Li-ching and I!
Joe with some sweet rented roller skates at the mall in Phnom Penh.
Bun chai-oo filling and my feet
Completed bun chai-oo packets
Making compost magic
Soccer heading practice
More soccer
A couple of my 9th grade students in class on one of the last days of school
And now...for words...
A lot has gone on these past few months. And I have not been so good about writing about it for you. But here we go!
June was time for a 3-day soccer camp that our soccer team put on for some younger girls--it went really well. We had three girls a day take on the position of being the teachers/leaders, and we had about 25-30 7th-, 8th-, and 9th-graders participate. The idea was to give the current players a chance to feel the joys and the pains of coaching, feel a little more confident about their skills playing, and gain some experience being leaders. It made me proud to see them take on the responsibilities and to see the younger girls start to get excited about soccer. It always brings me joy to see more and more female spectators at the games that go on on our school field--opening up the realm of soccer to include female interest and participation in my town continues to bring me joy even in times like now, in the depths of summer, when no one is really coming around for practice at all. Also...a middle-school school director from down the road decided to start up a girls' team toward the end of school following our example, so now there are two teams in my province, both in my district...and we'll have someone to play come October/November when we start school again! That's what I'm most excited about.
Also in June, during exam time, I headed down to Kampot and then back up home with Joe and some planks in tow, and we set up a compost bin. It's getting pretty richly decayed; I'm excited to use some of its 'fruits' to help nurture a jackfruit tree that I've been growing in a cut-off 1.5-liter bottle in the yard. We're going to put it in the back. It won't have fruit for years, but it will be cool to see how much it's grown when I come back to visit years down the road.
Oh! And I made nom bun chai-oo with some of my students at one of my co-teacher's houses during a 'small get-together' we had on a day off from school. The dish involves a sunshine yellow rice-flour pancake that you cook up and serve with meat and some vegetables like bean sprouts and banana blossom inside. I was pretty bad at flipping the pancakes, but very good at eating them, especially when they are super tasty and made at home--the ones in the market aren't nearly as good. Nom bun chai-oo was my mom's favorite dish in Cambodia, I'm pretty sure, and she only had the market style!
Classes petered out pretty pleasantly, including the last day of classes, a day called 'pull-u-kam,' in which everyone at school does tidying up things like burning up trash, sweeping up leaves, and cutting down the grass-seeds-that-get-stuck-in-your-socks-and-pants plants that grow all over the soccer field. I wore my new hat, this marvelous pastel plaid large-brim hat with a sweep-around cloth piece to cover up your mouth in case of dust, etc. and took part in the soccer field fixing. Most of the teachers didn't really participate; they just directed the kids and watched. So it was nice to get down with the kids and pull up plants, too, while they used small scythes (the ones used to harvest the rice in November/December) to chop off the offensive tops.
And then it was July. The beginning of July was a little hard, since it was time to say goodbye to Joe as he headed back to the US. We had a fun time his last few days in the country though, plenty of cookies included. That was around the same time that Michael Jackson died, prompting about a month's worth of Cambodians learning of his death and asking a variety of interesting questions about him. I would have never known the world would be so intrigued. It just goes to show. I learned more about him than I ever expected to, including catching a marathon of his videos with Joe in Phnom Penh that provided me with a glimpse of what he looked like as a young man--he was actually pretty attractive then!
I spent the next few weeks of July working on fundraising for the Girls' Leadership Development Program we're planning to do here in Dang Tung. Through a letter-handing-out campaign that included going into my provincial town and meeting with officials and NGOs, as well as visiting with community members here in our district, we raised 200 dollars in cash and another 200 dollars of contributions in-kind, enabling us to ask for a good deal of supplementary funding from Peace Corps through the Small Project Assistance program. Right now we've gotten everything turned in, and now we're just waiting for it to all get approved, but still planning as we wait. We plan to have a 3-day girls' camp in November during Water Festival that will include workshops on gender, leadership, general health, mental health, and sexual health and will culminate with the 30 student participants' sharing of the information they learn with other female community members through presentations on the last day of the camp...followed by all-female dancing and eating of small tasty sweet things. Then, over the course of the following week, the girls will survey community members about their perception of problems in the community. Following their surveys, they will come together in a meeting on another school-off day to meet with women from the Dang Tung Women's Affairs Group and assess the needs of the community in order to determine priorities for project planning. These women will serve as mentors to the girls over the course of the following 4 months, during which the students will (in teams) formulate and implement small development projects that we--along with the district development office--will approve and fund. At the end of all of that, we will have our district's first ever Women's Rights' Day celebration in March, in which the students will tell the community about the exciting development work they have done and we will host a speaker on women's rights or women's issues as well as provide leaflets and handouts on resources for women in Cambodia. I'm really excited about the whole thing! I look forward to seeing how it evolves and blossoms!
