Some projects I'm working on...

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I promise to post a real post soon!

July, August, and September 2009

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!

Battambang, Khmer New Year, and a taste of Laos

Chickens at my house woooooo


Girls in the van (we stuffed 30 people in) on the way to Battambang


The wife of the driver, the owner of the van, hanging out the window to make more space inside


Our team! At the school where we stayed


In front of the Taa Dambong monument in Battambang


Two of my favorite students, See Lain and S'rai Owen hanging out in the classroom where we slept


I washed all the uniforms after we got back. This is them hanging up on my fence in my yard. I washed all the socks, too! My hands hurt afterwards.


At Wat T'moh Dup, a cave-wat near my town


My friend Bong Mahp who sells school supplies and sews near my school. I study Khmer with her once a week. She's awesome. This is from when Joe, Joel, and I went with her to her mom's house to the East.


The extended family with whom we ate on top of Bokor


Beautifully cloudy, the edge of the world at the top


The old casino, deserted for more than 20 years


After our successful descent, on the way out


Advertisements for cobra wine in multiple languages near the waterfront in Luang Prabang. Super sweet.



Lao Omelette. Delightful. The chef called her younger assistant over to talk to us in English when she saw us. Also on the waterfront.


On the boat to Nong Khiew.


Working elephants, pulling logs


View from the boat


On our hike in Muang Ngoi Neua


Laotian flag on top of Phu Si in Luang Prabang, blue sky


Joe at the top of Phu Si, Luang Prabang below him


Lao nom (cabbage leaf around lemongrass pouch of stuff), Hmong needlepoint that Joe bought


At Wat Phu Champasak, peeping in


Pine trees! on the Bolaven Plateau in Paksong outside our guesthouse


Carvings at Wat Phu


From the boat from which we dolphin-watched in Kratie


Crazy duck egg on the bus ride back to Phnom Penh from Kratie

Fruitalicious

PS Now, finally posting, I was reminded that I finally had some Lychees, once in Battambang when we were there (super tiny, from either Vietnam or Thailand, and not that great), and once in Laos (super sweet and delicious). Back in Cambodia, we've been having a lot of sweet fruits recently, like p'nyeeyou, mangosteen, and, best of all, durian....sooooo good. It's gotten cheap enough in Kampot to even make it to my little town, where 2.2 pounds now cost less than $2 (it's usually super expensive). MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. Too bad mango season will be completely over by the time Mama and Daddy and Sarah and Mimi get here...

Life

So, life has been bustling and busy here for a while, but now that the school year is winding down I'm finally getting around to writing another post. Soooo, let's travel way back in time to March.

Uncle Mark and Jan came back through for another week or so after having traveled all around the country before splitting and heading to Vietnam. They were around for the final preparations for the national sports tournament in Battambang, the moments of excitement while the girls tried on new uniforms for the first time and had their final practices, all of which bubbled with excitement. One of the PE teachers at school took interest in the team, too, now that we were going to nationals, so he started coming around to practice most of the time. To be honest, it was a relief to have someone else around to coach with. I had planned to co-coach with one of my co-teachers, but he had ended up being a flake, leaving me alone with the girls and unsure of my skills at coaching or really soccer in general. But the days before we left, spent talking late at night with Mark and Jan and playing during the daytime with a growing gaggle of 8th, 9th, and 10th grade girls, shone.

Once we actually got to Battambang, after a 9-hour super-squished ride with 33 people in a normal-sized van, things were a little less bright. There was some drama right when we got to Battambang about where the students would sleep, whether or not a bunch of the wealthier ones 'knew how' to sleep in the place that was provided for us, a classroom at a high school in town where we had our meals and some volleyball games were played. But then after one night at a guest house, they decided to come back to the school to sleep because it was a pain to get back and forth for meals, practices, etc. So at least that happened. But then we lost every. single. one. of our games. We scored zero goals over the course of the ten days there. The girls pulled through and were still pumped about soccer when it all came to a close. I put a lot of emphasis on getting experience (the other girls' teams had played for years; we had only been practicing for two months) that would help us in the future.

Since we've been back, practice has been continuing and the girls have really been getting better and better, which is super nice to see. We're planning on doing a training for 7th, 8th, and 9th grade girls from our school and another one close by who are interested in learning how to play. A lot of interest was generated by a tournament that the guy coach organized while I was in Laos (more details on Laos later); it didn't end up too well for the girls. The guy coach used us as a show game to play against the winning boys' team (I was really super excited that the girls have now become brave enough to play against the boys!)...but then cut our game short to 20 minutes total, smiling as if to say, "Oh, girls! Thinking they can play soccer! Hah." as the girls' faces filled with embarrassment and disappointment.

It was still cool to see the girls excited about watching the games leading up to that big let-down. Hopefully the training session for the younger girls will help 'luu' their 'tuk chet,' or get their spirits up and boost their self-confidence. I'm working on getting a girls' team from Takeo, a nearby province, to come here to play us, which would probably help them get back in the groove, too.

