“Whatever America hopes to bring to pass in the world must first come to pass in the heart of America.” -Dwight D. Eisenhower

I grew my beard our for a month because the kids wanted to see it. People told me me I was ugly a lot! After I shaved I was told I was more beautiful than before.

Before shaving

The American Ambassador in Cambodia came out to visit my site! We checked out one of my gardens together and got to talk about our lives and interesting jobs. He said he is considering Peace Corps after he retires! It was an honor to have him out to visit and my little niece adored him!

The Ambassador with my host mom, sister, and niece!

Often times, when going through unknown territory, people will yell something and call me French. My goal has always been for someone to yell American instead. One day riding home from the middle school that dream came true when my next door neighbor, Lee, jokingly yelled, “Hello American!” I’ll take it!

During the gardening project several people have mentioned that carrots are difficult to grow here and we couldn’t find seeds at the local market. When I went into Siem Reap, I found a pack of seeds and planted them in our experimental garden at the house. They were growing great in a nice shady spot of the garden for about a month. I came home from a busy day around site to find that chickens had scratched through the garden and destroyed 97% of my beautiful carrot patch. I’m trying to salvage the last 3 or so just to spite them. It was our fault that we hadn’t built a fence, but even still, I asked mom if we could eat chicken that night and I thoroughly enjoyed every bite!

Ngaa held down Borah and smeared charcoal on his face.

One of the families in my village had a 2-year-after-death ceremony for a relative complete with a projected movie set up on a massive screen, a few fireworks, and of course enough musical speakers for a Justin Beiber concert. At night, I walked over with the kids and an intoxicated man rushed to grab me and bring me into the dance circle which only consisted of ten or so people at the time. We continued to dance in the dirt of the rice field for three hours straight and the circle grew through the night to nearly 100 people! My father joined and awkwardly stood in the middle of the circle and everyone danced around him. Each time I made a pass, he reached out and pinched my butt. He’s still pretty shy so we rarely exchange words, but this is just his little way of saying he cares for me, and I appreciated the gesture! The volunteer English teacher in the village was super excited that I was attending his ceremony and dancing, twice he cut the music in the middle of song and dance to give a speech…completely in English…thanking me for joining and wishing me luck when I left…in six more months…It was very awkward since none of the people knew what he was saying, only that he was talking to me and interrupting the fun time we were having. They starred at me, I starred at him nodding trying to get the music back on, but he kept laying it on thicker and heavier! I felt like a turd. A few weeks later, I was at a phone store in the market putting additional money on my phone and the woman working the counter said she had seen pictures of me dancing that night on a villagers cellphone!

I biked to the middle school one morning to meet with the director to discuss our school garden. She excitedly said, “I had a dream last night that you came to the school to meet with me, and here you are!”

Recently, when students are riding their bicycles in packs, I will see one of them quickly dismount to the side and run along pushing their bike. Everyone laughs and jokes that they have a flat tire or they are exercising, then just as quickly remount and continue riding like normal. For some reason, this continues to crack me up every time I see a kid running in the middle of a pack of bikes like the Tour De France!

I was laying in a hammock with my beautiful little niece, Sopeeahlie. She was standing on my chest and we were practicing balancing. She peed all over my chest. I cracked up along with everyone else around and went to change my shirt. It’s happened many more times since that one, but she’s so stinking cute that it’s no big deal.

My aunt’s name is “Suem” and her oldest son’s name is “Rong”. My host mother always calls my aunt “Rong’s mom”, even to her face. I asked her way…she just laughed and said it’s easier!