After that, my parents came in town the same day as the next group of Peace Corps volunteers--the K3s--, which crazy enough includes someone I went to camp with when I was little. I'm going to write more about my parents' and sisters' visit in a separate post, since it will have a lot more to it, but I'll go on and fill you in here about my interaction with the K3s and the other things I've been doing since my family left.
Three of the K3s came to visit my site a week after my parents left--they had a really nice time, and it was fun to play around with them and show them what basic life is like here. Then, about a week later, I went to Takeo where they were in training to help out there for a few days, including their site announcement, and then accompany them to Phnom Penh to help with their Counterpart Conference, the event in which they meet someone from their school for the first time and start to find out what their sites are like (I missed mine last year because of dengue...). It was a pleasure to get to know all of them, especially those who are going to be living in close quarters with me over the next year. Starting at the end of next week, we'll have five of the new guys in my province, scattered across the four districts the K1s were in until their service ended in March/April. Matt and Emily (the other two K2s in our province) and I headed down to our provincial town to meet up with all of our K3s, which was also a really good time and a fun chance to get to know one another a little bit. We plan to go down to Rabbit Island with them in late October the way that the K1s did with us last year. For us, was definitely a welcome time to bond with each other and get a break from site during the period in which you aren't allowed to leave the province, and I hope it can be the same for them.
Other than that, since my family left, I've mainly been working with some of the people who work at the district office with simple conversational English teaching, working out things for the girls' camp, like getting sexual and mental health speakers from the provincial health department and meeting with my co-teacher here. Now school's about to start up again--the students have already started doing the next set of pull-u-kam work--and I'm working on creating a reference manual with activity ideas to follow all the grammar points that are in the painfully-written government-issued textbooks that were written in the late 90s. Hopefully, the book I'm working on can help all the current teachers better understand the material they're teaching and create class sessions that are interactive and interesting, even when I'm not around. Ideally, once I get input from my co-teachers on how to fill parts in and explain them in Khmer, it could potentially be a text that could circulate between Peace Corps volunteers, between schools in Cambodia.
I have also been working with a group of rising 12th grade students interested in working on helping improve public health in our district. Together, the students decided to focus on disseminating information about the free government vaccination program in the even more rural parts of our district after surveying community members and local health workers and finding that many people had no idea about the services available. When we met with the chief of the health clinic in my district to confirm details about the vaccination program with her, she also asked us to spread the word about the other services at our clinic, including maternal health check-ups, delivery services, various different extremely affordable birth control options, tuberculosis testing and treatment, and an ambulance that can take you to the closest hospital in an emergency (If they take you from our clinic, it's free, but if it's from your house you have to pay a dollar a kilometer.).
So, this past Sunday, when we all biked together about two hours to the west of the market to visit homes out that way, we spread the word about all of those services, not just the vaccination ones. The students who ended up doing all the work and going through the whole process of surveying and planning turned out to be all women--the boys dropped out along the way after not really being motivated to get surveying assignments done. The whole group of us brought food and rice with us out on the trip and stopped mid-way through to eat together and swim (with all our--professional--clothes on--that's how swimming goes in Cambodia!) at this really beautiful lake between mountains. We had a really good time together, and when we stopped on the way home to evaluate our work together at one of the students' houses, all of the students agreed that one of the biggest ways that they had succeeded was in finding out all that information for themselves, not to mention spreading it to others. We're going to have a celebratory gathering at my house once school starts back--they've asked me to try to find Romeo and Juliet dubbed in Khmer when I go into Phnom Penh next, as their interest in the story was peaked by something from their 11th grade curriculum. We're also going to make stir-fried noodles and this coconut gelatin dessert that's super tasty...and I'm going to bring something special and American in from the big city to taste-test, too! It should be good. They're also interested in giving some sort of presentation during the girls' camp in November, and we might end up doing other sorts of health projects, too--but since they're going into their senior year they might get incredibly busy because of needing to prepare for national exams, so we'll just have to see how things go!
