directly into the soil, and the other half I planted in trays and raised in my nursery. One row I didn’t raise the soil, another I didn’t cover with rice straw, and another I didn’t weed. I have been keeping an eye on the plants and taking pictures in an attempt to provide visuals to villagers about the importance of several steps in the gardening phase. For instance, if they think that all the effort in raising a row of dirt isn’t worth it, I can show them a comparison of plants in a raised row and a flat row and which one had better results.

Raising the rows of the experimental garden

Experimental garden after planting seeds

I went to an elementary school one morning to meet with the director in hopes of setting up some classes. The teachers were in a meeting so I waited outside with a massive amount of children wearily watching me from a distance. After a few minutes I had lured them in. I observed a blob of chicken poop on the table we were sitting at. One student grabbed the hand of another student and put his hand into the poop and everyone had a good laugh. Some kids would poke at it voluntarily even after I just told the other children not to play with poop. I’ve seen this a lot, with kids tricking each other to step in cow poop or flicking poop at each other with a stick. While I can’t help laughing with them at the absurdity of it, I decided I would teach about germ transmission at the school that day. I refined my lesson plan over three days of teaching and the best activity, in my opinion, was a hand washing demonstration I observed a fellow PCV named Melissa teaching. Take two kids, both put a few drops of vegetable oil on their hands to simulate the natural oils our hands have. Then sprinkle their hands with glitter to simulate germs. Have both kids wash their hands, one with soap, and one without. Observe! The student who used soap should be mostly rid of the glitter, while the student who didn’t use soap should have the hands of a drag queen!

Baby crocodiles

During training we learned about an old Cambodian medical practice for women after they give birth called “roasting”. I observed my sister doing this after giving birth to my host niece. At night she sleeps on a slatted wooden platform, and below the platform they set up several containers of hot coals. The belief it that the heat helps the mother to stay healthy after following child birth and protects her. She did this every night for about a month, during the day…it was hot enough already! My mom also told me that my sister had been craving watermelon after giving birth, but my mother would not allow her to eat fruit for a month or two following child birth in fear that her stomach would swell. I asked if the doctors recommended this, she said no, it was something that she had done after she had given birth, and that these days it’s not so common anymore.

Borah…loves the selfie

I learned through my mom and cousins, that one of my uncles, who lives in another town does not allow his 6 and 7 year old children to go to school. The children lived with us for a month and loved going to school, they went every single day. Unfortunately, due to their financial situation, the uncle feels that the children need to help at home and he is raising them to work as soon as possible so they can assist with the family income.

A fellow volunteer from the year prior to me was finishing her service. Her final weekend she had a going away party at her site, so I made the bike ride West. Due to absurd head winds it took me 3 hours and 15 minutes. was hoping i’d get to ride those winds the following day! Michela borrowed a dress from her host family and went and got full Cambodian make-up, she looked stunning! The party was held at a restaurant where she had gotten close with the family, they had balloons set up and music playing. The food was fantastic and it was fun to hang out at a social situation with both fellow volunteers and host country nationals. She gave a wonderful speech in Khmer before tearing up, it was obvious what a wonderful job she had done in her two years in Cambodia, and how much she will be missed. My ride home the next morning…tail wind…2 hours flat. A difference of 1 hour and 15 minutes…absurd winds indeed, a cyclists dream ride!

Pete, Michela, Me, Jeff

Michela with her host parents

Two months ago, I had an idea. I wanted to take the kids into Siem Reap to go roller skating, or go to the circus, or whatever else they wanted to do, but I didn’t want to flat out pay for it because I don’t want to foster expectations of money. I announced my idea to the children and suggested that they save up money little by little. We made a jar labeled “traveling money” (in Khmer) and I kept it in my room. When the kids had a little extra cash, they gave it to me, i’d deposit it into the jar and write down the quantity on a paper next to their name. Some kids were more diligent about it than others, but I was really impressed, they each saved up a few dollars. Finally the day arrived, we met at my house and my uncle, the tuk-tuk driver, picked up the 9 of us. Each person contributed $1.00 from their savings towards the cost of the tuk-tuk.

Borah, Jew, Knit, Chen. On the Tuk-tuk to go to Siem Reap

Knick, Sun, Hei, and I on the Tuk-tuk

First we went to Lucky Mall in Siem Reap, we rode the escalators a few times with nervous laughter, went into an electronics store and watch the big screen televisions and made out way into a kids center. There was a ball pit and arcade games! Shooting games, claw drops, and race cars! Back in the tuk-tuk we giggled, recapped and high-fived.

The second stop was to another mall called the Ankor Trade Center. On the third floor is another massive arcade, this one also including air hockey, a room of computer games, basketball, and old school mortal combat systems set up! I watched with delight as they tore through the games like one of the seven plagues, I bought a few dollars of tokens and supplemented their spending. I was drunk with the love of a parent, so proud of these kids for saving up and seeing the smiles and hearing the laughs.

