This was taken near Oudong at a Wat near a mountain temple compound. The woman is standing in the center of an artificial lake, and represents a figure who allegedly soaked up a river with her hair to save her husband from being eaten by crocodiles.
Friday, August 29, 2008
Monday, August 18, 2008
Twilight Over The Rice Fields
This is what the sky often looks like at night after the rains have come through in the afternoon. It is quite lovely.
Picture of Myself And House
This picture was taken by my host mother in front of our house. I have just come home from teaching at the local high school, and we are burning paper money and toys in celebration of a Chinese-Cambodian holiday that honors one's ancestors. My host father is to my left, and so are some of my siblings. Behind me is a smaller alter on which food and incense are placed. Although I am wearing socks and sandals in an unfashionable way, it is great protection against mosquitoes.
On The Subject of Teaching
On a recent Tuesday morning, I completed the teaching practicum portion of our training here in Kampong at the nearby Hun Sein High School. The entire session included a week of teaching by myself, and a few days of teaching with a Cambodian counterpart. Groups of two or three trainees taught a single class of 10th and 11th grade students for three hours every morning of the practicum. This being the case, each trainee had to teach for at least one to two hours a day.
Contrary to what I expected, I found the experience to be rather enjoyable. To stand in front a classroom of students for the first time is daunting, to say the least, but by the end of our practicum I felt much more comfortable with the position. I must admit that I did expect a few more items of instruction from the Peace Corps as to how to teach, but it gradually dawned on me after the first day of the practicum that they have a "sink or swim" policy for this. The most probably cause for this is that we have a limited amount of time before we have to head off to our individual sites, and there is only so much that they can tell us. While the Peace Corps training staff did give us a few lectures on teaching styles and methods, most of what they said can be summed up like this:
"Okay everyone, let’s get started. Here is how you organize a lesson plan, manage a classroom, and write neatly on the whiteboard. Now here is a classroom full of 61 Cambodian students for you to practice with. Have fun!"
To be fair, this is partly an exaggeration. I say partly because I really did have to teach a class of sixty to seventy Cambodian high school students at a time. The instruction that the training staff gave us was useful, but I often found myself skimming through pages of TEFL books during the first week looking for sources of inspiration. I would often search for activities in these books, which would either be useful for grammar or reading practice, or be wonderful at filling the time of the lesson. I am also still at the point where I need to meticulously prepare my lessons, but I think that this will be something I will get better at over time.
Teaching At Hun Sen High School
The school where we practiced teaching was located off the national road on the outskirts of town. When I rode my bicycle there, I would enter the grounds through a blue, steel framed gate that would open to a wide driveway. The classrooms were located in short yellow buildings that formed a rectangle around a large open field. Skinny, white cows grazed almost everywhere that there was an open patch of grass, and they ate the flowers that lined the central driveway and other paths. The classrooms had blue shutters, which the teachers had to open and close after class, and the students sat in pairs or threes at dark, brown wooden desks, which were pointed towards a small, raised cement landing at the front of the class. On this platform was the desk of the teacher, and on the wall was the whiteboard. Trash lined the aisles between the desks, and the air inside had a distinct smell of used white-board maker and stale sweat. Even with the windows opens, it was still very hot inside there. It was unbearable to be in there by noon, and I would often be drenched with sweat after teaching after my group’s third hour of teaching.
The students themselves were in eleventh grade, and while I did not know their age specifically I would have guessed that they were around sixteen or seventeen years old. Most of them dressed very neatly in black slacks or skirts, and a white shirt. There was some deviation in this and some exceptions, but most of them tried to look their best. Physically, they resembled most Cambodians in all but age. Many of them were an average height of about 1.62 meters, with neatly arranged, jet-black hair, rounded adolescent features, and a skin tone that varied from being either very dark or light.
Shyness and perhaps a lack of self-confidence were clearly shared among the students in the class. This was readily apparent when I asked for volunteers to either read certain paragraphs aloud or write something on the board. In response to this request, no one would dare to move or make eye contact with me. This was particularly true for the boys who sat in the back. On some days, I felt like much of my lesson was spent trying to get the least kind of reaction out of them. During the first week when I was teaching by myself, I went as far as to put on a raincoat and pour water on my head to illustrate the meaning of downpour. A few of them laughed, but I think that most of them were more confused than anything.
Teaching pronunciation was the easiest task I could do because I could simply do it by ear, and teaching grammar was the hardest. The subject matter for the latter can be easy or difficult, but what makes teaching it burdensome is the fact that you never really have an idea if the students are getting it or not. Cambodian students in general seem to love to repeat every word that you say and copy down everything that you write down on the board. Whether they understand it or not is an entirely different question. It is good to do some kind of evaluation at the end of class to see if they need more work on it. Another strategy is to use the more advanced students to teach the less advanced students what they do not understand about the lesson; therefore, improving the comprehension of the students and making my life easier.
Working With a Cambodian Counterpart
Part of the Peace Corps’ mission in Cambodia for English instruction is to try and shift the education system away from teacher centered approach, to that of student centered learning. What this means in simpler terms is that the focus on any given lesson should be on the students learning the material, and not the teacher. This may seem rather obvious to those of us with a modern, western education, but for students in Cambodia and other parts of Asia this is a major shift. Many English teachers simply stand in front of the classroom and lecture to the class without any concern or thought of the comprehension of the students. To further this process along, PCV’s work with Cambodian counterparts at their permanent sites. During the second week of practicum, we were assigned counterparts with whom we would teach with for two days at the high school. It is through this way that we would be familliar with how to teach classes when we are at our site.