I also started teaching some teachers at the school basic computer skills, but our classes were cut off when one of the school computers got a virus and the school director made the computers off limits for teaching, which is a shame because they were all so excited to get a chance to learn basic skills like typing and creating documents. I feel bad because I'm worried that it was I who contaminated the computer when I was trying to get unicode to work on it, though I never had any problems, and I don't think we were the last people to use the computers, either. Who knows. I tried, though! During the few lessons we were able to undertake, they got the basics down, so there's at least that!
Seasonally, it's been ridiculously pleasant ever since the beginning of this month, cool and rainy enough that I have only used my fan once and have been able to wash my clothes less often as opposed to the parts of life when a shirt 100% gets sweaty enough in one day's use to warrant a cleaning. In terms of seasonal culture, we're moving closer and closer to Pchum Bun, the holiday in which you give rice balls to your dead ancestors who are stuck as spirits between worlds so that they aren't angry and curse you over the next year. For the opening day of the two-week-long rice-ball-throwing-around-the-wat festival, I got up at 3:30 AM and went to the wat with Li-di, the older of my two little host sisters, and some other neighbors. We brought a dish filled with sticky-rice balls sprinkled with black sesame seeds and adorned with orange slices and pink and while bougainvillea that Li-di had collected from a neighbor's house, topped off with incense, a few small red candles, and a couple 100-riel bills. The wat was breathtakingly beautiful in the early morning amidst all the candlelight and shadowy faces. My eyes burned from all the incense smoke, but my heart burned with the glow of being amidst everyone, participating in the ceremony and then the rice-ball-throwing afterwards--walk around the sanctuary building three times, throwing your balls at the spirit houses that surround it. It's crowded and pushy in the dark, but it's definitely a communal event, and it was nice to be a part of it. Afterwards, Li-di and I went home, arriving at about 5:30, and I finished a book and slept a few hours before heading back to the wat for lunchtime giving-the-monks-food-to-eat-and-then-picnicking-with-everyone-after-the-ceremony. My host family here isn't very religious, so I usually end up going to ceremonies alone, but I go and hang out with the grandmas there, the Yays, and they make sure I stay taken care of. When my 'mom' the nom-ban-chock seller Ohm Ran goes, she always takes care of me, but this time I was on my own. The next time I go to the wat will be for the culminating rice-ball celebration, on the 19th, but I'm going to go to my training village for that so that I can spend some time with my training host mom and see everyone there--when I left last year they said I definitely needed to go back there for Pchum Bun because it's the event in which it's important to be in your hometown, and my training site is like my hometown in Cambodia.
On the Jewish calendar, High Holy Days are coming up. I'm not going to be able to go into Phnom Penh for services for Rosh Hashanah because it overlaps with Pchum Bun Day, but I'm going to plan to be there for Yom Kippur! I'm excited to be celebrating holidays with others instead of my normal Friday-night-candlelighting alone. There are also four or five K3s who are Jewish, which is also exciting--I went with one of them to a Shabbat dinner at an RPCV's house when we were in town for Counterpart Conference, which was really a treat. There was homemade challah and everything! The community seems a little more organized this year than last; they've already sent out a calendar with Shabbat and other holiday event dates over the next few months, and I hope to be able to attend some!
Before I finish writing, I want to take a moment to talk about my host family, mainly to sing the praises of Li-ching, my little tiny host sister. Playing with her is one of my favorite parts of coming home these days. She loves it when I mirror her actions, play peek-a-boo with her, make that pfffff sound on her tummy, look at books with her, drink water and smack my lips as she does the same, dance around with her, and so much more. Li-di, my other sister, is about to start school, which is also really exciting! Over the past year, while Li-ching has been becoming more extroverted with me, Li-di has overall become more introverted with the world, withdrawing into herself a lot of the time. We still have fun together, but she's not as trusting and happy-go-lucky as she was when I first got here. I wonder if that happens to all 4.5-year-olds, maybe all Cambodian 4.5 year olds? It's probably just Li-di starting to think about her world and who she is as a person on some levels. Their parents are pretty much the same as always, but the other small part of our family, Coconut, is different....she's due to have kittens sometime soon, as evidenced by her bulging belly. Look forward to really cute photos!
So that's basically life for now. I probably won't write again (besides a post describing what happened while my parents and sisters came to visit) until after the leadership camp is over and we're in the development project mode time, since I need to focus on making that happen and also studying for the GRE, which I'm going to take at the end of October. I really enjoy hearing from all of you, especially all the little mundane details. Email me or write me paper letters or text me or whatever if you get the chance!
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