Sitting with my friend, Soken, at her house, a relative of hers called from a different city and told us to look at the sky, there were four suns! We struggled to stare at the fiery sun, trying to mask the ball of fire behind our hands to get a better look. We couldn’t distinguish anything out of the ordinary, but four suns would sure explain the blazing heat we experience this time of year!
Sitting with some men who were drinking under a house, one began to smoke. I asked why as a way for them to interject some health education. Another man quickly jumped to his defense and said that smoking helps him remember things and cures boredom. Sound reasons indeed!
A highschooler in my village told me that our local high school, where he attends, was recently voted the 3rd best school in the country! He went on to mention that he studies hard, but will always be at a disadvantage compared with his co-students who live in Puok at the market because they have more free time, have electricity, and have access to the internet and other learning materials. On the other hand, he has to help out with many chores around the house and village and each year devote a considerable amount of time to rice planting and harvesting.
Leaving my English class one afternoon, my friend Soken was sitting at a table and invited me to sit with her and another woman from an NGO called Peace Bridge. The woman was interviewing Soken about a recent workshop they did together. The worker asked Soken, “What have you done to spread peace since attending the workshop?” She went on to tell a short story about how Soken and my host aunt have been on bad terms for about a year and completely ignored each other. Being as Soken was my counterpart for the gardening project, and my aunt was a participant in the project, the two of them had some forced contact and I noticed them being a little feisty together and talking about each other to me behind the other’s back. Not knowing they had a history, I asked Soken about it afterward and then told me that I would work with my aunt instead so that they would not have to interact and create problems. I didn’t know at the time, but after that conversation, Soken went to my aunt’s house, sat down and they talked out their differences and now they say hello to each other on the street and ask the customary, “Where are you going?” I was elated to listen to this story and I recently learned that Soken selected my aunt as a participant for another gardening project with a local NGO! Peace out baby!!!
Just after night fall, there was a community meeting at the village chief’s house to discuss plans for the upcoming Khmer New Year, the biggest holiday of the year in my opinion. We sat on a tarp and discussed matters pretty normally. What stood out to me was when the chief offered on of my male neighbors a cigarette, a man who I’ve seen smoking many times. He declined the cigarette and said, “I stopped smoking. Don’t you get out of breath? Before I could only run 50 meters, but now I could run three kilometers to the next village!”
When people host ceremonies in Cambodia, the guests are expected to pay a small donation in order to “help” the ceremony. If I then invited that person to a ceremony of mine, they are expected to attend and “help” my ceremony back. If you cannot attend, it is expected that you will send another family member in your place, or give your donation to another guest to deliver to the host. It is this back and forth of ceremonies that seems to be a problem for some community members as they know a lot of people! In one month, my mom received invitations for 27 different ceremonies and shelled out a total of $250.
Previously, when the village kids had saved up enough money we would go into Siem Reap to go roller blading or to the arcade. This time around, I planned us a trip to the birth place of Cambodian civilization, Kulen Mountain! This is a beautiful and historic mountain for the people of this country, with several pagodas on the top and a tall waterfall. Supposedly, all the rock used to form Ankor Wat and the numerous other temples was quarried from Kulen Mountain and floated several miles down the Siem Reap river to the site where the temples were built! Anyhow, I woke up at 5:30am to start getting ready and my students began to arrive between six and seven o’clock. Of course, my host mother had been up since 4:00am cooking rice, grilling chicken, frying fish, and making all the side courses that go with this food for us to feast on at the mountain. Once word got out that I was taking the kids to Kulen mountain, we also extended the invitation out to any other villagers who wanted to attend. I ended up renting two large vans for $80 each, and each one having 15 seats. We squeezed 50 people into the two vans and began our journey about two hours to the mountain.