Riding the elevator, to the top floor, then back down

Finally, we headed to a place in Siem Reap known as “Street 60” where there is a small carnival set up. We all rode the bumper cars in the light rain, ate junk food, and I paid for all of us to jump on the trampolines for a half hour. We rode home as the sun set, worn out from exuding happiness, Knick mentioned that they should all start saving again that Monday…Hei responded, “Yeeeee, I’m going to start saving TOMORROW!!!” (an sure enough, they have been saving up even more this second time around). As things quieted down on the ride home, and we drew weary under the hum of the motor, Law looked at me…”Boo Joel…thank you”. We made one final stop at the market to buy fruit smoothies to give to our families.

Hei and Borah

Bumper cars

Chen and Knit

Sun jumping on the trampoline

Riding through the fields on the way home from studying, some people in a field called my name and waved me over. A fellow villager invited me to help him. After rice seeds are sown, the baby rice grows for a few weeks, but it is too close together. So after it reaches a certain height, you rip it out by the root, then replant each individual stalk by hand and space it out to they can get more sun and more nutrients. We were ripping the rice out this day. Grab a small handful of rice low to the ground, rip it hard and fast like a table cloth without moving the dishes, then kick the whole wad to knock the mud off. Keep doing this until the entire field is empty, tie them together in bundles and you’re ready to plant again! Simple? You would think so, but I either pulled up pounds of mud with them, or just ripped the plants right in half. White rice tastes better and better the more I help in the process!

Tying the rice bundles

Pulling up the baby rice in preparation for transplant.

There is an 81 year old man who I sometimes see on the side of the rode in a far village. He has no job, so he fills in holes in the dirt road and maintains them little by little and people who pass him by will offer small tips. I brought him a bag of fruit one morning and he was so appreciative and I had a hard time translating one word until I realized he was calling me “Son”.

My tutor’s mom invited me to plant rice in the afternoon. She went before me, so I had to wander around a bit before I found the massive field with 50+ people bent over planting. I took a deep breath and walked over and jumped right in despite many quizzical looks. I’m usually pretty good at physical tasks, but these people were machines, I was so slow, they laughed and laughed and watched, and mocked…and rightfully so, but that’s a sign of flattery right? Some girls comically mimicked my voice and my Khmer then said I was too tall for planting. It’s hard work, and it’s sometimes awkward, but I feel like it’s a great way to meet people and after a bit of warming up, they ask some really interesting questions about myself and America.

Transplanting rice. Every blade planted by hand.

An elderly Village Health Volunteer mentioned that when she was a girl she walked 7 km each way to school. That’s a little over 4 miles…one way.

I ate grilled mouse. Pretty good, a lot of bones, and a little greasy.

Some of the cousins invited me to do something, often times I know that they are asking me to go do something with them, but not positive what it is until we arrive. This day, we went to a large pond and collected snails! We wondered the edge of the water, pulling back vegetation and searching around in the muck. Most were fairly small, but we did find three big ones! They would be used in a stir-fry.

Picking snails

snail hunting

Snails!

Snail searching

Our final snail catch

From there we jumped into another pond nearby and collected the fruiting portion of lotus flowers. It was a refreshing dip in the water, but difficult work navigating all the lilly pads, they are really spiky on the stems, like a very coarse sandpaper rubbing your shins. But the seeds are crunchy and delicious, ever so slightly sweet.

Water lilly pond

Hei and Law picking water lilly seeds

I visited my retired Health Center director at his house. He was a great host and we had a delicious lunch together. He’s still trying to get me to ride a moto with him after nearly a near of telling him I can’t. While there, two young women also stopped by to visit him, they teach about diarrhea around various villages. I invited them to come out to my village one afternoon and we walked around giving talks to mothers and grandmothers with young children about signs, treatment, and prevention of diarrhea.

Educating about diareah

Some chickens had gotten into my experimental garden, they don’t harm the plants directly, but we put down rice straw to cover the rows (like mulch) and when the chickens scratch around looking for food, they push the straw over the baby plants and bend, break, and cover them. So, Law and I built a small fence around the garden and haven’t had any problems since!

Experimental garden fence

A 10th grade student in the village sometimes asks me to translate words he comes across for him. One day he came to ask me to translate “Rhibosome”. I did my best to explain, but that wasn’t something we learned during Pre-Service Language Training!