I developed a sore on my neck. It started out small and slowly began to get larger and spread around to my cheeks. I went to the Health Center and they prescribed me some antibiotic pills and medicine to spread on the infection. I also contacted out Peace Corps doctors and followed their advice. One day I woke up and had a large skin bubble on the side of my neck about the size of a dime. Everyone talked about it, wanted to look at it, and asked what it was. I played off the added attention by telling them that my girlfriend kissed me too hard. My host mom told me that she had planned to cook chicken soup for dinner, but wouldn’t feed me chicken until my neck was healed. One morning at the middle school with the principle and the teachers, after a long discussion about my neck they decided that I needed to go to a Traditional Cambodian Healer. One the way home from the school, my village health volunteer, Soken, took me down a side road to the house and introduced me to the healer. After taking a look at my neck he put a variety of leaves and barks into his mouth and chewed it up for awhile. He stood at my side resting his hand on my throat and began to chant. After a minute, he blew on the affected area of my neck…more chanting…then he blew his spit into a fine mist over the affected areas…chanting…blowing…chanting…spitting…all for about 5 minutes, then ended with an excited “BOUP” noise and told me to get out of there and come back twice a day until healed!

Skin infection on my neck

Cambodian Traditional Healer

I helped Soken set up her garden. In the morning my next-door neighbor was at her house plowing the field with a team of cows. After the plowing was complete, he went over it with a large wooden rake. To add weight to the rake, he had two of the kids squat on it as he steered the cows around. It was quite comical when one of the cows began to poop mid stride and the kids dove for cover!

Soken’s garden prepped and ready to plant

In a previous post I described a dancing ceremony where people would dance like they didn’t know their body. I attended another one with some 150 people spectating. After awhile of dancing the traditional band took a break, so in turn the dancers also stood still resting. All except for one woman who, in her goofy outfit, was holding a small radio and continued to jam out dancing for 10 minutes all by herself while everyone watched. She crushed it!

Traditional band and dancing ceremony

One of my English students invited me to a ceremony at her house in a different village by giving me an invitation in Khmer. Because I can’t read and write Khmer, I had one of my cousins translate it for me. When the day came, I biked out to her village, but didn’t know exactly what house it was. I stopped to ask a seller in that village that I’ve hung out with a few times. I completely butchered my opening question to her, and she didn’t hesitate to quip, “You’ve been here for one and a half years, speak clearly!” After pulling out the invitation for her to read it turns out that I was one month and one day too early! I was trying to attend a March 10th ceremony on February 9th! I went home and ate lunch.

Before bed, I was hanging out with my mom and sister on the floor. I asked if my sister picked her husband herself or if my mom had picked for her. After a pause, mom replied, “I did the thinking for her and selected the wealthiest bachelor in the village.” She went on to mention that she was scared that my sister would go away to study or for work and would fall in love.

Soken at our school garden training

A volunteer from the far side of the country, Giani, was in Siem Reap and came to visit my site! He arrived in the evening when I was teaching English at the school and jumped in and allowed the kids to pepper him with questions. My mom and family loved him and sat for a long time at dinner chatting and joking with him. After movie night, he slept in my room and mom and I set up a mattress on the floor so I could sleep out with the family. We had four big mosquito nets tied up around the house like a tent fort! He continued to stay for another day, so the kids and I took him to the small temple in our village. It was awesome to have Giani to my site and to watch other volunteers interact with the villagers who mean so much to me, it’s a good reminder of what an incredible opportunity we are lucky enough to experience everyday!

Giani!

Giani making plant-airplane launchers with the kids

One of my host uncles who lived on a floating village in Siem Reap died in a boat crash. His wife and four children moved in with my grandmother next door so we can help care for them. The wife had a stroke five years ago and can barely walk and cannot use her right arm. The wife and kids had all shaved their heads to mourn the death. The only daughter used to be scared to death of me, if I got within 5 feet of her she would cry. When they moved home, she has completely reversed! She calls my name all the time, hold my hand, lays in the hammock with me, and follows me everywhere I go. The family has a long difficult road ahead of them, but I continue to be inspired by this family every single day.

Tee and G’dee

Ga’bow and I watching a wedding procession go down the road.

After meeting with the teachers and principle of the middle school to discuss our school garden, it was decided that they wanted to build a basic irrigation system which would lead water from a hand pump to a holding tank closer to the garden where it could be easy to scoop up the water. After purchasing the materials the kids and I got to work digging holes to put the cement rings into the group so that they were lower than the water pump. We layed out the PVC pipe and either filled in or removed dirt so it was level, then assembled it with PVC glue. In a different area of the school, the principle is having the kids dig an artificial pond so they can raise fish. We took the extra dirt and used it to cover the run of PVC to protect it from sunlight. Now, they just have to turn a valve to direct the water either to the right or the left side, then get to pumping the well and it will fill the appropriate holding ring!