After going to Battambang, it was Khmer New Year, a super-hot and dry part of the year here in Cambodia and one with two weeks of break for the kids from school. I spent it visiting my friends and host mom in my training village, then getting some new balls for the girls in Phnom Penh, then playing with Joe and his friend Joel first in my town for the New Year's celebrations (which were kind of a let down) and then in Kampot town. They opened up the road up Bokor mountain (it's been closed for a while because the Chinese are building a new one) for New Years, so the three of us took advantage of the opportunity and biked up it. 6 hours up, 45 minutes down. It was pretty awesome. Up at the top we checked out a misty view of the shore from the top of an old casino from pre-Pol-Pot days worn out by years of being raided and ignored, alternately.

Also, while we were up on top of the mountain, Joe sweet-talked us into eating lunch with a family of Khmer people just finishing up. We had their leftover rice, starving from our epic ride up, and had one of those great chats with them that makes you feel good about Peace Corps, the kind that makes you feel like when you walk away from the experience there will be little starbursts of you still flickering in the minds of people with whom you have interacted, little starbursts that make people think that all Americans can't be that bad, despite the realities of attitudes both on the policy and individual level both now and in the past. When I start to feel stressed out here in my site, worrying about projects I'm dreaming up or trying to keep in motion, I try to focus on those kinds of moments, the ones I have just visiting and hanging out with people here and making their lives and my lives brighter in the process.

Anyway, after Khmer New Year there were only a few weeks of class before another break, this time for the king's birthday and the Royal Plowing Festival. Joe and I headed to Laos via Siem Reap, flying to Luang Prabang and then boating up the river to a few smaller places, Nong Khiew and Muang Ngoi Ngeua before exploring Luang Prabang for a few more days and then heading to the south, to Pakse, the Bolaven Plateau (where they grow coffee...and durian!), Champasak (where there's an Angkorian temple), and the 4 Thousand Islands. The trip was a good way to step back from Cambodia and miss it, as well as a chance to work on building things that are important to me and to reflect on myself. Laos is a beautiful country with wide open spaces; its population is less than that of Cambodia but it's 50% bigger, and I think it has so far seen a lot less of the deforestation than Cambodia. I enjoyed playing and loving and laughing in those big open spaces and feeling small within them. I learned a little bit of Laos along the way, but when we first came back in contact with Khmer it was definitely refreshing to come back into familiar language waters and be enabled to converse with people again. It was in the 4 Thousand Islands where we crossed back over, meeting and hanging out with a few Khmer boat/fishermen who lived there. We had some really nice moments with them, moments of excitement about being able to communicate coming from both ends, moments of pride in Cambodia in a place not too far away from it, but a different place all the same.

Back at the ranch, Coconut's all grown up. She was acting all weird last week, squatting and really wanting you to pet her tush. My aunt informed my sister that she was 'looking for a male,' and she soon found one, a little male cat smaller than she is that lives across the street. I had given her human birth control on the recommendation of my family a few months ago but then decided to stop when I found information suggesting it might give her breast cancer or ovarian tumors. I looked into getting her fixed, but I won't be able to take her in for another few weeks at least...kittens might already be on the way! We'll see.

Right now it's the night before second semester exams start. and, though there is scheduled class between exams and the final day of the school year, things are pretty much petering out. I'm thinking about several products for the long official break, which starts at the beginning of July and runs until the beginning of October. Both the people who work at the district office (like the county government office) and the district education office seem interested in some kind of English lessons, I'm thinking of putting something together to encourage tourism in my district from the provincial town, connections with the village volunteers who are entrusted with going door-to-door to spread health-related info seem promising, and I have a lot of work cut out for me in trying to work on a girls' and women's leadership and development program to start in November of this year. Plus, my parents and sisters are going to come in town, and there will be rice planting, in which I'd like to take part at least a little bit, so my summer is looking like it will have plenty to keep me going.

The one thing that's not great about summer is the fact that the hot, wet days are starting to be filled with mosquitoes. Please wish me no dengue this year. I'm doing my best with sprays and nets to keep up my end of the deal, but your wishes might help me out, too. And now, it's time for this mammoth of a blog post to end and for me to go to sleep. I'll try not to wait so long before posting again...

Photos with Other PCVs

Emily, Ben, and I at New Year's


Derek, Jason, Conor, Emily, and Matt at New Year's


Robert and I in the van after visiting our training host families


Joe and I in Bodhi Villa in Kampot Town hanging out


Joe with Huge at Bodhi


Emily, James, and Dan at Royal India in Phnom Penh during IST


Mike and Rachel


Robert and I


Joe and I in Kampong Som looking ridiculous


Check out the items on Joe's menu

More Random

Phnom Penh, the little mountain near my site where they mine gravel.


Coconut sneakily hiding out in my backpack right before I left.


Baby chickens in my yard!


Lydy is awesome. This photo is courtesy of Joe.


Ben came to visit for New Year's.


One of my neighbor-kids, Dara, at the 7th of January celebration


Dara's brother, Achaee


Singing on stage! Com ang mee-un luyyy...


The flying horse ride that came to town


Boys'volleyball team at a tournament nearby


Students threshing the rice...IN ACTION!


Taking a break from the thresh


My main co-teacher, Phaly


Neighbor-kids with some of the fragranced flowers that people gave me up on stage while I was singing


Jan and I in Kampot


One of my students sewing at his house


This is my friend Mae Hon--she used to be a teacher at the school, but mainly she now does office work. She's great to talk to, and all three of her kids are great students in my classes.



This photo and the next two are from the caves we went to in Kampong Trach wooo