“Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.” -Muhammad Ali

The kids love to go swimming, they ask me almost daily to take them. One day, I was wading in a small canal with 3 of the youngest boys: Tee, Borah, and Bunya. We played around a little and to quote from my journal: “The three of them sat on rocks just under the water level and had a competition to see who could meditate the longest. I timed them and watched the 3 beautiful boys radiating in the sunlight with water trickling over their legs in the heart of a rice field as tall and green as ever…a mental picture I don’t ever want to forget.” While it probably sounds like I’m a pedophile, it was more of the feeling of being a proud father!

When it rains, my family and neighbors convince me not to go to school, that I won’t have any students show up. One day I went to class in a hard rain, so hard it was like a “white out” you couldn’t see 50 yards down the road! At least 15 soaking wet kids showed up, some biking as far as 3km each way for class and riding home in the dark. So yeah, I always show up…no matter what!

Made a clock for teaching time in English class

My neighbor Lee rode to English class with me because his bicycle was broken. On the way home, he insisted on doing the pedaling. I sat on the bike seat and held onto his shoulders while he stood on the pedals and biked us home! I couldn’t help remember biking this same method to the beach in Australia with my friend Chris where we would sleep out under the stars in the sand next to the ocean.

Riding to the market with one of my best friends, Soken, she asked me if there would be a volunteer replacing me when I returned to America. I asked if she wanted one. She replied, “Yes, because you teach English, help Cambodia, teach health, and people get to learn about America and Americans.” BOOM, that’s the first two of the three Peace Corps goals…she’s the best!

My cousin, Chen made a random little flower on a bench

Everyday, around 4:00pm, my cousin K’nick grabs a large cooking pot and we go pick small, edible, yellow flowers along the road near our house. She sells these to my mom, who in turn sells them to customers. Such the little entrepreneur!

Mouse poop. Chewed holes in books. Chewed holes in clothes. Partially eaten bananas. Scratching and scurrying through the night. I had mice living above my room. I finally had enough of their nonsense and went to the market to buy a mouse trap for $0.35. Not your standard wooden mouse trap from America, this was the same concept, but heavy-duty metal with a serrated metal lip around the frame…a no non-sense device! Since they had previously gotten into my prized Worther’s Original stash, I decided to bait the trap with just that and slid it into the corner of my room in the evening. When I checked it before bed, it was swarmed with ants…these darn pests, if it’s not one, it’s the other!!! I hosed down the trap with mosquito spray to kill all the ants, and didn’t have high hopes that this hard candy wielding death trap coated in %30 DEET would be especially appealing to my furry nemesis. As I drifted off to sleep around 10:30pm…THWACK…the twang of metal. Mom yelled to my brother under the house, “What did you drop?” But I just smiled that mischievous smile that would rival the Grinch because I knew what that sound was…the sweet sound of retribution! Come morning, I checked it out and was heart-broken to find the trap had caught the poor thing’s leg and was still alive sitting in a pool of blood. I covered my hands in plastic bags and carried it out of the house with K’nick close at my heels, she spared me the dirty deed and killed it with a swift blow to the head with a stick. A bitter-sweet victory knowing the painful night the little critter had, I hadn’t wished for that even as my nemesis.

After catching that mouse, the next night, I was still visited by the mouse fairy, so I again prepped the bear trap. One night I loaded it with nutella, another night with a big hunk of banana. Both times, when I woke up in the night, the bait was 100% gone and the trap had not been set off. On the third night, I set the bait in firm and put the lever on a hair-trigger. Around 11:00…THWACK!…awoke from a dream and put a smile on my face. In the morning, it was even better than I had imagined…doubble whammy!!! Two mice, both instant kills, so no suffering. Since then, I haven’t heard any mice at night! Now it’s just that pesky chicken laying eggs in my ceiling!

Double whammy!

My cousin Ngaa is pretty active, he likes to horse around, even compared to the other teenagers. He climbed into the back of a pick-up truck that was at our house, and when the truck sped off he proceeded to jump out of the back of the pick-up and eat it hard onto the gravel road taking fleshy gashes out of his knee, elbow and hip. I instructed him how to clean it out good with soap and got him some Antibacterial ointment. At dinner, he calmly asked me “Why can I jump out of a stopped car and land find, but when I jumped out of the moving car today did I fall over?” I love it when they ask science questions! I did my best to explain about inertia and this phenomenon using the example of tossing a ball inside a car. I think he understood, what an oddly unique learning experience!