Teaching and working with a counterpart can be quite challenging. To begin with, most English teachers in Cambodia are trained to think that the government issued textbook English For Cambodia, is a perfect book. This is not an exaggeration, for they follow it like the NRA follows the second amendment of the constitution. The first day that we met with our counterparts, they sat us down and gave us a long lecture about the proper way to teach English, and this consisted of understanding what the lesson plan was that the book laid out for the teacher to use. There was hardly any deviation from this, and some ideas for creatively using the book in different ways were rejected immediately.
The real difficulty in this is that English for Cambodia is a horrendous source of material for anyone who is trying to study English. It was published through monetary assistance from Britain, and is full of British spellings, vocabulary, and terribly confusing writing exercises. Trying to teach what the government has insisted that the students learn, and not have them a form of English that would incomprehensible to a native speaker is a difficult balance to reach.
This is not to say that there was not anything to learn from our counterparts. Their knowledge of English for Cambodia is extensive, and the shared knowledge of it is incredibly helpful since this is the book that we ultimately have to use throughout our service. They also have different and intricate ways of teaching grammar to Cambodian students that would baffle a native speaker. For example, I introduced the second conditional to the class on the second day of the practicum, and found that my counterpart had a wildly complicated method of explaining in Khmer how the second conditional functioned in English. How it was laid out is hard to describe, but I can say that it appeared as a six variable math formula on the whiteboard at the end of the explanation. While I did not quite understand it, it seemed that students did. It would be very useful to learn how this formula for teaching grammar works, and I can only hope that the counterparts at my permanent site would be willing to teach me.
I still do not know what I will find when I move to my permanent site in October. Whether the experience at Hun Sein High School will be repeated is a question I ask myself daily. I anticipate, however, that the answer will come sooner than I expect it.
Contrary to what I expected, I found the experience to be rather enjoyable. To stand in front a classroom of students for the first time is daunting, to say the least, but by the end of our practicum I felt much more comfortable with the position. I must admit that I did expect a few more items of instruction from the Peace Corps as to how to teach, but it gradually dawned on me after the first day of the practicum that they have a "sink or swim" policy for this. The most probably cause for this is that we have a limited amount of time before we have to head off to our individual sites, and there is only so much that they can tell us. While the Peace Corps training staff did give us a few lectures on teaching styles and methods, most of what they said can be summed up like this:
"Okay everyone, let’s get started. Here is how you organize a lesson plan, manage a classroom, and write neatly on the whiteboard. Now here is a classroom full of 61 Cambodian students for you to practice with. Have fun!"
To be fair, this is partly an exaggeration. I say partly because I really did have to teach a class of sixty to seventy Cambodian high school students at a time. The instruction that the training staff gave us was useful, but I often found myself skimming through pages of TEFL books during the first week looking for sources of inspiration. I would often search for activities in these books, which would either be useful for grammar or reading practice, or be wonderful at filling the time of the lesson. I am also still at the point where I need to meticulously prepare my lessons, but I think that this will be something I will get better at over time.
Teaching At Hun Sen High School
The school where we practiced teaching was located off the national road on the outskirts of town. When I rode my bicycle there, I would enter the grounds through a blue, steel framed gate that would open to a wide driveway. The classrooms were located in short yellow buildings that formed a rectangle around a large open field. Skinny, white cows grazed almost everywhere that there was an open patch of grass, and they ate the flowers that lined the central driveway and other paths. The classrooms had blue shutters, which the teachers had to open and close after class, and the students sat in pairs or threes at dark, brown wooden desks, which were pointed towards a small, raised cement landing at the front of the class. On this platform was the desk of the teacher, and on the wall was the whiteboard. Trash lined the aisles between the desks, and the air inside had a distinct smell of used white-board maker and stale sweat. Even with the windows opens, it was still very hot inside there. It was unbearable to be in there by noon, and I would often be drenched with sweat after teaching after my group’s third hour of teaching.
The students themselves were in eleventh grade, and while I did not know their age specifically I would have guessed that they were around sixteen or seventeen years old. Most of them dressed very neatly in black slacks or skirts, and a white shirt. There was some deviation in this and some exceptions, but most of them tried to look their best. Physically, they resembled most Cambodians in all but age. Many of them were an average height of about 1.62 meters, with neatly arranged, jet-black hair, rounded adolescent features, and a skin tone that varied from being either very dark or light.
Shyness and perhaps a lack of self-confidence were clearly shared among the students in the class. This was readily apparent when I asked for volunteers to either read certain paragraphs aloud or write something on the board. In response to this request, no one would dare to move or make eye contact with me. This was particularly true for the boys who sat in the back. On some days, I felt like much of my lesson was spent trying to get the least kind of reaction out of them. During the first week when I was teaching by myself, I went as far as to put on a raincoat and pour water on my head to illustrate the meaning of downpour. A few of them laughed, but I think that most of them were more confused than anything.