“Don’t let fear or insecurity stop you from trying new things. Believe in yourself. Do what you love. And most importantly, be kind to others.” -Stacy London

In town one evening, I was walking back to my hotel with another volunteer when a tuk-tuk driver in front of our hotel asked for some help. I walked right by not thinking of it, but my friend stopped to hear him out. He began this story about how his email was broken and a bank sent him $300 and his wife passed away and his son was in college. It was quite the sob story, I doubted it’s validity. The other volunteer hear him out and tried to give him some technical help on a computer (remember this whole conversation is in Khmer). Finially, she followed him over to a computer cafe across the street where he gave her the name and password of him email account. There were many problems, the password wasn’t correct, we tried many things. She was persistent, she believed. They worked out the mis-spelled account name and password and finally got into the account, and sure enough there was an email from Western Union Bank sending a code to receive his $300 from their bank. She typed up a full reply email to the bank for him and asked them to communicate by phone in the future due to his lack of email access. So, after working through this problem for over an hour, his story was true, she saved the day, this man would be able to receive his money and pay his child’s college tuition.

Borah and I transplanting some rice.

Rabbit Island, off the coast of Cambodia to the South. Described in my journal as: “palm trees, clean shoreline, thatched roofed bungalows, delicious food, shady hammocks and the perfect temperature water.” I made the trip down during a long weekend and had an incredible experience. I became a lightning cheetah. (From my journal) “The water was it’s typical self, but when agitated, the alge would glow a bright, neon green for a second. Therefore, every step, every swim, every twitch of your hand or arm revealed our magical powers, like shooting glitter from your hands. I could not stop moving and staring at my arms, kicking and running in place as I shed light from every pore on my body. I took to the shallows and would bound on all fours like a cheetah chasing prey, a streak of green trailing my every move: lightning cheetah! I don’t know that i’ll ever be able to translate how neat this phenomenon was to someone back home, but I found myself thinking a lot about Brendan (my brother in the USA) and how much he would have loved it, and how much I wish we could have bounded together as lightning brothers reunited.”

Bungalow at Rabbit Island

Sunset from Rabbit Island

I was in Phnom Penh during a rain storm. The rain came hard and came quick. Apparently faster than the infrastructure can drain the water away. In some places, the streets flooded nearly knee high. I was in a tuk-tuk with a fellow volunteer as we splashed through the traffic and madness of hundreds of motos driving through a foot of water. Then a car came in the opposite direction. The waves from the car rippled outward, high above the standing water level until it slammed into the slatted wooden floor of our tuk-tuk and exploded upward into the sitting compartment like a depth charge sinking a submarine. We got wet.

My host sister gave birth to a beautiful, three kilogram, baby girl at 4:00am on June 10th, 2014. Her name is “So-pee-ah-lie” and she likes to sleep! My first niece.

Baby So-pee-ah-lie

The chickens we raise eat the fleas off the puppies when they are sleeping. Cool symbiotic relationship!

Law’s bicycle was broken for a week, so I rode him to school on my bike rack every day after lunch. I’d remind him to study hard, say please and thank you…all the things my parents used to remind me. He give me a sincere thanks and run off to play with his friends at school. My host cousins are the closest things I have to children in this world. They grow up so fast!

Knick taking a nap

At my house, I was sewing a button onto a shirt, and stitching up a broken zipper on my backpack when my village health volunteer, Soken, stopped over the house. She took the needle and thread from me as we chatted and proceeded to stitch up the repairs for me in record time. I’m so grateful that my host family and community take such great care of me.

Playing with children in torrential rain storms should be mandatory practice. The children sometimes take these tiny silicone beads and soak them in a water bottle for a day until they swell to the size of a marble, but squishy and slippery. During this rain storm we took to pegging each other with the silicone balls. A correctly aimed throw would result in silicone confetti as it hit it’s mark. After a solid half hour of pegging each other, both the Elementary School and Middle School let it’s students out at 5:00pm. This means that hundreds of uniform wearing children were riding down the road in front of our house. Think of them more as those tiny colored ducks in a shooting gallery! Five of us stood at the entrance of my house and pegged the mob as they sloshed by in the mud. I was hesitant at first, but they all giggled with glee and shielded their faces with wet notebooks as they passed. It only took one to stick out their tongue in a taunting manner before I cranked back and painted him in silicone.

My sister and cousins watching movies with the baby under my house.

Coming home from tutoring, I stopped along the road side to watch a group of men cut down a massive tree near a small hut selling snacks. Standing on a branch propped up against the trunk, one man wielded a long chainsaw while another squirted some lubricant on the blade from a water bottle. Some observers invited me closer and I wore my bicycle helmet for protection. Just as the winds picked up some men ran to pull a long rope that was tied to the top of the tree. The tree keeled over slowly before crashing to the ground safe and sound. From there, I had about a five minute ride back to my house. I was soaked to the bone in just one. The rain fell as I battled the wind coming as both a cross wind and a head wind. I was standing up and putting everything into the pedals and barely moving, I wondered if my brakes were stuck or something else on my bike had broken because I was facing so much resistance, but it was just the wind. When it hit me from the side, I had to lean into the wind, I was riding at an absurd angle to the ground. Rain was pouring down my face. I’ve never ridden a bike in conditions like that before. When you pass another bicycle or a moto coming the other way in storms like these, you both smile, a big toothy smile that depicts the shared experience of the events at hand. A beautiful smile.