K’nick’s two-tone fingernails

My cousin, Leak, went down to the large district Health Center in the middle of one night. The next morning, I biked down to check in and see how she was doing. She didn’t have any visitors besides her sister and husband, so I stayed and chatted a bit. When I asked, she told me she had “urine traffic disease” which I am assuming translates as a urinary tract infection. After some antibiotics, she came home in a day or two and all was well.

Roger and I were planning a play day at the Angkor resivour. Emily texted me early in the day saying she too would be going with her host family! So I biked over with my merry band of children and met up with the others for a wonderful day splashing around in the water! I rented tubes for the kids, walked them to the food venders for snacks, waded in the shallows with the little kids and give them piggy-back rides to the deep areas…who would have known the Peace Corps would be father training?

Riding home from swimming

My cousin K’nit randomly bought me a second hand stuffed dinosaur as a gift!

My uncle, the tuk-tuk driver, who busted up his face about 3 months ago when he hit a water buffalo had another incident. Driving home at night with some monks in his tuk-tuk, he hit a cow! No injuries this time around, just a little damage to the moto, and I think the damages were paid for by the cow owner because it was their fault. Uncle Hooah told me in his 12 years as a tuk-tuk driver he has never had an accident before, now he’s had two in the last three months!

Wandering around the village with little Tee, I came across a group of six village women and girls, some of them my English students. They had a 60 kilogram sack of frogs and were running them through a food prep assembly line. First, head chopping. Second, skin removal. Third, gutting. Fourth, hand and feet removal. Fifth and final, leg chopping and sorting. They ripped through the live critters faster than you could imagine in a tarp covered in blood, guts, and frog skins. The final frogs they would stuff, grill and sell as a popular stuffed frog dish.

Frog prep

Frog prep

After movie night, I heard some commotion under the house. My brother and his friends had caught a 1.5 kilogram snake under the house! Nothing too huge, but one of the biggest I have seen here in Cambodia. I believe they sold it at the market in the morning for upwards of 6 dollars per kilogram!

Snake, it was bigger than it looks here

Some of the kids have small speakers shaped like soda cans which have a slot for a memory card, sort of the local equivalent of an iPod. Recently, the boys asked me to put some American songs on their memory cards for them. Since I don’t really have any music on this computer, I put on the “Top 40” songs that I borrowed from another volunteer last year, rap, country, pop, it’s got it all! It’s been fun walking around town hearing American music on occasion. One song in particular has been a hit: acapella by Karmin. Who would have thought? And maybe it was just coincidence, but one night dancing at a ceremony about 2 weeks later, a remix of the song came on!

One Saturday, fellow PCV, Jeff, and I biked out and met in the middle at PCV Rachel’s house for the weekend. The ride out was a dusty road for about 1.5 hours and lots of smiles. On the way I found a small area of one of my villages that I didn’t know existed! We mostly just hung out with each other and Rachel’s host family and walked around her village a bit. They cooked us up some delicious food, and Jeff also prepared a nice dish of fish and vegetables! At night we ate jellybeans and watched a movie in bed! After getting breakfast at Rachel’s market, we set off for home. I decided to take the long route and go through a different village to visit a now returned volunteer’s family (Meghan). They were doing great, have been raising bunny’s, missed Meghan, and said they have had the opportunity to chat with her on the phone a few times!

Jeff

Rachel

Jeff the chef

I had just got out of my mosquito net in the morning, my pants were on and I was figuring out the arm and neck holes in my shirt so I could put it on…STOP, STOP!!! My host brother yelled from across the house as he came running over. I thought maybe there was a scorpion or some other animal on the shirt that I was about to put on and I was in mortal danger…when he got to my side he reached out and stroked my chest hair for a few times with a giggly smile on his face. I asked if he had any and he was all to quick to whip his shirt off to show me he did not, but that he did in fact have arm pit hair. So there we were, two shirtless bros checking out each others pecs in the morning light, a good start to the day!

