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Published: November 3rd 2009
It’s 1:30 Tuesday afternoon in Siem Reap. I am sitting on the balcony outside our room where the temperature is a very pleasant 75 degrees or so. Rain is falling softly, I can hear a little noise from the street and the Ly family below me in their outdoor kitchen. The smell of the chicken on their fire is wafting up and it smells delicious. I am supremely content. And for once, I am not sweaty.
So much has happened, and so much will happen yet, and I’m feeling a little guilt about not blogging more. I know some of you look forward to reading this, as I look forward to reading Jaz’s blog, so I apologize for the relatively long silence. I will do my best to catch you up, but I’m lowering my standards. Forgive any typos, and please, if you want to know more about something, comment and ask! Perhaps some questions will jumpstart my writing a little. In the meantime, prepare for some random observations and reporting.
We have been busy! We arrived Thursday, and by Saturday morning at 9:00 Mim and I were at the PAGE house “teaching” English. Sambath, Sovanna, Srey Nga, Neourm, Lakana, Samneng, Vichney, Sokha, Pek, Sakoam, Kimlay, and Sokny had their desks gathered in a semi-circle and rushed to turn the fan on for us. We did some introductions (“What is your name?” “How old are you?” “How many brothers and sisters do you have?”), then went to some other questions and answers, writing things on the board and going around the circle asking each other. We played around with some flashcards, practiced writing some words on the board, and referred often to their nametags while we tried to master their names. At the end of the 90 minutes, we gave them homework: Each was given an index card and asked to write one question so we could all discuss them the next day.
The questions they wrote were fascinating. I had no idea what to expect, wondering if we would get some standard questions from an English 1 textbook. Instead, they had very thoughtful questions, starting off with Sakoam asking, “What do you do when you are angry?” It took an hour to get through all their questions, from “What do you do in your free time?” to “What is different in Cambodia and America?” Jaz had come along with us for this second class, and I think they were quite interested in her and she had wonderful answers to offer as well. When we talked about family constellations, Mim explained that her mother is 90 years old, and her father is “no more.” Jaz explained how Cambodian families are different and that in America, children leave their parents’ home well before they are married and that sometimes old people “all live together in a house, and maybe their children come to visit.” This drew gasps, as did the notion that education in America is free.
“Free?!?!” We ended that class by pulling out the Banagrams letter tiles and working together to build crossword-style words on the floor. They are so eager to learn and use new vocabulary - when three of the girls arrived a few minutes late in uniforms, we had eventually established that they were “scouts” and wrote the word on the whiteboard. One of the girls managed to work the word into our crossword, and was quite pleased, as were we.
This morning we had a third class (having skipped yesterday because of another project I’ll tell you about later) and asked them to show us around their house. They have a 2-story wooden house, with a classroom, a squat toilet, and an open-air kitchen downstairs and one large sleeping room upstairs, where they all sleep on the floor on mats. Upstairs there are also two small rooms, one with some shelves holding all their clothes - a stack of clothes for 12 girls that probably resembles a modest-sized wardrobe for one American girl. With some more questioning, we were able to learn that most of the girls have been there for 2 or 3 years and have come from villages 5 or 6 hours away for the purpose of being able to finish school. They go home to visit twice a year for a week or so.
“Our families are very poor. Here we have everything we need.” The morning went on to include a lesson on body parts. They had a big wall chart with arms, legs, fingers, toes, etc. We taught them some more obscure items, like eyebrow and thigh, and forged ahead into the heart and stomach and uterus. We played with my stethoscope, listening to our hearts at rest and then after dancing and jumping around the room.
“Now my heart is fast! This is bad?” We drank water and listened to it gurgle in our stomachs. We talked about where babies grow and about periods. (This required their Khmer-English dictionary.” We sang the Hokey-Pokey (always a hit!) and they taught a singing hand-slapping game. We broke up into two small groups to play with letter tiles and small props, practicing speaking and spelling and pronunciation, and when our time was almost up, one of the girls asked,
“Jess, why my uterus have stomach ache?” This led to a wonderful discussion about periods and cramps and other such womanly delights. (Girls here start their periods much later than at home, at 14 or 15 or 16.) And I suppose that’s enough information for some of you…!
We’ll return to the girls another time or two, though details are still a bit sketchy. They return to their regular school schedule on Thursday, so we’ll have to go in the evening. Their house is a 20-minute bike ride from the guest house, and it might be interesting to ride back in the dark with no streetlights!
We didn’t go to the PAGE house yesterday because Steve and I went with Lori and some of Ponheary’s family to Knar school, about 45 minutes away. A group of Chinese tourists had made a plan to come there and cook lunch for all the children, so Ponheary’s family loaded a truck with vegetables and chicken and noodles to be chopped and stir-fried and served to the children. It made for quite a scene: 18 Chinese tourists, Ponheary’s sister and sister-in-law, and a couple dozen schoolchildren spent an hour or so chopping chicken and cabbage and carrots, opening noodle and spice packets, all under the watchful eye of a few dozen hungry schoolchildren. The other 350 schoolchildren played in the schoolyard and carried all their desks into the yard to make rows of rustic banquet tables. Steve played volleyball with the teachers for a while, and he and I both chopped and sliced and diced with the rest of the kitchen crew. Eventually, the ingredients were added to the huge round woks sitting on the earthen ovens over wood fire, and boys with the big paddles stirred amidst the woodsmoke. The Chinese tourists broke out in songs, and the children reciprocated.