TIMBER!!!

Tree chopping

My two host cousins who work in Thailand were kicked out of the country due to a military coup. Any Cambodian’s who did not have legal paperwork and passports were told to leave by June 20th 2014. The Cambodian Government sent numerous military personnel vehicles to the border to retrieve all the returning workers. I believe the Cambodian Government temporarily dropped the cost of passports to just a few dollars to help accommodate these misplaced folks. Both of my host cousins have remained in Cambodia since. One moved to Battambang with his girlfriend and got married a month later.

While eating dinner one night, a crazy man was walking down the street towards our house. I have seen him on several occasions and I believe he mostly wanders between the different villages in my commune. There is not much chance of him passing by the foreigner without taking notice and wanting to interact. But as he approached, my host father who mostly keeps to himself intercepted him and got him moving down the road. Even though he doesn’t say much, he’s always looking out for me!

My commute!

I woke up in the night to two loud chimes of a bell near my house. Sounds of scuffling and voices nearby, I looked at my phone, 1:23am. I slipped back into a dream, I was laying on the floor of my Cambodian house, in the middle lay 4 monks in bright orange robes, each with a stick and a large gong across their chests. They would chant, then ring the going two times, I assume this was in tune with what was actually happening around my house. Once I awoke in the morning, my brother-in-law informed me that the grandmother next door had passed away…at 1:23am. I also dreampt that I was fighting the ‘crazy’ man from yesterday in a gym and we were using the 45 pound plates as weapons! The following day we had the funeral for the grandmother next door. The villagers came over in the morning, then men drank and built a coffin, the women sat in circles and prepared massive amounts of food. In general it wasn’t a somber event, more of a gathering. We all sat on tarps on the ground and ate rice together. After lunch, I went to a fishing pond with some of them men and took a swim and they threw their nets. Back at the house, the men buried the grandmother’s body behind the house and built a small bamboo hut over the grave. I believe in a years time, the remains of the body will be dug up, cremated, and either taken to the pagoda or kept in the family’s house.

Shoes as people went up into the house as they paid respects to the grandmother next door.

I was sent play dough in a care package. The kids didn’t know what to do with it at first, but after a little coaching and some examples they started crafting beautiful contraptions!

Play dough!

A villager came over at dusk to purchase something. As I finished dinner he was very talkative and it was obvious he was drunk. This is pretty much how the conversation went: Please give me your shorts…no…do you hate me…no…if you didn’t hate me you would give me your shorts…no…please give me your shirt…no…do you hate me…no…please give me your shorts…no…And so forth. Over and over and over again. Hooray beer!

When people tie up their cows to graze, they often times do not tie up the calves because they stay with their mothers. One day a baby cow jumped the bushes at my uncle’s house and started chowing down on our baby corn seedlings! Eventually, they spotted him and chased it away, but it killed about 30 plants. Another problem has been the chickens, they like to scratch around looking for things to eat in the dirt, but this can be problematic to the small seedlings if they scratch the straw on the ground over the plants and breaks the stems.

Teaching Nutrition

A crazy man from our village came over to buy cigarettes, he is always saying nonsense then cracking up. I was so interested in his laugh that I was staring, he caught my eye and came over and sat with me. He poked me in the side a few times, counted the colors on his cigarette pack, mumbled and laughed. I kept a weary eye on him, but mostly just observed and laughed with him. He finally gave me a poke on the nose, grabbed his shovel and went home. I asked my brother, Pow, what the guy’s story was. He told me he wasn’t always crazy, but his wife was very sick and poisoned him before she passed away from the illness, now he lives alone.

My original Health Center Director is officially retired now, but still comes around the village on occasion when he is bored. He’ll usually stop over my house to eat and I get to chat with him. During one meal, he cracked open a beer and a coke-a-cola, poured them both into a large pewter bowl of ice in a 50:50 ratio and drank it. After completing his meal, he rinsed his hands with the remainder of the concotion. I tried it once on my own when I was in town, not too shabby, give it a try sometime!

My tutor told me she has become more healthy since she began tutoring me. Due to the health questions I ask her and translate and attempt to describe, she has learned from some of that knowledge. She told me that she sometimes washes her hands up to 6 times in a day! She has been eating more vegetables. And using the money she makes from tutoring, she bought a $17.00 ceramic water filter from Siem Reap for her and her mother. Music to my ears!

Tutor’s water filter

Many moons ago, I visited my High School Friend Chris at his college, Randolph Macon. During those visits I learned a new card game called ‘Horse Racing’. Never would I have guessed that I would be using this game to teach English in Rural Cambodia some 10 years later!