My cousins were asking me to do something with them, I couldn’t quite figure it out, but it sounded like it involved swimming and it wasn’t too far away, so we got on our bikes and set off with a bucket. We arrived at a local water way and entered the water on the shallow side of a dam. With our hands and feet we would feel around in the mud under the water until you felt something hard and dug it up…sometimes just a rock, but sometimes it was a mollusk which looked like an oversized muscle! We played in the water and collected the shellfish for a few house with all the local passerbyers stopping to watch the foreigner. We probably gathered close to 5 pounds! unfortunately, I wasn’t around the next day when they prepared them, so I never got to taste them.

Collecting shellfish

Cambodian weather is brutal on objects. We destroy soccer balls in 5 days, my clothes have seen more wear in the last year that in 10 years at home. So my favorite Ospray brand racing backpack has been slowly deteriorating with a few holes here and there and the zippers were getting stuck. finally, once all 4 of the zippers were completely ruined, to the point that I couldn’t use the sack, I took it to the market and got all the zippers replaced for $3.00…good as new!

Laying around in a hammock with my adorable cousin, Teary, she began to pull out a few of her long hairs. We would then take the hairs and pretend to shave each others arms, face and mustaches with the hairs. Later, she walked around bragging to people to look at how smooth her mustache was and people were amazed that shaving with a hair could get so close. But in reality, she’s just a goofy 6 year old girl with no mustache hair!

Some of the village boys and I biked down to a local bridge to go swimming. Lots of jumping, flips turned into back-flops, and cannonballs. When I first got to Cambodia, my cousin Borah couldn’t swim. This day, we got his courage up to jump off a 10 foot bridge in 8 foot deep water and swim about 20 feet to the shore all by himself. I followed along right by his side, but he crushed it no problem!

Bridge jumping

Inquiring about water wells, mom told me about when she was younger, they just had deep pits dug my hand into the ground that they would fetch water out of using a bucket and a length of bamboo. It would take hours of their days to gather enough water for showers, meals, and other daily needs. About once a year, as the dry season came in, they would have to climb down into the well to dig out any sedimentation build up. She said kids these days didn’t know how easy they have it compared to the living conditions she had as a child. So of course, I felt like a complete sissy thinking about out living conditions in the USA.

My mom’s cousin was having a large ceremony at her house. She was inviting nearly 500 guests over to celebrate and eat rice porridge. These guests arrive staggered over the period of a couple of hours, so during that time, the party is in constant flux of setting tables, eating, cleaning up and resetting, along with constant food prep, dish washing, etc. I went over in the morning to help with some of the initial preparations and helped put decorative covers on some chairs and build little ceremonial sand castles with a grandfather for an incense shrine. In the evening, I first ate porridge with some random folks from the commune, and later ran into my retired Health Center director and he grabbed me to eat more porridge with him. After we ate, he took me up into the house where we sat with the grandmothers and grandfathers and 10 monks and chanted for about a half hour. All-in-all, it was an action packed day, and one I was thrilled to be a part of, and it was nice to recognize so many people at the ceremony. At night, 8 men who are distant relatives of my mom slept in hammocks under the house. Party on Wayne!

My cousin’s son, Date

Cooking station to make rice porridge for 500 guests!

A Cambodian friend who lives near Siem Reap invited me to her house to have lunch with her and her neighbors. The whole crew was super friendly and they let me help out with the food prep and my language felt spot on that day so I was cracking lots of corny jokes. During lunch, I went to grab a napkin out of the small plastic packages they come in, but to my surprise, inside were three new, female sanitary pads. Thinking it a bit odd, I just set them down, she asked me what I needed and I motioned to the napkins closer to her. After lunch, I offered to do the dishes, and to my amazement she let me do the dishes alone while she hung out with her friends outside, it was awesome! Complete reversal of gender norms in Cambodia! I stuck around for the afternoon and we slowly got to prepping for an early dinner. As I was peeling some vegetables, my friend was organizing the table from lunch and discovered the sanitary pads she had mistakenly set out instead of napkins. She ran over and told the story to the group (all females), then turned to me and asked if I could understand what she had said…I bust out laughing so hard and then she realized that it was what I found during lunch. We laughed until the point of tears, but she was truly mortified. In a culture that is very reserved about sexual topics, for her to set out sanitary pads for a foreign guest to discover during lunch was a big mistake for her. We continued to laugh it off, and I assured her it was no problem and that it’s nothing to be ashamed of, but I could tell she was uncomfortable still. When I got on my bike to leave, I thanked her for the meals and for the napkins…she threw a water bottle cap at my head and I knew we would still be friends!

