long-awaited wellness post (written oct 4)

Soooo, I'm better now, officially, as evidenced by my most recent blood test, which came out normal, despite it's having been taken the day after a night of birthday festivities. And now, for more fun and exciting things!

Since the last time I posted, a lot has gone on. I found out the location of my permanent site before I left Thailand; then, once I got back to Cambodia, I went on a shortened site visit because of being sick (4 hours to get there, 4 hours there having lunch and hanging out with my family, my future co-teacher, and the school director, and 4 hours to get back to Phnom Penh). I'm going to be living with a couple and their two small daughters in a small town in the southern part of Cambodia.

My future 'Bong Praw' (big brother) is about 35 or so and is an elementary school teacher, and his wife, my 'Bong Sarai' (big sister), is 25 and as far as I know currently is not working in order to spend more time with the kids, who are 7 and 1. They all live together on the first floor of my future home, and they are giving me the entire second floor (a closed room, a porch, and an inside common area) to have as my personal space. When I went to visit it seemed like a pretty sweet set-up, especially concerning the fact that it's way breezier there than in my training site.

My future co-teacher is a woman about 30 years old who has been teaching for about ten years. She speaks English quite well, and seems to be a friendly person in general. I look forward to working with her and getting to know her better...starting OCTOBER 5 WOOOO when I arrive there.

After my mini-visit to my permanent site, everyone else came back from their normal 4-day site visits, and we all met up in Phnom Penh. We did a really fun scavenger hunt in teams by permanent site provinces that led us all around the city to find the places where we can buy all sorts of stuff that we might miss or need while in-country, and my provincial team won wooo! Currently, the Phnom Penh staff owes us one (1) pizza party redeemable whenever.

Once we did all that good stuff, it was back to our training villages for our last few weeks before moving to our permanent sites. During that time, I celebrated my birthday, the Cambodian holiday P'chum Ben, and Rosh Hashanah.

We did my birthday up big at my house, with like 5 extra people helping make num koum s'nol doung, these super delicious little dessert ball things that you make with fresh shredded coconut, sugar, and some roasted peanuts and sesame seeds encased inside sticky rice powder dough and folded into a pyramid shape into individual portions in banana leaves. I should have taken pictures, but I didn't. I'll try to get some num koum on camera at some point. I did receive birthday presents from a bunch of the Khmer people I invited, including two pairs of super sweet hawaiian pants/shorts. You can see them above if I can get the slow internet here to let me load the photos of them.

For P'chum Ben, I went to several different wats with my mom several different days, as we got time off from studying Khmer because our teachers had time off to go home to their families to celebrate it. At the wats, we did a number of things, from giving money to the monks and receiving a blessing to plopping spoonfuls of rice into special beautiful pots to listening to meditation to repeating the things the monks said to (this was a special honor) passing around the collection pot for everyone to give money to the wat. My host mom also gave me things to give to the other Yays (the women who are a little older and either live at the wat or go there every day--the more observant ones observe basically the same rules as the monks except the one about carrying money--I'll tell you all about those rules another time.), all of whom gave me lots of blessings. So my karma is in really good shape right now, hopefully--cayna hara.

For Rosh Hashanah, the celebrations were a little more low-key--I got some apples and asian pears and pomegranate from the market (my BFF fruit seller actually gifted them to me), and my mom hooked me up with some apparently super-pure honey bought from one of the Yays. It was more watery than the honey I'm used to, but I think it will bring everyone who had some a sweet year all the same.

While all the festivities were going on, a lot of people came into town to stay at my mom's house--some of her cousins' kids. They seemed pretty nice, and I went to visit the Boribo creek again with them. Having them in town made it easier to leave my mom all alone in the house, because at least she wasn't going to be alone right when I left. Even so, the morning of the 1st we both cried a bunch when she and the other family peeps dropped me off at the restaurant by the market where we were going to catch the taxi-van. It was intense. But it did result in an amazing photo in which you see both of our chromas (the multi-purpose checkered cloths that people use for everything from male loincloths to drying your hair). Check it out after I upload it! It was hard to say goodbye to everyone, but especially to my mom and to Sutjeeah. I will miss them a lot when I'm in Kampot having to build new relationships.

Right now I need to stop writing, because tomorrow we have our official swearing-in ceremony, and I still haven't finished writing the part of the speech that I have to give. Whoops.