An older gentleman I met during a walk invited me to his house on a Thursday afternoon to watch a ceremony at the pagoda near his house. When that day arrived, I headed over that way and discovered hundreds of people at the pagoda, complete with decorations, music, food vendors, the whole shebang. I didn’t immediatly see any familiar faces, as this pagoda is a little further from my village. Suddenly, one of my English students, a man who works at the silk weaving factory, pulled up behind me and said (in English!) “Follow me!” I tagged along with him and his family for an hour and got to ask lots of questions. Turns out it was an induction ceremony for some new people who were becoming monks! It’s nice to wander to ceremonies further from home, it’s a good reminder of how many stares I used to get and how far I’ve come with in my own village.

Monk induction ceremony

Monk induction

“If you want to truly understand somebody, you can’t become bored or impatient, and the everyday matters as much as the exceptional.” -Strange Stones by Peter Hessler (RPCV China)

Camp LION: Leaders In Our Nation. This was the name of a camp that my fellow province-mates and I put on for 60 high school students from 5 different schools around the province. We applied for a grant, and with generous donations from the local communities and our friends and families back home we raised the money to put on this camp. It would last for 4 days, the students and volunteers all stayed at a guesthouse next to a teacher training facility in Siem Reap and ate meals across the street. During the day we has several NGO’s teaching about leadership, sexual and reproductive health, planning your future, and other subjects that students generally don’t learn about during their education in public schools.

Camp LION!!!

Students arrived in vans, coordinated by the volunteers, from various districts around the province before checking in at the guesthouse. We issued everyone name tags, pens, notebooks, a water bottle with their names for reusing, a room key, and an envelope to decorate which they would use as a “mailbox” of sorts to send notes to each other for the duration of the camp.

Envelope mailboxes

The meals were taken care of by a fantastic restaurant across the street. They cooked up some mean Khmer food for breakfast, lunch and dinner and were super accommodating to our needs. The sessions would take place in the teacher training center, complete with spotty wi-fi, electricity, a projector, and air conditioning!!! We were the cat’s meow. As volunteers we mostly served as moderators, recruiting Cambodian NGO’s to come do the teaching in Khmer, they did a fantastic job and the students seemed attentive and engaged. Us volunteers sat in the back of the class rooms working on planning the next events and days, or out running errands to get the stars aligned for the coming sessions. Jeff and I had the pleasure of lugging the giant, blue, 5 gallon water jugs back and forth from the seller some 200 yards away, what a forearm workout!

The rooms in the guest house were pretty rustic, about what you’d expect for $5.00 per room, per night. But the heat was brutal, so hot in those concrete walls at night with nothing but a half broken fan which we couldn’t even aim at our bodies. But, being one of the volunteers, I shared the room with one other person. The students had 4 bodies in each room and two beds!

Jeff’s counterpart did an incredible drawing on his shirt.

Someone put flowers in a pile of cow poop.

On the first night of the camp I was leading an hour of “night time activities”. I planned out some games using balloons. First, teams would pass balloons back and forth in a relay but could only hold the balloon by clamping it between their chin and neck/chest. If they dropped it, they had to get down on the floor and pick it up with their chin. But even better was the chin-to-chin transfer when they would pass the balloon to their teammates. Oh yeah, things got intimate! The next relay made pairs move the balloon by mashing it between two faces, and two new people would have to use their faces at the transfer. Then onto some passing of the balloon over their heads and between their legs. Finally, each student got a balloon, and in a long line they sandwiched one balloon between each person and had to walk like a conga line forward, but could not touch the balloons with their hands, and could not let the balloons drop. They did awesome with all the games, and the smiles and laughter I get to experience everyday here is what fuels the fire to keep on trucking!

Balloon face relay.

Balloon train!

Us Peace Corps Volunteers split into groups and led a fair, each taking a group of students and rotating every 20 minutes. We taught: study skills, American culture, health problems in Cambodia, and team building. I led the team building session which consisted of a few games. Pairs would line up on a thin curb and attempt to walk past each other and if working together they would not fall off. Then we switched to the entire group, where they had to walk together in a game called “welded ankles.” They walked in a line and kept all their shoulders in contact the whole time, if they broke they would start over. Next they had to keep their hips together. And finally they had to keep their ankles in contact, think of it like a group 3-legged-race, just lots of legs!

Looks like wrestling, but it’s teambuilding.

