Waking Up In Cambodia

In the months and weeks before my departure, I would have dreams about what it would be like to live in Cambodia. Often enough, a state of dormancy allowed my subconscious to depict an opaque vision of jungle, humidity, and survival. These dreams drew upon all the information I absorbed on the country, and I formed a strange and convoluted picture of my new life through them. The morning would reveal that I was still in the same place where I had gone to sleep, but I began to wonder how it would be different to do the most basic actions over there. What was it going to be like to wake up in Cambodia?

I am drawn to think of this momentary act of waking because among human behaviour, falling asleep and waking up are two parts of the same process that have always fascinated and frightened me. It has to do with the momentary period of time when one involuntarily slips in and out consciousness. In terms of my prevision that I had about Cambodia, I thought that I would arise from a happy slumber to a land of jungle, humidity, and survival.

Of course, waking up in Cambodia and how I imagined waking up in Cambodia are two different things. I have often compared two separate states of mind when thinking of foreign lands that I have visited; how I imagined it before I went, and how it actually was. As the result of an overactive imagination and the curse of a good memory, I can still compare these two sets of mental depictions for many different countries. Cambodia has been no different. I often compare in my head this prevision to the reality, which I will describe:

I wake up each day around four or five in the morning in a bed that has one, white cotton sheet on it. When I open my eyes, the morning light is dripping slowly over the leaves of the palm trees in the jungle. It is impossible to sleep past seven because the heat is very strong by this time. Because the pervasive humidity, I find myself sweating at all times of the day. The first thing I do when I get out of bed is to take a cold shower, and revel in the cooling effect that it brings me. After the shower, I towel off, shave, brush my teeth, and put on my krohma, which is towel-like sheet of cloth that I wear around my waist like a skirt. It is quite practical in this climate for keeping cool. I take another cold shower in the afternoon, and one at night before I go to bed. In the evening, I read or write in my journal before I fall asleep around nine or ten o’clock.

While the elements of the jungle, humidity, and survival do exist here, waking up in Cambodia was nothing like what I expected. In the four days that I have been here, I have started to adopt this act of waking as part of my normal routine that I will follow in the next two years. I am beginning to adopt myself to Cambodian culture, and the process of waking up is just one small step in a far greater process.

My Life So Far

As I am writing this, it is Election Day in Cambodia. People from around the country are voting for their preferred party in the parliamentary elections, and almost all the shops and restaurants are closed in the provincial town where we are staying. It is my first holiday in Cambodia, and it is also my first day off from training. There are so many things that I could describe about my current situation, but I should probably begin by saying that the training that we are receiving is intense. We are staying currently in a guesthouse of a hotel, and every day we have a series of meetings from eight in the morning until five in the afternoon. In these meetings, we discuss how we are going to go about our training. The five basic components involve how to manage our health, protect our safety, teach English in Cambodian schools, learn Khmer, and how to integrate into Cambodian culture. It is pretty intense, and there are so many things to think at once that it just feels overwhelming. There is a lot of information to absorb very quickly, but I am trying to take one day at a time. If there is anything that I learned from living in Morocco, it would this attitude.

More To Come

There is not a day that goes by that I do not write about this country in my journal. I want to tell you so much about my new life here, dear reader, but I have limited time to type and work on my computer. I can say, however, that I think the decision to join the Peace Corps was the best one that I have ever made in my life. I cannot tell how proud and happy I am to be here and to serve the people of Cambodia.