Packed in the vans
When we arrived at the base of the mountain, there is a toll road full of switch backs which takes you to the top. The price for Cambodian nationals is $0.50 per person, but since I am a foreigner I had to pay an astounding 40 times that, $20.00! There was lots of vomiting into plastic bags along the journey since most of these folks rarely ride in cars, they get car sick easily. After we arrived, everyone chipped in to carry all the food and things to two bungalows where we set up camp and devoured the delicious food mom had prepared earlier in the morning, carefully wrapped in banana leaves.
Eating mom’s delicious food
The big waterfall is my favorite part, so I couldn’t wait to get down there and play in the cold water. Seeing the faces of the kids as they turned the corner and saw a 75 foot waterfall for the first time in their lives, especially living in a completely flat area of the country, was profound. The young kids hung all over my arms and shoulders and I took them into slightly deeper waters playing tugboat.
The lower waterfall
My little niece, Sopeeahlie, sat down in the cold, shallow water and splashed herself silly, just full of joy to be playing in the water.
My sister and nice at the upper waterfall
Sopeeahlie playing in the water
A handful of us took the hike up the mountain in our wet clothes to visit the pagoda and the massive reclining Buddha carved into the top of a boulder. On the way back down the mountain, a few of my favorite students were making their way up, so I turned around and went for a second trip with them.
With the reclining Buddha
With the reclining Buddha
Coming back down the mountain with these students, we ran a little bit. One of my students was taking pictures with my camera and got her legs tripped up and fell down and ate dirt and tore a hole in her jeans at the knee. She popped right up, still with dirt on her cheek and said, “I protected your camera!” Way to sacrifice the body!!! Once everyone had their fill of playing at the mountain, we decided to make a pit stop at Angkor Wat on the way home. Unfortunately, I couldn’t enter into the temples because it would have required playing an additional $20.00 for a ticket, but the Cambodians could enter for free. I hung around the moat with some villagers and chatted and ate boiled peanuts in the shade. At the end of a long day, I laid in the house with my mom and sister discussing the events of the day. It turns out that we came up about $10 short on all the payments due to the tolls and other parking fees, I had to twist mom’s arm for a good 20 minutes to allow me to pay for it, pleading that it was my idea and my responsibility. She’s my mother indeed, always giving, working hard and asking nothing in return. An awesome day with my community and was trilled that everyone was excited to attend one of the largest things I have planned so far.
Dad was grilling fish over charcoal for dinner and while standing there, drunkenly passed out and fell into the fire. Mom ran over and pulled him away and walked him inside and yelled to their children to come help. Luckily, he was unhurt, but I’ve witnessed the devastating effects of alcohol all too often, and can’t imagine what it would be like to grow up in a household subject to it.
A woman came to my health center to help train our midwives on emergency training and to increase their organizational capacity for paperwork, such as taking patient history and current medications before making a diagnosis. She was a well educated midwife with some 30 years of experience. We talked for a long time during breaks and she told me about her two sons, 21 and 26 years old, one is studying in Russia and the other in Finland. They have been abroad for two years already and each have another four years to go. She mentioned that meeting and talking with me made her miss her boys and we shared an instant connection together from the common experience. One of her boys called her from Finland during her lunch break to chat and asked to talk to me because we both have been away from our home countries for many months. In all the pictures she showed me of them, they were bundled up in lots of clothes surrounded by a plethora of snow!
During English class, I was teaching comparatives and superlatives. One student stood up, as is customary when answering, and gave the example, “Joel is better than my father.” I was flattered, but it makes me wonder what goes on at home to prompt such a statement.
Aunt Lee had been living at the base of a mountain for a month or so, doing some potato farming for income. The children all ditched school and went to live and work with her. I got the opportunity to go visit on a weekend with my cousins, Jew and Ga’dee. We waited for the 11:30 pick-up truck to come to our house for two hours, and finally hopped into the cab and bumped down the road. The driver said I was the first foreigner he has ever transported! When we arrived at the base of the mountain, K’nick ran up looking like an Indian princess, her skin a perfect golden brown, and her hair in twin braids over her shoulders.
K’nick, the Native American princess!