Teaching pronunciation was the easiest task I could do because I could simply do it by ear, and teaching grammar was the hardest. The subject matter for the latter can be easy or difficult, but what makes teaching it burdensome is the fact that you never really have an idea if the students are getting it or not. Cambodian students in general seem to love to repeat every word that you say and copy down everything that you write down on the board. Whether they understand it or not is an entirely different question. It is good to do some kind of evaluation at the end of class to see if they need more work on it. Another strategy is to use the more advanced students to teach the less advanced students what they do not understand about the lesson; therefore, improving the comprehension of the students and making my life easier.
Working With a Cambodian Counterpart
Part of the Peace Corps’ mission in Cambodia for English instruction is to try and shift the education system away from teacher centered approach, to that of student centered learning. What this means in simpler terms is that the focus on any given lesson should be on the students learning the material, and not the teacher. This may seem rather obvious to those of us with a modern, western education, but for students in Cambodia and other parts of Asia this is a major shift. Many English teachers simply stand in front of the classroom and lecture to the class without any concern or thought of the comprehension of the students. To further this process along, PCV’s work with Cambodian counterparts at their permanent sites. During the second week of practicum, we were assigned counterparts with whom we would teach with for two days at the high school. It is through this way that we would be familliar with how to teach classes when we are at our site.
Teaching and working with a counterpart can be quite challenging. To begin with, most English teachers in Cambodia are trained to think that the government issued textbook English For Cambodia, is a perfect book. This is not an exaggeration, for they follow it like the NRA follows the second amendment of the constitution. The first day that we met with our counterparts, they sat us down and gave us a long lecture about the proper way to teach English, and this consisted of understanding what the lesson plan was that the book laid out for the teacher to use. There was hardly any deviation from this, and some ideas for creatively using the book in different ways were rejected immediately.
The real difficulty in this is that English for Cambodia is a horrendous source of material for anyone who is trying to study English. It was published through monetary assistance from Britain, and is full of British spellings, vocabulary, and terribly confusing writing exercises. Trying to teach what the government has insisted that the students learn, and not have them a form of English that would incomprehensible to a native speaker is a difficult balance to reach.
This is not to say that there was not anything to learn from our counterparts. Their knowledge of English for Cambodia is extensive, and the shared knowledge of it is incredibly helpful since this is the book that we ultimately have to use throughout our service. They also have different and intricate ways of teaching grammar to Cambodian students that would baffle a native speaker. For example, I introduced the second conditional to the class on the second day of the practicum, and found that my counterpart had a wildly complicated method of explaining in Khmer how the second conditional functioned in English. How it was laid out is hard to describe, but I can say that it appeared as a six variable math formula on the whiteboard at the end of the explanation. While I did not quite understand it, it seemed that students did. It would be very useful to learn how this formula for teaching grammar works, and I can only hope that the counterparts at my permanent site would be willing to teach me.
I still do not know what I will find when I move to my permanent site in October. Whether the experience at Hun Sein High School will be repeated is a question I ask myself daily. I anticipate, however, that the answer will come sooner than I expect it.
Khynom Barang - Reflections Of A Foreigner Living in Cambodia
In the letters that I have written to friends and family in the US, I have touched briefly on a subject that is very difficult to detail. It is easy to simply state that living here is very hard is itself, but when I try to put it down in words I cannot seem to give an answer that completely satisfies the question of why this is so. It is as if the language barrier that I experience on a day-to-day basis is affecting my cognizant faculties. For example, a running joke I have with my host family is that when I do not understand anything they say, I shrug my shoulders and say, “Khynom Barang.” This phrase literally means “I am a Frenchman,” but the word barang is used to refer to any foreigner of European ancestry. By saying this, I acknowledge my ignorance in trying to understand the world around me. In struggling with this, I have reached a feeling of determination to at least overcome this barrier in a non-spoken form. Thus, I hope that in writing this letter I will better describe the demanding nature of my current life.
Part of it has to do with the grueling schedule of the Peace Corps training. Currently, much of my daily routine is spent between teaching in the morning, studying Khmer in the afternoon, and forming lesson plans for the classes I am currently teaching. Even just the language classes and the teaching practice are exhausting by themselves.
Becoming fluent in Khmer in a very short period is next to impossible. There are virtually no cognates between English and Khmer, although there are a few between Khmer and French that are useful. Pain, café, sac-a-dos, and carrot (bread, coffee, backpack, and carrot) are all French words that are used in Khmer. The grammar of language is very easy as there are no verb conjugations or genders, with a few exceptions, but learning the words themselves is not all an easy task. We are slowly learning Khmer script, which is based on Sanskrit, in our language classes, but for the time being we have to rely on our own Romanization of the language. What that means is that every time you hear a word in Khmer, you have to write down what you think it would correspond to in roman letters. Quite often, the words that I write down in class do not match how to word should be pronounced, and I have to review what I have learned with my host family every evening.
Mixed in with these daily activities are the sporadic information sessions of health and cultural classes that are given to us every so often. I barely have enough time to read, write these posts, and play the violin. But the reason why it is so hard does not necessarily have to do with the daily routine. I put myself through harder regimes than this one when I was in university, but this has an added element. I often find that the stress of daily life can often be counteracted with exposure to those things that are comfortable and familiar in order to achieve some sort of balance. In this way, one can allow for some degree of sanity in a place where bizarre behavior is considered acceptable. Yet, it is this yearning for something familiar that makes the experience particularly hard.