School irrigation system

While I was working on the irrigation system on February 14th, one of my students walked over to me between classes and gave me two flower lollipops for Valentines Day. My heart melted into a puddle!

The middle school principle, Mrs. Saem, made me a cross-stitch picture as a souvenir. It took her four months to complete.

My computer battery died for the third time. My hunch is that because we charge electronics using a car battery, that something does not agree with the computer and is causing early failures. We can still watch movies every night, but anytime someone bumps the power cord, the battery cuts out and we have to restart the computer! I just pray that this computer survives the length of my service so I don’t lose all my pictures!

Early February was still a little cold here, but then someone flipped a switch. It was like one week I was sleeping with two blankets and socks, and the next week was no blankets and laying in a pool of sweat. It’s the hot season!

Home garden training

Mom has been buying vegetables from one of the home gardens in my project to make meals. She sells the delicious and nutritious food from our house, and I get to feast on the harvest! There is no better reward than seeing it all come full circle!

My cousin, K’nick, needed to get some passport size pictures taken for school. She asked me to accompany her on the journey. We rode down the dirt roads to the next village over and met up with a few of her classmates. First, we all went to the village chief’s house where they would be shooting the pictures…but no one was there. Second, we biked to a different village to her teacher’s house…but no one was there. We waited for a half hour and ate little smoothies from a moto salesman. Last, we biked back to the first village to a different house, to a man that I had previously met and danced with at a wedding. His wife and I held up a blue backdrop while he took pictures of the many students, then hooked the camera up to a small printer to spit out the pictures. After the children had their pictures they went home. The man and his wife were very friendly, so I continued to sit and chat with them for awhile afterward, they were very inquisitive about America and Americans. I love having those conversations, to be able to give this family a small glimpse into another world and another life and compare and contrast the things that make us special! Peace Corps Second Goal: To help promote a better understanding of Americans on the part of the peoples served.

K’nick and her classmates eating smoothies while waiting for pictures

Watching the printer make pictures!

“Strength lies in differences, not in similarities” ― Stephen R. Covey

One of my Village Health Volunteers invited me to her daughter’s wedding in a different village. She told me 11:00am, and I forgot the golden rule of weddings that you actually show up 1.5 hours after the start date (don’t ask me why!). So I showed up at 11:00 and sat around with some folks as the hustle and bustle of the preparations were underway. around 12:30 when people began to arrive, we were seated to begin the 6 course lunch. You generally are seated in the order you arrive in and with the people who arrive at the same time as you. As my table was being seated, one man behind me said, “I don’t want to sit with a Frenchman, I want to sit with Cambodians!” and he sat at a separate table. It stung for a second, but I get it. Our paths crossed later in the day and we chatted and he gave me his phone number to come visit him in another district sometime.

The wedding party

At weddings, each person is expected to pay a monetary sum depending on how well you know the family, for me, my host mom has always recommended that I pay $10.00. That’s a good bit of money for a villager to spend in a single sitting. I believe this may contribute to the binge drinking that occurs amongst men at weddings…got to get your money’s worth! Within minutes, they go from mild mannered, shy men to raging, screaming, dancing, maniacs! It wasn’t long before a few tables were cleared to make room for the dance floor (dirt rice field) and the men began dry humping each other into oblivion. After some coaxing, I got out there and threw down my best Khmer dancing skills. About once a minute for a half hour, the same woman would tap me on the shoulder and ask me if I was happy, and it tickled her pink every time I replied, “happy”.