Welded ankles game

Let me tell you a little story about shirts. We were getting t-shirts printed up for the students, but because the printing facility in Siem Reap used low quality materials last year, we decided to get the shirts printed out in Phnom Penh instead. One of our staff in Phnom Penh was in charge to getting the shirts printed out and mailed up to us since they wouldn’t be ready until the first day of camp! We had a beautiful logo that one of the other volunteers drew by hand of a regal lion. We went to the location to pick-up the shirts for two days and still nothing had shown up. It turns out that after getting in touch with the company in Phnom Penh that they had never received the shirts and had no employee by the name of the person we mentioned that the shirts were given to. So, somewhere in Phnom Penh, someone made out with 70 blank t-shirts and some $200.00 cash. After picking our brains about our options, I remembered that my dear sweet mother in the United States had mailed me tie-dye for the camp so we could dye shirts. She also got a great deal on shirts, so went ahead and bought 70 of them and started to mail them across the Pacific Ocean a few at a time in care packages! After hitting the post office and doing some inventory, I counted 28 shirts, we had 60 students exactly. We were close on our budget, but Sally, who did an incredible job with the budget allotted me nearly $50.00 to go to the market and try to get my hands on 32 more shirts. I hit a couple stalls in the market and haggled, but couldn’t get the price low enough. At my finial stop the woman wouldn’t sell to me any lower. I explained what we were doing with the students, what had happened. Still wouldn’t budge. I pulled out all the money in my pocket…$49.50 and laid it out in front of her and told her it was every penny I had. She nodded! We sorted through various sizes of white t-shirts and I left with a plastic bag of 32 shirts. As I walked through the market back to my bike I remembered I had parked my bike out front and the attendants charge $0.25 for watching you vehicle while you’re in the market…and had just given every cent I had to the shirt saleswoman. I returned to her stall and explained the situation to her and she forked over a quarter with no questions asked, just a smile on her face. So we had done it, 60 shirts just hours before we were scheduled to tie-dye! Then we read the direction on the dye…this was no mix and drip dye, it required mixing with boiling water for some 15 minutes, then allowing the shirts to soak for 20-30 minutes in the hot solution. I’ve heard PCV’s called resourceful and innovative, but this was a whole new definition. They sprang into action to try and salvage our ever problematic t-shirt issue. Large dying buckets and tubs were purchased, the restaurant was persuaded to allow us to boil up an absurd amount of water, the mix went in. The students arrived, one station distributed shirts, another had them write their names inside, another taught the methods of rolling the shirts for various dying effects, then as dusk was upon us the shirts went into the mixes and soaked with much stirring. I had my doubts, if the shirts were allowed to soak for this long, there wouldn’t be any blank parts of the shirts to contrast the color. The students gathered around and we distributed out the boiling hot shirts for them to take back to the dorm rooms and wash in the sink/shower. A few hours later and my concerns were put to rest, not only did the dye work, but the patterns were beautiful and crisp! I was so proud of the challenges overcome by our teamwork, it was inspiring to watch it all come together and the result was absolutely satisfying!

Other care package goodies. My family is the best! Thanks mom and dad!!!

Care packages from the states with white T-shirts!

My tutor, Ratha, in her newly tie-dyed shirt.

Jeff and I stirring the dye

The following evening we loaded into long tuk-tuks and buzzed down the road to the nearby Ankor Wat for sunset. Each student brightly adorned by their freshly tie-dyed shirts, this made for keeping track of them quite easy! Despite all of the students being from Siem Reap Province, some of the students had never been to the temples before! Everyone was appreciative and spirits were high as we took photo after photo in front of the magnificent stone structure. The party continued on the ride home as kids sang songs together and played games on the tuk-tuk. Upon arriving at the guesthouse, 26 pizzas, a vat of fried rice, sodas, and ice were brought in for our final nights feast. And what a cause for celebration indeed, the students had been excellent.

Singing on the tuk-tuk

Riding to Ankor Wat

Jeff jumping for joy

Crossing the moat around Ankor Wat

The final morning we had a closing ceremony and gave out certificates to all the students. The students drew pictures and messages for our generous donors back home who funded the camp. Alas, it was time to say goodbye. Students from 5 high schools, now all embraced in hugs and goodbyes, smiles, laughter, tears in their eyes. I couldn’t believe how moving it was and I knew right then and there that all the hours, upon hours, upon days we had put into preparing this camp were worth every minute, and we would certainly continue it in 2015! My tutor was one of the students in attendance, and back at site, I asked her her opinions about the camp. She summed it up well in saying, “I was awake until 2:00 in the morning last night talking on the phone with my new friends!”

PCV’s relaxing after pizza night and a long days work.

Writing notes to each other and using their envelope “mailboxes”

Drawings for the donors

Messages to the donors

Tearful goodbyes

“Peace is much more than the mere absence of war.” – Sargent Shriver

Sometimes i’ll bike ride or walk around the commune, and from somewhere nearby i’ll hear someone say under their breath, “look at the frenchman!” or “the frenchman is riding a bike!” And then on a few occasions something special has happened. The person they were speaking to looks up and replys, “Oh, that’s Joel…he knows Khmer…Hey Joel!!!”