When the bizarre and unfamiliar become a part of life that you have to adopt as your own, the desire for sense of normalcy from your former life is what makes the experience hard. Any kind of familiar reading material, food, or objects are the basis for cravings after anyone has spent any significant amount of time abroad. Chocolate, rice crispy treats, and Chipotle burritos are often high on the lists of things that people miss from America. If you visit a Mexican restaurant in Phenom Penh, however, the experience will often not be a good one. You will either get food poisoning, or enjoy the food enough to the point where you fully realize how much you miss the familiarity of the familiar.
Integration is the Key
Integrating into an unfamiliar society is often problematic for many people who have tried, and in the time that I have spent abroad I have seen three main ways in which this can be done. The first is one that resembles European colonial life, and is largely practiced by those who either work for the embassy or plan to take an extended vacation as a tourist. They constantly try to build walls around them through their culture, and try to recreate their former life as much as possible, with as much detail as possible. At the other end of the spectrum are those who decide to go native. This is to say that these people have decided to shed every aspect of their former life and culture in exchange for another. Some of these people are fascinating and remarkable in their effort, but there always seems to be some aspect of mild insanity in their story. This is not the kind that drives one to the asylum, but rather a wild, passionate, and perhaps unhealthy obsession.
In the middle of this spectrum is the life that a Peace Corps volunteer, largely, tries to lead in Cambodia. It is the effort to not abandon one’s cultures completely, and at the same time not to put up barrier against the outside world; therefore, to walk the middle path. The difficulty in this is trying to find a balance between what one can tolerate with respect to one’s own culture and system of values, and what one cannot stand the sight of. I have heard tales of disgust, horror, and tragedy from the some of the volunteers that have been here for almost a year and a half. Some of these are incredibly shocking, and the only incredulous aspect about them is the fact that the volunteers can say them with a phlegmatic expression on their face. While nothing has threatened my safety and security so far, I can already recount at least one story that shaken me a little.
The Evils of Drink
During some of the training sessions, some of the volunteers spoke about how Cambodian men pressure male volunteers to drink excessive amounts of alcohol. I had this happen to me for the first time this week, and despite the warning about it I was shocked at the amount of pressure there was. To recount the story, last Friday was a holiday for families who are of Cambodian-Chinese ancestry. Since my family is Chinese-Cambodian, I joined them as they burned paper money as an offering to their ancestors when I came back from teaching that day. We had a large meal for lunch, and inexpensive beer was provided. My host father offered me a can of Anchor Beer, which is generally tolerable, and I accepted out of an effort to be polite. During the meal, however, both my host father and our next-door neighbor raised their glasses in a continuous stream of toasts, and put an increasing amount of pressure on me to drain my glass. I explained that I had to go study Khmer after lunch, I did not like being drunk, it was inappropriate for a teacher to be drunk, and that I merely wanted to sip the beer to enjoy the taste. Not even a firm no would work with these men, and they only stopped when I could not stand it any longer and excused myself from the meal early. My entire host family thought that this was really funny as well, and kept repeating phrases that questioned my sobriety.
As I rode off on my bicycle, I was furious. How could these adult men have the maturity level of a doltish college freshman, and not understand that no means no? As I was silently fuming, I suddenly remembered what the country director told us on the first day that we arrived in Cambodia. “You will see things that shock you, and you will see things that will disgust you. But before you criticize and make assumptions, you have to ask yourself why these things are the way they are.” While mulling this over, I remembered that there is an incredible amount of pressure among Cambodian men to drink excessive amounts of alcohol. For example, if you are at a wedding or party, and you have drunk enough beer to make you vomit, the expectation is that you will then go throw up, come back, and drink again. What is even more shocking is that mature adults, and not the binge drinking college freshman of society do this sort of thing.
While this may seem to be a premature assumption about Cambodian culture, it seems that the concept of pleasure is much different from what I knew in the west. What I mean by this is that it seems to be categorized in separate and distinct spheres. For example, relations between men and women appear to resemble those of 19th century Victorian society. It is a relatively prudish society by our standards, and men and women barely touch each other before marriage. Beneath this veneer of politeness, respect, and strict moral behavior, however, lies the ugly truth that prostitution is widely spread and accepted here as well as in other large portions of Asia. The key to understanding why this paradox could exist is to know that men have relations with their wives for the sole purpose of producing offspring. Relations for the sake of pleasure are not acceptable, and are reserved for prostitutes. Thus prostitution thrives, and the spread of AIDS and other diseases remains unchecked. Relations for that of pleasure and reproduction are held in different spheres with very little crossover.