My point-of-view on the dance floor

I sat down for a rest with a man from my village and watched the dancing continue, minutes later, bodies would hit the floor. I don’t know what sparked the first punch, but after it was thrown, many more followed, and about 15 men were brawling in the dirt. For nearly a half an hour, I watched the events unfold as men drunkenly tried to restrain each other and failing to do so, men screaming at each other with veins pulsing through their necks, swinging plastic chairs, dust flying through the air, a woman in the thick of it wailing crying with her hands on her cheeks like a scene from “Saving Private Ryan”. Alas, the main instigators were separated and the ones from other villages were drove home on motos, and the local men were escorted home, stumbling through the rice fields. Just when everyone was breathing a sigh of relief, the biggest, drunkest goon came trudging back through with rice fields towards the wedding with a 3-foot sword in hand! He was intercepted far from the venue and turned home, but seriously?!? Through the course of the battle, I remained seated with some of the older men on the edge and was actually a little excited to witness a fight since I hear them talked about so much as reasons why my mom and other people don’t want to go to big ceremonies. The Village Health Volunteer was pretty upset, because in the wake of all the fighting and people being escorted home, many people left before paying their wedding dues which the hosting families rely on to help mitigate the costs of the expensive ceremony and meal.

Bo’rah and Ngaa snuggled up for the night

One weekend, I went down to Phnom Penh for an Ultimate Frisbee Tournament. As luck would have it, my friend Giani happened to be in town at the same time. We got to hang out and catch up, then went to eat chinese dumplings for lunch, 36 dumplings…each! Afterward we waddled over to Nagaworld Casino to walk around and observe, although neither of us gambled because we didn’t understand most of the games! The Frisbee tournament began meeting the other players in front of a pagoda and standing in the back of cattle cars for transportation to the university that was the host venue for the games. The “Big Phat Phnom Penh Hat” tournament is in it’s 7th year and was very well organized featuring music, snacks, electrolyte mix, lunches, registration parties, give-aways, skills competitions, and I think it was eight teams comprised of some 120 people!

Ultimate Frisbee

The games were competitive, but very well spirited. My team, Joan of Arc, went undefeated in the first 5 games with solid defense, high spirit, and some super skilled Cambodian youngsters! The participants were from countless different countries around the world and spoke any number of different languages, yet there was a strong sense of comradery and friendship on every team! After not exercising for a year and a half, I could barely walk or sit afterward. After the first day, I limped to dinner with Giani, went to the hotel room and laid down at 7:00pm with a large bottle of water. I was anxious for the second day of play, I dreampt of Frisbee all night and was so excited like the night before a long adventure race! Unfortunately, we got knocked out of the playoffs by the eventual tournament winners by an 11-4 beat-down.

Team Joan of Arc

If my legs didn’t hurt enough after the first day, four more hours of play the second day rendered them completely useless, I think the only time they have ever been more crippled was after trail running 50 miles over ten hours, and I had a couple of purple toenails to prove it! In addition to Giani, I had the distinct pleasure of having the beautiful Amy, Kelly, and Olka come out to the tournament to cheer us on.

Amy, Giani, and I

The tournament ended with free hamburgers, live music, and a “slip-n-slide layout contest” where participants would run and dive to catch a thrown frisbee and then land on a slippery wet slip-n-slide to glide the rest of the way. It was AWESOME! Men, women, and children were getting huge air, catching frisbees, and eating soap on the landing! A big thanks to my teammates for re-teaching me everything after not having played ultimate for ten years! After every game, my team would sing a short song to the other team, set to the spirit of a popular song, but featuring their team name and a few frisbee terms. My favorite was about Team Gandhi set to the tune of ‘I like big butts and I cannot lie’…sing along…”We like Gandhi and we cannot lie, you other players can’t deny, when a monk walks in with an itty-bitty face and a loin cloth ’round his waist, you jump HIGH!” 36 more Chinese dumplings to celebrate the finish and I day dreampt of how my bed would feel back home in Siem Reap. I slept the entire six hours back home and was all to happy to make that day dream come true at the end of the day…home sweet home!

Ultimate Frisbee Lay-out contest!!!

the contest winner

With the garden project going, I couldn’t help starting my own little garden with the cousins at the house. We set it up behind Anunt Lee’s house and each of the cousins were in charge of their own rows and could plant whatever they wanted. Everyone was in charge of their own planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, etc., but they get to do whatever they want with their own harvest, plus I threw in a toy for the best row to add to the competition! Let the games begin!