My aunt and her three kids were simply loving under a tree at the edge of a field near the base of a small mountain with one other small family. There was a cement table with four cement benches around it and covered by a tarp tied to the trees, and three hammocks hung between the trees, the nearest village was ten kilometers away. Simple living. Everyday they plant potatoes, uproot the grown ones, chop up the potatoes, and put them out on tarps to dry in the sun, then sell them by the truck load.
Drying potatoes with the trees that we slept at in the background
My cousin Law escorted us up the 300 foot mountain where we feasted on wild jack-fruit and enjoyed the views and nature. At the top of the mountain was a stone quarry where they blast and mill rock into gravel.
Hiking the mountain
Ga’dee eating wild jackfruit
Mountain top quarry
As night fell, we grabbed a bucket and walked 250 meters down the road to the nearest well, a pit dug into the ground which we scooped water out of with the bucket. We all showered there in the field with a cool breeze and cool water and it was quite refreshing. My host mom sent us with a bag full of vegetables and Aunt Lee cocked us up a delicious stir-fry for dinner. At night we played a few games, then when got bored, we went to the rice tractor full of potatoes and go to chopping with machetes on wooden blocks. We stayed up for an hour, until 10:00 pm chopping away and talking together. They said that for every two 5-gallon buckets of chopped potatoes they make 12.5 cents. Jew and I were taking turns working on the same pile and probably would have only made 12.5 cents in the hour we worked. At night, we all slept in hammocks we brought from home and set them up in a circle in the trees, all sleeping head to foot in the cool mountain air under the starry sky. K’nick and Ga’dee slept on the concrete benches under the tarp. I was in heaven being out in the woods with my favorite kids, but imagine if that was your life and one of your only options for income. It puts a lot of things into perspective.
My little niece can walk on her own now!
I give one toy to the kids every Sunday, one week I game them Connect 4. We played for hours that night. My sister usually is too busy with house work and watching the baby to play silly games. But tonight, she played, and she dominated, I think she went undefeated in every game she played!
For a few weeks in April, the schools go on vacation for Khmer New Year. The last day of school, there was a party that the principle invited me too. Before I even left my house, I could hear the speakers blasting from home, one kilometer away. For about two hours, the female teacher and a handful of students cooked up massive batches of food over open fires. The male teachers invited me into a room with there where they drank beers and gambled on a card game. I sipped a coke, watched, and snacked on the fried chicken heads and tried to learn the game they were playing. I took my leave when the students began playing games, such as sack races and a race where they spit water into bottles.
sack races
spit-the-water game
After the games, the music started back up, and we formed a dance ring in the shade of the big trees since it was a billion degrees out. I invited the other teachers to come dance with me, and to my delight, one of my favorite teachers took me up on it with her big beautiful smile, and a few other teachers followed shortly behind!
I danced in a small circle with the other teachers and we played a game called “change style.” When someone points and you and yells, “change style” you simply change up the style of your current dance, usually to comedic relief!
Change style
change style
CHANGE STYLE!
We even got the principle out there for a few songs before duty called and she had to run. I’ve seen some interesting shirts in Cambodia, usually English phrases that don’t make sense, or things that do make sense, but the person wearing it doesn’t know the meaning of it. On this day, one of the 8th grade girls wore an all white shirt and on the front in black lettering it read: Lustful Cockmonster. In the evening, we had a small Khmer New Year party in my English class also. I went ahead of class and hid Easter eggs around the school property, filled with small prizes, such as: money, bouncy balls, toy rings, hair ties, and toy sunglasses. I bought a case of soft drinks for $10 from my mom and gave everyone one while we played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey on the chalkboard, even the principle participated! I then explained that I had hidden small plastic eggs with toys in them around the school and they bounded out the windows and ran in search! So much fun celebrating this beautiful holiday with all my favorite students and children. The abundance of smiles and laughter is music to my eyes and ears!
Pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey
Easter Egg hunt!
Joely the Goalie 