A similar opinion is held for the use of alcohol. Either one drinks alcohol to get raving drunk, or one does not drink at all. As the father of my host family put it, “Drink, no drunk? No fun!” In essence, what my host dad and neighbors were doing to me was the same thing that they would do to anyone of their friends or colleagues. It is also completely normal for people, especially women, who do not drink alcohol at all to simply accept this kind of behavior as mundane. The day after this party, I came home from language class at around five in the afternoon to find that the father of the family was lying face-down on the floor of the living room asleep. He owns several rice fields outside of town, and he usually spends long hours in the morning and afternoon tending to them. I assumed that he was simply tired, and I carried on my usual business of socializing with my host family. After I had showered, dressed, and come down the stairs from my room to dinner, I arrived in the living room and found the father lying in the same position. I asked the mother if something was wrong, or if he was simply tired. She shook her head and replied, “Koat at ah kum lang. Ban slo vung chia muy poomah (He’s not tired. He simply got drunk with his friends). During dinner, we simply ignored the fact that he was there. We spoke at normal volume levels, and I played chess with one of my host brothers until I went to bed at about eight thirty. I could hear the grandmother scolding the father later as I lay in bed, and him responding in a slow slurred speech. I really do not like it, but I have to understand why things like this happen. From the stories that I have heard, I am going to see this kind of pressure more often when I arrive at my permanent assignment. It is yet another thing which I have to adapt to.
You are probably wondering, dear reader, “If it is so hard, why are you doing this at all?” A lot of that answer has to do with the fact that I enjoy my work as a teacher, but also with the fact that the Cambodian people, or at least the ones that I’ve met so far, are really great. I love my host family, even if they yell at me to take a bath or put pressure on me to drink alcohol because at heart they are really great people. My language teachers are great, my students are great, and the relationships I have formed here I hope will be long-lasting. For me, at least so far, the people are the reason why I came here, and the people are the reason why I am staying.
There are often moments where I can relax and enjoy life for a little while. Hanging out with my fellow teachers at breakfast before school, sitting and chatting with my host family, or going out for fried frogs with one of my Khmer teachers on Sundays are all times that I treasure greatly.
I often wonder what living in Cambodia will do to me during the two years that I will be here. Looking at the faces of the some of the volunteers who are here, and I can see a haggard weariness during pauses as they look down at their good during a meal. It is something that I cannot particularly worry about too much, however, and I think I will continue my current life philosophy of taking the experience one day at a time. I am still a barang, but maybe life will be a little easier once I have gotten more accustomed to it.
Part of it has to do with the grueling schedule of the Peace Corps training. Currently, much of my daily routine is spent between teaching in the morning, studying Khmer in the afternoon, and forming lesson plans for the classes I am currently teaching. Even just the language classes and the teaching practice are exhausting by themselves.
Becoming fluent in Khmer in a very short period is next to impossible. There are virtually no cognates between English and Khmer, although there are a few between Khmer and French that are useful. Pain, café, sac-a-dos, and carrot (bread, coffee, backpack, and carrot) are all French words that are used in Khmer. The grammar of language is very easy as there are no verb conjugations or genders, with a few exceptions, but learning the words themselves is not all an easy task. We are slowly learning Khmer script, which is based on Sanskrit, in our language classes, but for the time being we have to rely on our own Romanization of the language. What that means is that every time you hear a word in Khmer, you have to write down what you think it would correspond to in roman letters. Quite often, the words that I write down in class do not match how to word should be pronounced, and I have to review what I have learned with my host family every evening.
Mixed in with these daily activities are the sporadic information sessions of health and cultural classes that are given to us every so often. I barely have enough time to read, write these posts, and play the violin. But the reason why it is so hard does not necessarily have to do with the daily routine. I put myself through harder regimes than this one when I was in university, but this has an added element. I often find that the stress of daily life can often be counteracted with exposure to those things that are comfortable and familiar in order to achieve some sort of balance. In this way, one can allow for some degree of sanity in a place where bizarre behavior is considered acceptable. Yet, it is this yearning for something familiar that makes the experience particularly hard.
When the bizarre and unfamiliar become a part of life that you have to adopt as your own, the desire for sense of normalcy from your former life is what makes the experience hard. Any kind of familiar reading material, food, or objects are the basis for cravings after anyone has spent any significant amount of time abroad. Chocolate, rice crispy treats, and Chipotle burritos are often high on the lists of things that people miss from America. If you visit a Mexican restaurant in Phenom Penh, however, the experience will often not be a good one. You will either get food poisoning, or enjoy the food enough to the point where you fully realize how much you miss the familiarity of the familiar.
Integration is the Key
Integrating into an unfamiliar society is often problematic for many people who have tried, and in the time that I have spent abroad I have seen three main ways in which this can be done. The first is one that resembles European colonial life, and is largely practiced by those who either work for the embassy or plan to take an extended vacation as a tourist. They constantly try to build walls around them through their culture, and try to recreate their former life as much as possible, with as much detail as possible. At the other end of the spectrum are those who decide to go native. This is to say that these people have decided to shed every aspect of their former life and culture in exchange for another. Some of these people are fascinating and remarkable in their effort, but there always seems to be some aspect of mild insanity in their story. This is not the kind that drives one to the asylum, but rather a wild, passionate, and perhaps unhealthy obsession.
In the middle of this spectrum is the life that a Peace Corps volunteer, largely, tries to lead in Cambodia. It is the effort to not abandon one’s cultures completely, and at the same time not to put up barrier against the outside world; therefore, to walk the middle path. The difficulty in this is trying to find a balance between what one can tolerate with respect to one’s own culture and system of values, and what one cannot stand the sight of. I have heard tales of disgust, horror, and tragedy from the some of the volunteers that have been here for almost a year and a half. Some of these are incredibly shocking, and the only incredulous aspect about them is the fact that the volunteers can say them with a phlegmatic expression on their face. While nothing has threatened my safety and security so far, I can already recount at least one story that shaken me a little.