Teaching my niece to walk

“Not what we have but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.” -Epicurus

An organization which does some wonderful work in my commune asked me to join them on some education they were doing. It was only men they invited and the meeting was about drinking responsibly, gender equality and domestic violence. And one of the coolest things was that the meetings were led by two women and they had no problem controlling the group and getting participation in these topics. One moment in particular, when the men were starting to get tired and lose interest, the women took a break, had them all stand up and sing and dance like frogs…and these 20 gruff, rice farmers did it!!!

Soken and her partner teaching the men.

Eating mom’s famous rice porridge during a snack break

Soken taking the helm

The men singing

Since most people travel by bicycle or moto’s, rain seems to be an excuse not to go to school. Being the teacher though, I always show up. One day it was just one of my younger students and I, one on one. We set up a game on the board and threw nerf balls at the correct words and played a few other goofy games for the full hour. As we rode home together he told me that he thought learning English was really difficult at first, but that I am a nice teacher and I teach him the same topic as long as he needs to understand it and that playing games is fun so he enjoys learning. It’s these split second moments that make all the difficulties and doubts fly out the window and you remember why you signed up for Peace Corps!

When I had a sore throat, mom cooked me up a batch of hot tea with ginger, sugar and lime…what a treat and what a gal!

During movie night we usually go through phases of movie types, like superheroes, car racing, robots, etc. As we worked our way through a series of zombie movies we watched all 5 of the Resident Evil sequels. The kids were so into the suspense that they would jump a mile high when something surprised them and k’nick would put her hands to her face with her mouth wide open like Kevin from home alone during chase scenes. It’s almost more fun to watch them than the actual movie!

I had a nice week-long sickness with changing symptoms. One day I had a stomache, one day headache, one day sore throat, one day fever chills, one day throw up in the squat toilet in the outhouse. I told mom I couldn’t do rice during that point and I’d request ramen noodles instead. Hanging out at Ngaa’s house one afternoon, I decided to try some Cambodian traditional medicine called coining. I took off my shirt and layed face down on the floor. Ngaa rubbed some ointment on my back (think Vick’s Vapo-rub) when took the edge of a coin and scraped it hard against my skin in a line about 10 times and then would move to a different location. This breaks some of the surface blood capillaries giving the appearance of red tiger stripes and is supposed to let out our “bad air”. It was fairly painful in some places. I don’t know if it cured me, but it certainly took my mind off the sickness for a while!

Ngaa coining me

Earned my stripes

During the sickness, I knew I had to go to the Health Center to set a good example for all the kids and family that I heckle about going to the Health Center when they are sick. My midwife supplied me with some oral rehydration salts, which is like an electrolyte mix to help stay hydrated. She set me up in a lounge chair in the middle of the waiting room under a fan and put “The Voice: Cambodia” on TV. I drifted off to sleep for an hour and was so grateful for the care she took of me.

At night, my stomach was still hurting. Mom and sister were laying on the floor watching dubbed movies. Mom set me up with a bowl full of ice and set it on my stomach. I layed on my back and read a book for an hour while icing my stomach on and off. It was very soothing and relaxing. It’s incredible how a little sickness can make everything so much harder, but everyone shows you so much love and care.

Hanging out with mom and sister before bed.

I got to Skype home with my father’s side of the family and my wonderful grandmother, Nanny, while they feasted for family dinner. It was so nice to see everyone and all their tasty desserts! Thanks for getting everyone together and making my day!

Heading to the pagoda for a small funeral celebration, Ngaa’s bike was broken so he wanted to ride with me. unfortunately, my bike rack was temporarily broken…so instead of riding on the back, he sat side-saddle on my top tube as we bounced 3km down crappy dirt roads. At first he just sat there with his hands on the handle bars for balance and I pedaled like usual like I was giving him a hug. Then he took the reins and controlled the steering while I sat up on my bike seat and did the pedaling and held onto his shoulders. It was a blast just pedaling and letting him to the steering, we cackled the entire 3km to and from the pagoda!

Tee and I at the stupa where my host grandfathers ashes are held.

Little celebration at the pagoda for my deceased host grandfather

One night there was an accident where a tuk-tuk collided with a moto about 1km from my house. The next morning I heard that the moto driver lost his foot in the incident. For the next few days, riding to and from English class there were large red stains on the road until a few good rains came through and some policemen were out taking measurements and photographs.