Mango drying to make mango leather.

My aunt’s dog gave birth to 7 beautiful puppies. When I went to check on them then next day they already were crawling with fleas, but super handsome none the less. I walk over to her house at least once a day to play with the babies and it’s been fun watching them get their legs and practice “working on their RAWR!”

Once or twice a day, my family uses a gas powered water pump to pump our well water into large clay cisterns around the house, to water the plants, and to hose down the dirt road out front of the house to keep the dust down. During these few minutes, the younger cousins will strip naked and jump into the spray of water to take their daily “shower”. I throw on a bathing suit and join in if I have the time. Just like back in America, playing with friends in the hose when we were kids!

My next door neighbor invited me to his pond with some of the village men to catch fish using a throw net. When I got there, they had caught a few already, and I went for a swim with my host cousins. The men were using an interesting tactic where they would deliberately wrap the throw net around a large cluster of water plants from the underside. This would trap all the fish hiding in the plants in the net. Then they would float the whole cluster to the edge of the pond and pull out all the plants, and bingo…fish! I began helping the men pull out the plants, quite heavy because they are water logged. There are always weird itches and stings when swimming in the murky ponds, so I didn’t give much through to the sting on my man parts. After pulling out a few more plants it still stung a bit so I submerged myself and scouted the situation with my hands. To my horror and hilarity there was a leech the size of my pinky finger latched to my left testicle! I’ve learned all about the presence and removal of leeches in the ponds, so it wasn’t a big deal, but of all the places! How rude!!!

Road construction nearing completion

During a hard rain, I was putting some things away in my room when I peaked out into the main room of the house. Let me explain that the roof of out house has two peaks, picture the letter “M”. In the central valley is a main gutter that runs the length of the inside of out house to collect rain water which we store in a large clay cistern outside. And much like the gutters in America, if you don’t clean them periodically, they become backed up with leaves. The difference here was that the overflowing gutter is inside the house! So when I peaked out of my room, it was full on raining cats and dogs in the house! I immediately grabbed my camera and took a short video, which included my host mother walking up into the house and observing the situation. Here I was videotaping a downpour inside our house instead of first taking the time to alert her, I don’t think she cared, but I felt ashamed. My brother-in-law crawled up into the rafters, reached into the gutter and pulled out the sludge to allow the pipes to clear. Fortunately, the floor of the house has cracks between the boards, so all the water drained out easy.

It’s rice season!!!

When we had another hard rain, one of the first of the rainy season, all the cousins and I were playing in the rain and ran down the road to the rice fields to see them filling up for the first time this year. The wind was blowing so hard that it stung our shirtless bodies. Then as the rains eased up and we walked back home, something weird happened. All of us, all at once had this deep dull pain inside our ears and upper jaws and started cupping our ears. It only lasted about 15 minutes, but I don’t think I’ve ever experienced that before and don’t know what environmental conditions caused it!

Sharing my snacks from care packages with the children during movie night.

Once every couple of months some French doctors come to our Health Center to do free check-ups on children. They doctors are different every time, but they always use the same translator…A Khmer women who speaks English and Khmer…but not French…and they don’t speak much English usually. It’s interesting, but we make it work. Anyhow, I was talking to the translator in English before lunch, just having a normal conversation, just the two of us. One of my Health Center midwives called from across the room, “you’re fat (in Khmer)”, both the translator and I stopped mid sentence and looked over, “excuse me?” said the translator…”you’re fatter than before!” replied the doctor. The translator nodded in agreement and said, “yeah, I haven’t been exercising”. And that was it, we picked up our conversation in English where we left off. She took no offense, the midwife meant no offense, just an observation. I don’t think that happens in the USA!

A student taking my wheels for a try.

One of my village neighbors recently bought a used tuk-tuk to begin working in Siem Reap as a driver, as if that occupation isn’t over saturated! I saw him on the road with some of my cousins in the tuk-tuk and they asked me if I wanted to ride along to the pagoda. So we bumped out way down the unkempt road. A new building was getting painted with neon colored murals telling the story of the Buddha. My neighbor, the driver, parked his tuk-tuk in front of the entrance and stripped down to his underwear sitting next to it. A monk then chanted for about 5 minutes and splashed both him and the tuk-tuk with water until both were soaked. This was a blessing of sorts to ensure he had good health and lots of work and money for his new profession. Then we slip-slided our way back home in the rains on the slick muddy road with an inexperienced driver. I got out twice to help push through some sections with thick mud.

Peace Corps arranged a regional language training session for us to further study Khmer in small groups with our expert teachers. Our Peace Corps language teachers are really sensational teachers and people and we learn an incredible amount from them in a short time. It was also great to catch up with some of the other volunteers and take a dip in the pool in the evenings…I know, we really rough it here in Cambodia!