The Evils of Drink
During some of the training sessions, some of the volunteers spoke about how Cambodian men pressure male volunteers to drink excessive amounts of alcohol. I had this happen to me for the first time this week, and despite the warning about it I was shocked at the amount of pressure there was. To recount the story, last Friday was a holiday for families who are of Cambodian-Chinese ancestry. Since my family is Chinese-Cambodian, I joined them as they burned paper money as an offering to their ancestors when I came back from teaching that day. We had a large meal for lunch, and inexpensive beer was provided. My host father offered me a can of Anchor Beer, which is generally tolerable, and I accepted out of an effort to be polite. During the meal, however, both my host father and our next-door neighbor raised their glasses in a continuous stream of toasts, and put an increasing amount of pressure on me to drain my glass. I explained that I had to go study Khmer after lunch, I did not like being drunk, it was inappropriate for a teacher to be drunk, and that I merely wanted to sip the beer to enjoy the taste. Not even a firm no would work with these men, and they only stopped when I could not stand it any longer and excused myself from the meal early. My entire host family thought that this was really funny as well, and kept repeating phrases that questioned my sobriety.
As I rode off on my bicycle, I was furious. How could these adult men have the maturity level of a doltish college freshman, and not understand that no means no? As I was silently fuming, I suddenly remembered what the country director told us on the first day that we arrived in Cambodia. “You will see things that shock you, and you will see things that will disgust you. But before you criticize and make assumptions, you have to ask yourself why these things are the way they are.” While mulling this over, I remembered that there is an incredible amount of pressure among Cambodian men to drink excessive amounts of alcohol. For example, if you are at a wedding or party, and you have drunk enough beer to make you vomit, the expectation is that you will then go throw up, come back, and drink again. What is even more shocking is that mature adults, and not the binge drinking college freshman of society do this sort of thing.
While this may seem to be a premature assumption about Cambodian culture, it seems that the concept of pleasure is much different from what I knew in the west. What I mean by this is that it seems to be categorized in separate and distinct spheres. For example, relations between men and women appear to resemble those of 19th century Victorian society. It is a relatively prudish society by our standards, and men and women barely touch each other before marriage. Beneath this veneer of politeness, respect, and strict moral behavior, however, lies the ugly truth that prostitution is widely spread and accepted here as well as in other large portions of Asia. The key to understanding why this paradox could exist is to know that men have relations with their wives for the sole purpose of producing offspring. Relations for the sake of pleasure are not acceptable, and are reserved for prostitutes. Thus prostitution thrives, and the spread of AIDS and other diseases remains unchecked. Relations for that of pleasure and reproduction are held in different spheres with very little crossover.
A similar opinion is held for the use of alcohol. Either one drinks alcohol to get raving drunk, or one does not drink at all. As the father of my host family put it, “Drink, no drunk? No fun!” In essence, what my host dad and neighbors were doing to me was the same thing that they would do to anyone of their friends or colleagues. It is also completely normal for people, especially women, who do not drink alcohol at all to simply accept this kind of behavior as mundane. The day after this party, I came home from language class at around five in the afternoon to find that the father of the family was lying face-down on the floor of the living room asleep. He owns several rice fields outside of town, and he usually spends long hours in the morning and afternoon tending to them. I assumed that he was simply tired, and I carried on my usual business of socializing with my host family. After I had showered, dressed, and come down the stairs from my room to dinner, I arrived in the living room and found the father lying in the same position. I asked the mother if something was wrong, or if he was simply tired. She shook her head and replied, “Koat at ah kum lang. Ban slo vung chia muy poomah (He’s not tired. He simply got drunk with his friends). During dinner, we simply ignored the fact that he was there. We spoke at normal volume levels, and I played chess with one of my host brothers until I went to bed at about eight thirty. I could hear the grandmother scolding the father later as I lay in bed, and him responding in a slow slurred speech. I really do not like it, but I have to understand why things like this happen. From the stories that I have heard, I am going to see this kind of pressure more often when I arrive at my permanent assignment. It is yet another thing which I have to adapt to.
You are probably wondering, dear reader, “If it is so hard, why are you doing this at all?” A lot of that answer has to do with the fact that I enjoy my work as a teacher, but also with the fact that the Cambodian people, or at least the ones that I’ve met so far, are really great. I love my host family, even if they yell at me to take a bath or put pressure on me to drink alcohol because at heart they are really great people. My language teachers are great, my students are great, and the relationships I have formed here I hope will be long-lasting. For me, at least so far, the people are the reason why I came here, and the people are the reason why I am staying.
There are often moments where I can relax and enjoy life for a little while. Hanging out with my fellow teachers at breakfast before school, sitting and chatting with my host family, or going out for fried frogs with one of my Khmer teachers on Sundays are all times that I treasure greatly.
I often wonder what living in Cambodia will do to me during the two years that I will be here. Looking at the faces of the some of the volunteers who are here, and I can see a haggard weariness during pauses as they look down at their good during a meal. It is something that I cannot particularly worry about too much, however, and I think I will continue my current life philosophy of taking the experience one day at a time. I am still a barang, but maybe life will be a little easier once I have gotten more accustomed to it.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
Photograph of a Monk
This is by far the best photograph I have taken so far. I took it at a Buddhist Temple, which is called a Wat, and is a place where I take classes in Khmer on Thursdays.