During Pechum Ben holiday, the men in my town did a sort of pub crawl. They would walk to one of the men’s houses, sit around and drink a beer, then all walk to the next house, drink a beer, etc for the whole afternoon. My neighbor was home from working in Thailand for a few months, so I walked around with him and the other men while they forced me to drink soft drinks with them when I turned down alcohol. One of the funniest moments was when he was drunkenly telling me how much he loved me and how he wanted me to visit his house in another province one day. Another man cut him off and said, “Don’t trust him, he just wants to eat your butt!”

Towards the end of Pechum Ben holiday, I was told there was some boat racing down in the district town! Some of the kids and I biked down to check it out. Turns out it wasn’t racing, but there were tons of boats out and people riding around and hanging out. I ran into a village man who I had done the “Pechum Ben Pub Crawl” with the previous day and he told us he had a friend with a boat who would give us a ride for free. So, Ngaa, Rong, and I jumped into a boat and sped around while everyone watched from the bridge. After the ride, we ran into some other village kids, so the man took us down with the new group for another free ride! During a rain storm, all the people gathered under the cement bridge to wait out the storm and cheered on the boats as they passed under and rattled out brains with the echo! On the ride home, one of the boys must have had a lapse in attention and rode his bicycle straight off the edge of the road! A steep slope about 10 feet down and covered in high thick vegetation. He made it a good ways down before the vegetation broke his fall and came up smiling. I still don’t know what caused it, but watching him from behind just ride off this crazy slope into the brush was so comical we were all in tears laughing. On the way home we stopped at a random seller’s house who had a monkey chained up to a tree behind their house. We bought some snacks to feed the monkey before heading home before dark.

Rong and Ngaa on the boat ride

This is how we roll

Post crash into the brush

Laying on a table under my house, little Borah decided he was going to pick all the discolored hairs out of my beard. My facial hair wasn’t too long yet, so it was difficult for him to grip the hairs. He took a grain of rice, still in the shell and used this and it gripped the hairs so strongly, he was (painfully) ripping the hairs out so fast. I was tired and it was so comical that I took the abuse for a while before I had to stop him.

My little niece, Sopeeahlie, had a runny nose. In order to clean out her nose, my brother-in-law would take a mouthful of water, put his mouth over her nose, squirt the water up into her nose, then suck it back out and spit it out.

I set off to explore a neighboring commune one day, one I’ve been meaning to get to for a long time. I forgot how wonderful the feeling of exploration is and riding down unknown roads where every turn is new. I felt a taste of the euphoria we experience during Adventure Racing and I that freedom to just keep riding and not turn back was calling to me.

Exploring the open road

I had the pleasure of going to visit one of the new K8 volunteers at his home. I biked through my commune and met Roger at Ankor Thom temple before he guided me down the roads to his house. A beautiful and quiet house with a friendly family and great food. We hung out on the balcony, his little brother guided us to the pagoda, and we sat around with his host dad. A fun visit, and a good trip down memory lane to remember how difficult those first few months are and how so very far we have come. The ride home was brilliant green rice fields under a setting sun.

Visiting Roger at his site!

Bike ride home from Roger’s house

At about the halfway point of Peace Corps Service, we have “Mid Service Training”. I went down to Phonm Penh to meet up with my fellow friends for a few days of reconnecting, studying, relaxing, and stuffing our faces. My bus his a dog on the way down, and I saw it spiraling away out of the window…we didn’t stop and no one reacted. I rented a bicycle from the office for riding around the city for a few days, and it amazes me how chaotic and congested the traffic is and yet it all makes sense and flows together and everyone both cuts each other off and looks out for each other. Some of the volunteers organized a fantastic trivia night at a local bar and we all dressed up in costume for the affair! Back in Siem Reap we had a small get together for the new volunteers in our province. Again, it’s so great just to sit in a hotel room and exchange stories and get to know each other and share this experience which is both so unique to each of us, yet so common to all of us. I also had the pleasure of meeting with my family friend, Lauren, at the Cambodian Circus for the night! She is on a year-long trip helping out in 12 different countries (one each month) and had some wonderful stories to share, and she had that glimmer of the travel bug in her eye!

traditional dancing during our training.

On a boat cruise in Phnom Penh during our mid service training.