The day after Christmas, I biked to one of the distant villages in my commune to meet one of my older English students, Mr. Hat. I was meeting him at his father-in-law’s house in order to help them build a new house! First we went on a hay-ride up the street to pick up the cement legs, then we took a long time getting the measurements exact of where the legs would be places.
Measuring the house
Small pits were dug for the legs, sand was put in to help with the leveling, added some salt to protect from termites, then pushed the beasts into place!
Digging the holes for the cement legs
placing the cement legs
Once in place, we made precise location measurements using string and basic geometry.
Adjusting the height of the pillars involved a long piece of tubing filled with water, and we observed the water level inside at both ends to verify equal height!
measuring the height
After the legs were set we all sat down for breakfast: rice, dried fish, and watermelon. Back to work, some of them men grabbed a hand drill and slowly twisted his way into the main supports that would sit on top of the pillars, and using a hatchet, small notches were made to sit level.
hand-drilling
Mr. Hat doing some notching with a hatchet
About half the men set to work on the vertical pillars, making measurements with a marker, then pain-painstakingly chiseling away for hours! The chiseled holes would support the roof and the braces at the top of the house.
chiseling
The roof trusses were carefully measured, then cuts were made with a handsaw, before the excess wood was chopped out with a hatchet.
notching the roof supports
I helped my student lift and place the secondary floor supports in place. The secondary supports were cut from sugar plam trees, and we had to check each board to see which side was the bottom of the tree, so we could face that end to the West. Unfortunately, I had to head home before the final assembly, but it was pretty incredible that 10 men and a couple of hand tools could build a house in a single day!
Mr. Hat and I transporting the flooring supports
nailing down the secondary floor supports
A weekend in Siem Reap with some of the other volunteers and we had a small gift exchange in the hotel room following Cole Family Christmas rules. I gave a jar of peanut butter and a jar of Nutella and ended up winning two Coronas, a bag of chips, and some chocolates! At night, sitting at a restaurant, I taught some of the other volunteers how to play “swizzle sticks.” The penalty for the losers ranged from doing the macarana in the street, crab walking in the street, proposing to a stranger, push-ups in the street, spelling your name in the air with your butt, and I got stuck doing ballerina twirls in the middle of the restaurant with a lime in my mouth, so you see the green rind when you smile! K8 volunteer, Roger, brought his “Magic, the gathering” cards and we played a few competitive rounds of spell throwing! Towards the end of the weekend, I met one of the other volunteer’s friend’s, Nikki. She was visiting in town for a few days and was looking for something to do the following day. She biked out to my site the next morning, ate some of host mom’s cooking, and helped me teach English at the school!
PCV christmas 2015
Magic: the gathering, with Roger
New Years night, I gave all of the kids glow bracelets and we lit some sparklers I bought in Siem Reap. Pretty fun little celebration, and I’m always shocked at how many glow bracelets wind up stuck on the roof!
New Years Eve!
The volunteer English teacher in our village invited me down to his new school in the nearby town for a New Years party. Only six students and a couple of their siblings participated. Apparently, these are children from exceptionally wealthy families in the town who pay four times the usually monthly fee so that their children get a private class with just the six of them. They seemed a little spoiled rotten to me, but it was fun hanging out anyhow and helping out a friend who has certainly helped me out during my service thus-far.
Sopeak’s English class party
Doing some home visits around the commune, I stopped into one of my village health volunteer’s house. Three of us sat around and chatted for a bit. She mentioned that her husband has a gambling addiction and was $5000 in debt, an outstanding amount for this small, countryside village.
Sunset
At the school one day, I noticed that the government building next door was chopping down lots of green vegetation for an upcoming meeting. “Excuse me commune chief, can I take all the dead plants to make compost?!?” He agreed! After chatting a bit more, he said he wouldn’t allow me to go home at the end of service!
cousins helping me chop the compost materials from the government building
The cousins told me they were hungry for rat meat. We broke out some rat traps then went looking for holes in the rice fields. First we dug deep holes and reached in up to the shoulder to dig out crabs. They took the shell off the crabs, gave them a quick grilling to enhance their smell, then put them in the traps as bait. The next day, and several times since, I got to try rat meat…so delicious. I think we often associate rats as disgusting trash eating vermin and pests, but out here in the countryside, they are just natural animals. The meat was tender, very much like chicken, and mom grilled them with a peppery seasoning. Now I know why the kids were hungry for rat meat!
crabbing
Tee and little Ngaa with crabs
January 7th marks the end of the Khmer Rouge reign in Cambodia, and a day of celebration. 36 years ago a few million Cambodians were killed and countless more were labor slaves living in brutal conditions. I’ve never been particularly moved by the Cambodian National Anthem, but at the commune meeting this day, we all stood up and listened to it in silence. I looked around at all the faces and it struck me that so many of these people whom I interact with every single day lived through that tragedy, and what a special day for them to remember. The village chief invited me to sit with his government superiors after the meeting and we ate some noodles.