A Brief Glimpse Of Life In Kampuchea
As I sat in front of our house in Kampong, I whiled away a portion of one late afternoon by speaking in French with a neighbor from across the street. The balding man spoke with a peculiar dialect, and I listened while drinking coconut juice out of a straw. In the middle of an interrupted thought about the passing monsoon season, the father of my host family came to the front door, said something in Khmer that I did not understand, and beckoned me to come inside the house. I went immediately to the kitchen of our house thinking that it was time for dinner. There was no one in the kitchen, however, and I was confused about what to do. I asked the father if it was time for dinner, but it took a full ten minutes of pantomime and frantic searching in my Cambodian/English dictionary before he understood what I was asking about. This was the answer:
“No, you take nuk dtuck (a bath)!”
I heaved a heavy sigh of relief as I poured bucket after bucket of cold water on myself in the bathroom, and dried myself off. When I dressed and came downstairs, the short, ornery grandmother of the family yelled angrily at me, and indicated that my head was not combed properly. Through another series of non verbal communication, I understood that I would have to change my shirt and comb my head if I was to be invited to dinner. I followed these directions, and put on a collared shirt in my room. The grandmother laughed at me when I came downstairs from my room, and unbuttoned my shirt as a sign that I had misinterpreted her gesture. Once again I changed clothes, and came downstairs.
My host mother, remembering that I had done the dishes after lunch that day, asked me in English if I was interested in helping to prepare dinner. As a sign of integrating into the family, I smiled and heartily agreed. The mother laughed, however, and shook her head.
“Sorry, just kidding.”
In traditional Khmer households, it is generally understood that men do not do any sort of housework. Because I had done the dishes twice for the family after lunch in an effort to integrate, I assumed that my family thought that I was either a very strange foreigner, or just a big girly man. Being curious, I insisted on helping to prepare the dinner for that evening. My host mother led me over to a stone bowl where I ground peanuts, water, and yellow spices into a thick paste called crüen. The grandmother, who insists on shouting things at me in Khmer kept repeating “bok crüen!” I asked in response:
“Khyom bok crüen?” (I grind crüen?)
“Cha, Neak bok crüen.” (Yes, you are grinding crüen)
When dinner was prepared, we turned on the electricity and sat around the television set. A mat was laid out, and we sat and ate while watching the evening news. Dinner consisted of rice, some fish, vegetables in chicken broth, and fresh clams that were still in their shells. I had never eaten clams in such a fashion, and the grandmother took it upon herself to show how to break them open, pour spices on them, and slurp them into one’s mouth. The only other time that she spoke to me during the meal was when she asked if I wanted more rice.
Taik Bai (Would you like more rice)?
At tay or-koon (No, thank you).
Everyone ate in silence and watched the television, with the occasional remark in English or Khmer to tell me what the broadcast was about. After everything was cleared away, the family and I stayed around the T.V. and watched Asian soap operas that were obviously dubbed from the original Japanese or Chinese. I took it upon myself to fill in what people were saying to each other since I obviously cannot speak Khmer yet. Here is an example:
(Man and woman are together alone on a bridge at night. They are staring at each other longingly as snow is falling, and speaking in monotone voices.)
Woman: I heard you went to Chipotle without me. How dare you!
Man: I honestly thought you didn’t like Chipotle. Besides, Frank invited me and it was kind of a last minute thing.
Woman: You could have asked me!
Man: But I remember you saying that the big burritos make you sick to your stomach!
Woman: That’s only if I eat a whole one! You could have picked up a salad bowl.
Man: No man picks up a salad bowl at Chipotle. It’s just not done. Wow, this is kind of awkward, because I was actually about to ask you to marry me.
(Pulls out a wedding ring box, and opens it to reveal the gem.)
Woman: I’m sorry, but I can’t marry a man who refuses to pick up a salad bowl for me.
(Woman runs away crying. Man falls to his knees and looks upward. Cue dramatic sounding orchestral number.)
During the episode, my host dad picked up a piece of fruit, and said, “Kiss, smell! No eat! Stomach ache!” and then laughed. The fruit was something called bai cha, and it is indeed rather repulsive. By 8:15 or so, I excused myself, brushed my teeth, took my malaria pills, and got inside my mosquito net to go to sleep. By 9:00, I was dreaming of burritos and guacamole.
In the morning, I was dashing off to language class when the sister of my host mother stopped me at the door. She insisted that I could not go outside with a shirt that did not have its sleeves buttoned, and that I had to button them before I went outside. When I arrived at my instructor’s house, I took off my shoes, walked up a steep flight of stairs, and greeted my instructor when I arrived on the wooden balcony that is our classroom. Four hours of language class ensued.
“On The Seventh Day He Rested…”
As I am writing this, it is another Sunday, and another day off. I am sitting at my desk, a mosquito coil is burning at my feet, and it is just after lunch in the afternoon. The sound of a Gamelan orchestra is coming through the window, and it is almost time to take another cold bath.