Grandfather in town selling some snacks

After the weekend long language training, we jumped over to a different hotel in Siem Reap and met up with about half of the K7 volunteers. For the next week we would be learning about home gardening and food security training here in Cambodia through a program called HARVEST. And what’s even cooler, it that we would be building gardens to practice what we learned in the classroom…and we would be doing it at my site! For a few days prior to the training I had been hunting down materials and getting pricing and scouting potential locations to build the gardens. Everything came together well and we were able to build the garden at my Aunt’s house directly behind mine. The classroom at the nearby high school was HOT…real hot. But it was nothing until we got out into that field and began working the ground with garden hoes in our professional attire. My super-duper host mom hooked us up by moving one of the coolers near the field, and loading it up with ice and bottled water. The food was decent at a nearby restaurant at the market, but there was no escaping that heat. After two and a half days of that, Peace Corps decided enough was enough. At a minutes notice, they booked us beautiful conference rooms in air conditioned hotels and we ate at an all-you-can-eat buffet in Siem Reap. WHOOOOO-Weeee were we happy, everything was good in the world. Did I mention the hotel also had a small pool, oh yeah, nothing like a few months of deprivation to make you love the little things! In the evenings Jeff, Giani, and I walked around the town with some of the Khmer counterparts who also attended the training. They took us to a small pagoda, a garden, to the riverside, and to a Khmer carnival. It was a lot of fun to have a 50:50 ratio of Americans and Cambodians because we could dabble in whichever language or culture we chose. Finally, on the last day of training, Peace Corps hired my mom to cook up lunch for all 50 of us, and she delivered as always. Up in the house, rice mats covered the entire floor, dished abound, my aunts, neighbors, and kids helped out as servers, and the food was knock-your-socks-off good. Everyone sat around in circles, reflecting on the week, laughing, smiling and I can only assume day dreaming of the gardens they would soon establish at their sites!

Learning to make insect traps

Volunteers creating the garden at my Aunt’s house.

Planting seedlings!

Volunteers and their counterparts eating lunch in my house.

Picking up wood in the Peace Corps vehicle!

Shortly after the gardening training, the cousins and I built a small nursery to grow seedlings. A small bamboo rack and a plastic cover to protect from the elements. It’s worked fantastic, and the kids are always itching to help water and check on them. Meanwhile, my Aunt and Uncle, whose house we built the garden at during training, completely took over their responsibilities of planting and maintaining the garden we initiated. Just check out the cute little plants!

The cousins building a bamboo lattice to elevate seedlings in the nursery.

Law helping me put a roof on the plant nursery

Growing seedlings in the nursery

My counterpart during the gardening training is a Village Health Volunteer that works in my village. She is super cool, motivated, and a hard worker. She also has a significant garden of her own. Since the gardening training, she has invited me to check out several large gardens around the community and meet the owners, and point things out. Gardens I would have otherwise have never known existed. Walking back through the fields from one garden, we sat in the shade to rest and we talked for about a half an hour about cultural differences of dating, marriage, and gender roles in American and Cambodia. It was a very cool conversation, and i’m glad I had the language skills to follow along and contribute to the conversation. It was nice to have an intelligent conversation with someone my age.

Soken and I with our certificates

My counterpart Soken

Visiting a villagers existing garden.

Two other volunteers (Meghan and Emily) from nearby were taking some of their students to the water resivior near my commune, so the cousins and I biked down to meet them. Law, despite being in 7th grade, had borrowed a villagers small, pink, hello-kitty bicycle and it was hilarious to watch him ride the children’s bike, especially when we would floor it and make a squealing noise to race to the front of the pack. And not to mention when he wiped out one of those times and tipped the tiny thing and came up with a face full of dirt and laughter! The water resivior was nearly dried up, being as it’s the end of a 6 month long hot season without rain. The shallow water had been heated up by the sun for so long, that it wasn’t the least bit refreshing, and you had to work so hard to get anywhere in the knee deep mud that lined the bottom. But we made the best of times tossing the Frisbee on the beach and relaxing in the shade.

The kids at the Ankor reservoir

Let me just tell you about the heat again. March, April, and especially May are HOT. You sit still and you sweat…all day…every day. Anything you do, anywhere you go, you sweat, you sweat until you can wring it out of your clothes. The villagers do it year after year, day after day, I have much admiration for that. I would sit with my tutor, Ratha, in her kitchen area, we would just be practicing words, and I would have a steady drip of sweat trickle off my nose, I liked to think I was just concentrating super hard. I would have to put a cloth, or another book under my arm when I wrote in any book, or my journal at night since my arms were so sweaty they would wet the pages and make the ink bleed. When I ask Cambodians if they like the wet season or the dry season better, nearly all have told me the wet season, and they follow up…”because it’s not as hot.”

Knit checking out the corn

My experimental garden.

Healthy seedlings!