K’nick in the cousin’s garden

My cousin K’nick got hit by a moto riding the 200 meters from school to home. She had a few little scratches and busted a toenail up bloody, but it could have been much worse. The two men on the moto did not stop, but my mom saw it happen and recognized the men. Mom and K’nick drove out to meet the village chief of the village these men live in and settled up with him. I think the final verdict was that the two men paid K’nick $12.50.

My next-door neighbor was out digging for frogs and rats for dinner. When digging into a rats nest, he was surprised to instead find a 6-foot snake! The biggest I have seen so far in Cambodia. Back home, they made quick work of gutting it and prepping it for that nights dinner. While I was eating dinner, the mother next door brought me over a bowl of their stew with huge chunks of snake in it so I could try it! Delicious flaky meat, but a fair amount of small bones to work around like some fish.

My puppies playing on the rice straw.

After a quite successful vocabulary review playing pictionary on the chalkboard, at a later class I attempted the same with charades…epic failure! I couldn’t get any volunteers, and when I cold called people to come act, they just stood there completely motionless for 5 minutes nervously laughing. You never know what’s going to work until you try!

Massive mortal and pestal for pounding rice into flour to make noodles

I attended a ceremony at a Village Health Volunteer’s house where they were celebrating the life of a grandmother who had died two years ago. But first my mom told me to eat rice porridge at home because the rice porridge at the ceremony would not be delicious and wouldn’t have much meat. Both porridges were pretty delicious that day! We sat under a tent in a rice field, did some chanting with the monks, one of her twin sisters lent me a sash and I spooned out rice to the monks, we lit incense sticks and walked around the tent three times…all in all and pretty good morning and cultural experience!

Funneral celebration

One of my health center doctors retired at the end of January. During his retirement speech at one of our meetings, one of the village volunteers asked if there would be a party. He responded, “If we had a party, the money would come out of the Health Center budget and that money would be better spent improving the Health Center and the health of the community.” He is a great man and a great role model.

With the ongoing gardening project (thanks again to the donors!!!) I have been making many trips to the market a few kilometers away to buy seeds, fencing, watering cans, trellis netting, and miscellaneous other gardening supplies. I have done it all on my bicycle so we don’t need to spend any money to rent out transportation. It’s been good exercise and good fun to load up the bicycle with materials and give goofy smiles to people as they stare in wonder as to what this foreigner is doing riding down this rural dirt road with 8 watering cans!

bike loaded up with gardening supplies.

One day K’nick asked me if I was going to go to the ceremony in town that night. “What ceremony?”…”La’mouit, you know, where they dance and don’t know their body!”…That’s all I knew going into this ceremony, I walked over around 8pm with some of the kids and arrived on a small roofed set up with a single hazy light overhead, a wooden shelf holding some decorations, a live traditional band in the corner, and a gathering of villagers tightly packed around it, some of whom were sitting with a small bowl and a lit candle. As the band played, the people sitting with the candles would begin to shake and convulse before getting up and dancing in the center, sometimes as many as five at a time. The rest of the gathered villagers would hold out clothes for them to choose from and they would select what to wear, mostly to comedic effect as grown people were wearing children’s clothes, or men were wearing women’s clothes, etc. One woman got dressed up in mens clothes and even went to far as to take a beer and lit cigarette off some men and drink and smoke while she drank, something I’ve definitely never seen a woman do here! I asked a lot of questions trying to figure out some particulars, but I couldn’t understand most of the vocabulary. I think the people were being temporarily possessed by spirits, so it it was a male spirit in a female body, it would still choose men’s clothes, or if it was a child’s spirit in an adult, it would still choose children’s clothes. The dancing was often times comical to the spectators, yet they danced it out with straight faces, there is no language barrier to laughter! We left for home around 9:30, but I heard that the core group who put on the ceremony continued all through the night until the sunrise!

dancing like they didn’t know their bodies!

The kids said she looked like Rambo