I long for these days. Training is six days a week, and I am quite exhausted at the end of it. Two trainees have already dropped out and gone home, and I am trying to rest, write letters, and practice the violin today as much as I can so that I do not burn out as well. Living here is very hard, and I have not quite yet thought of it as home for the next two years. I still have dreams where I am in the States, only to wake and find that I am still in Kampuchea. I have a vague intuition, however, that it is only temporary. I am confident that familiarity will be established with time.
If you can imagine the sound of scales and Bach violin sonatas drifting over the rice fields of Southeast Asia, this is where I am.
“No, you take nuk dtuck (a bath)!”
I heaved a heavy sigh of relief as I poured bucket after bucket of cold water on myself in the bathroom, and dried myself off. When I dressed and came downstairs, the short, ornery grandmother of the family yelled angrily at me, and indicated that my head was not combed properly. Through another series of non verbal communication, I understood that I would have to change my shirt and comb my head if I was to be invited to dinner. I followed these directions, and put on a collared shirt in my room. The grandmother laughed at me when I came downstairs from my room, and unbuttoned my shirt as a sign that I had misinterpreted her gesture. Once again I changed clothes, and came downstairs.
My host mother, remembering that I had done the dishes after lunch that day, asked me in English if I was interested in helping to prepare dinner. As a sign of integrating into the family, I smiled and heartily agreed. The mother laughed, however, and shook her head.
“Sorry, just kidding.”
In traditional Khmer households, it is generally understood that men do not do any sort of housework. Because I had done the dishes twice for the family after lunch in an effort to integrate, I assumed that my family thought that I was either a very strange foreigner, or just a big girly man. Being curious, I insisted on helping to prepare the dinner for that evening. My host mother led me over to a stone bowl where I ground peanuts, water, and yellow spices into a thick paste called crüen. The grandmother, who insists on shouting things at me in Khmer kept repeating “bok crüen!” I asked in response:
“Khyom bok crüen?” (I grind crüen?)
“Cha, Neak bok crüen.” (Yes, you are grinding crüen)
When dinner was prepared, we turned on the electricity and sat around the television set. A mat was laid out, and we sat and ate while watching the evening news. Dinner consisted of rice, some fish, vegetables in chicken broth, and fresh clams that were still in their shells. I had never eaten clams in such a fashion, and the grandmother took it upon herself to show how to break them open, pour spices on them, and slurp them into one’s mouth. The only other time that she spoke to me during the meal was when she asked if I wanted more rice.
Taik Bai (Would you like more rice)?
At tay or-koon (No, thank you).
Everyone ate in silence and watched the television, with the occasional remark in English or Khmer to tell me what the broadcast was about. After everything was cleared away, the family and I stayed around the T.V. and watched Asian soap operas that were obviously dubbed from the original Japanese or Chinese. I took it upon myself to fill in what people were saying to each other since I obviously cannot speak Khmer yet. Here is an example:
(Man and woman are together alone on a bridge at night. They are staring at each other longingly as snow is falling, and speaking in monotone voices.)
Woman: I heard you went to Chipotle without me. How dare you!
Man: I honestly thought you didn’t like Chipotle. Besides, Frank invited me and it was kind of a last minute thing.
Woman: You could have asked me!
Man: But I remember you saying that the big burritos make you sick to your stomach!
Woman: That’s only if I eat a whole one! You could have picked up a salad bowl.
Man: No man picks up a salad bowl at Chipotle. It’s just not done. Wow, this is kind of awkward, because I was actually about to ask you to marry me.
(Pulls out a wedding ring box, and opens it to reveal the gem.)
Woman: I’m sorry, but I can’t marry a man who refuses to pick up a salad bowl for me.
(Woman runs away crying. Man falls to his knees and looks upward. Cue dramatic sounding orchestral number.)
During the episode, my host dad picked up a piece of fruit, and said, “Kiss, smell! No eat! Stomach ache!” and then laughed. The fruit was something called bai cha, and it is indeed rather repulsive. By 8:15 or so, I excused myself, brushed my teeth, took my malaria pills, and got inside my mosquito net to go to sleep. By 9:00, I was dreaming of burritos and guacamole.
In the morning, I was dashing off to language class when the sister of my host mother stopped me at the door. She insisted that I could not go outside with a shirt that did not have its sleeves buttoned, and that I had to button them before I went outside. When I arrived at my instructor’s house, I took off my shoes, walked up a steep flight of stairs, and greeted my instructor when I arrived on the wooden balcony that is our classroom. Four hours of language class ensued.
“On The Seventh Day He Rested…”
As I am writing this, it is another Sunday, and another day off. I am sitting at my desk, a mosquito coil is burning at my feet, and it is just after lunch in the afternoon. The sound of a Gamelan orchestra is coming through the window, and it is almost time to take another cold bath.
I long for these days. Training is six days a week, and I am quite exhausted at the end of it. Two trainees have already dropped out and gone home, and I am trying to rest, write letters, and practice the violin today as much as I can so that I do not burn out as well. Living here is very hard, and I have not quite yet thought of it as home for the next two years. I still have dreams where I am in the States, only to wake and find that I am still in Kampuchea. I have a vague intuition, however, that it is only temporary. I am confident that familiarity will be established with time.
If you can imagine the sound of scales and Bach violin sonatas drifting over the rice fields of Southeast Asia, this is where I am.
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