January 7th celebration
At night on the 7th of January, a huge carnival comes to the nearby town for a celebration. The villagers and I piled into rice tractors to ride down to the carnival. In one of the best ideas I’ve ever had, I gave all the kids glow bracelets so we could track each other in the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd. We rode on the ferris wheel, jumped on the trampolines, popped some balloons with darts, and ate some good carnival snacks! A lot of good double-takes when people turn around and see a foreign giant standing behind them in the crowd.
Ferris wheel with K’nick at January 7th night time festivities
view from the ferriswheel
Mony and our winnings from popping balloons with darts
Rice tractor ride home from the carnival
During a days exploits around the villages, I was close to the water resivior and decided to pay it a visit. Coming from a different direction, I decided to take a short cut and cut through some fields. I crossed a stream, then started to climb the small hill on the boundary of the resivior. First, I was pushing my bike up a small trail crowded with vegetation. Then I had to pick up the bike and shoulder it as the vegetation got thicker. Then it was so thick, I had to lift the bike over my head and barrel through with my chest. Then it got so thick that I didn’t have room overhead for the bike. I stopped, surrounded by thick vegetation, but too stubborn to turn around. I kept trying small holes, sweating my brains out in the heat. I stopped for a quick rest, and looked down at my shirt…somewhere in the bush-whacking, I must have encountered a tree-ant next…there were 100+ ants swarming over my chest and arms. In a weird look at the silver linings in things, it was just the motivation I needed to blast through the last couple feet of vegetation wall to the top of the hill where I could pick off the freeloaders! I celebrated my triumph with an orange and overlooked the massive body of water…worth it! On the ride home, I found a road down the hill that was pretty open. I realized it was the first downhill I have ridden on my bike in 1.5 years. It was so much fun, I turned around to do it one more time even faster!
Triumph at the top of the resivior
My little host niece is adorable, being only a few months old she is still breastfeeding. One night, my brother-in-law’s grandmother came over to hang out for a bit during dinner. My brother-in-law was holding the baby and she was being fussy. The grandmother jokingly said, “oh no, you’re hungry, come here and breastfeed!” She pulled up her shirt, and my brother-in-law put the baby up to her nipple. The grandmother continued to say, “please don’t bite!” While they were certainly doing this as a joke, they maybe cracked a smile, I was in tears laughing. I hope I’m that cool one day!
Mom and my niece
One of my English students asked me to come over one day to help her with a college application. When I got to her house, I first helped the family load rice sacks into their storage bin for an hour. As we went through the application, it quickly became apparent how difficult it would be for her to get into this university. The application was completely in English, and used to advanced words that the average foreign student would not know. We didn’t even know what to put down for her address, there are no house numbers or street names here…is the name of the village, commune, district, and province really enough? They would not be able to communicate with her by mail anyhow. She has no phone number or email account. She had no transcripts from national exams. Financially, her family makes less than $200 per month, so she would need a full-ride to get into the $10,000-per-year school, yet they have no tax records or bank statements to prove their financial situation, as required by the transcript. We did the best we could, but it was depressing to see that challenges that face young, intelligent, motivated students in my commune.
transporting rice at my student’s house
Sitting at a table to men who were getting drunk at 9:30am, an older man began to smoke. One of the younger men asked him to smoke away from us since I don’t smoke. He replied, “Why should I have to leave when we all smoke except him, he should leave!” Neither of us left, but he had a good point.
I gave the cousins “Jenga” one day, they enjoyed the game, but would much rather use them as building blocks!
Jenga building blocks
In order to set up a garden behind K’nick’s house, my uncle set up a water pump and flooded the field behind her house. The field had dried out too much and would be difficult to plow. After letting it soak for a night, he plowed it the next day.
Tee and Borah watching Uncle Bin pump water
My Village Health Volunteer, Soken, and I have been working hard on our gardening project. Firstly, we walked around the village to ask potential families if they had the desire to be part of the project and if they had the time to commit to it. After that was all set up, we began some training sessions. The first of which took place at Soken’s beautiful house. We sat outside on a tarp under the shade and talked about how to prepare the land before planting the seeds. We also went through the method to making both liquid and solid compost and built a small practice pile at her house. Really good stuff, and it participants (100% female) seem motivated and interested. I’m so excited that I just wet my plants!!!
Gardening training
Compost training
Joely the Goalie 