When the food was finally ready to serve, the children lined up in the schoolyard by classroom. Lori asked Ani, one of the teachers, to tell any student who had a problem to come see me, and we set up an impromptu and makeshift “health clinic.” It consisted of a desk that had been carried outside a classroom, and my supplies were meager: Band-Aids, gauze, Betadine, q-tips, sample-sized packets of skin cream, and some eardrops Lori had brought another time for kids with ear problems. Thirty or forty kids gathered around and began presenting their infected ears and rashy legs and festering feet. I gave Lori a quick look and she reminded me, “The bar is set pretty low. Do what you can.” She handed me four bars of soap and said, “Give them to the four dirtiest kids.”
Knowledge of germ theory has not reached this corner of rural Cambodia, and most of the skin problems and infections I saw were garden-variety cuts and scrapes and bug bites that had become infected from running through manure in the rice fields or swimming in contaminated water. We borrowed a cleaver from the kitchen crew and hacked the soap into small pieces to distribute to kids who needed it. With Ani as my translator, I asked about how much things hurt, how long they had been there, and gave instructions for washing. “Three times every day! Every day!” One small child’s feet were so caked with dirt that I couldn’t tell what he was trying to show me, so I had him stand in a bowl of water for a few minutes to soak off some dirt. I swabbed with Betadine and applied band-aids (none of which was likely to be particularly effective, but it felt better than doing nothing at all) and the children all bowed their heads a little and thanked me as they slipped away to make room for the next patient.
Far more concerning were the ears. I must have seen at least a dozen ears oozing infection, some caked with dried blood. I swabbed out ears and put in drops, all the while making mental notes about supplies to bring the next time. Not one child even whimpered, though some must have been in pain. It’s impossible to tell whether these are external ear infections from swimming in the dirty water or inner ear infections with pus oozing from burst eardrums. I know that untreated ear infections are a common problem and a significant cause of hearing loss in children here.
When the schoolchildren had all been looked at, the women with babies and younger children came next. More infected ears, more rashes of unknown origin. Even the babies didn’t cry when I fussed with their ears. The pharmacy list in my head grew longer, and I fantasized about our supply room at the VNA.
So today, Lori and went to the central market and bought plastic tubs and scrub brushes and soap. Later this afternoon, Mim and I will go to the pharmacy for antibiotics and alcohol and hydrogen peroxide and other supplies. Tomorrow we will return to the school and do a test run of Lori’s plan for introducing hygiene into the school curriculum. The hope is that if the school has all the supplies for the children to wash up well at least once a day, that will be a big improvement. It will be a bigger task to someday teach all of their families to do the same at home, but change can be introduced at school. We’ll scrub them up and treat their ears and bandage their wounds. I have never been a germ freak, but I have also never appreciated basic hygiene so much as I do after seeing the effects of its complete and utter absence. Suddenly, I understand even better how it is that so many children in Cambodia die before they reach the age of five. Diarrhea and infection, all preventable if you have the means to prevent it.
Sometime soon, we will also go to visit the Life and Hope Associations Children’s Development Village, where 44 orphans live. We will probably do more of the same - teach a little English, play with kids, look after some basic health problems. When and how exactly, we don’t yet know.
And that is so often the case here. As I’ve probably said in blog entries long ago, being here means we often don’t know. We don’t know why or how or when or what, but we figure it out. Steve and I went out to breakfast yesterday morning to a local restaurant where no one spoke English. We ordered by pointing to the menu: chicken and rice, beef with noodles, typical local breakfast food. I asked for coffee, and they brought us a pot of tea. Then they brought two plates with some sort of white doughy buns the size of baseballs. “Is this our food?” Steve asked. I didn’t think so, but I didn’t really know. “I’m so confused…” he reported. My only advice: Get used to it. You’ll be confused here often. They eventually brought the food we ordered, as I thought they might, and four dollars later, we were out of there.
There has been much eating and drinking and merriment. We go to meals in various configurations, to various restaurants. We eat loklak and pad thai and pizza and meat on a stick (thanks to all the food vendors in town for the water festival.) We haven’t eaten quite as much as we’ve wanted, as all of us have had some version of stomach trouble ranging from mild and short-lived (Mim and me) to 24 hours of exhaustion and aches and fever (Steve.) Jaz woke up our first night here with a fever which went away quickly, and now we are all quite well. We drink beer and Diet Coke and cocktails and coconut and lime juice and more beer. We did a pub crawl downtown, hitting Siem Reap’s gay bar and a couple of other Western-style bars before settling in to a restaurant for dinner. The next night, we did a pub crawl with a more local flavor, walking up and down the riverfront as the Water Festival geared up.
And oh - the Water Festival! This is not the same festival I’ve written about in Thailand for the new year. This is
Bonn Om Toek , which celebrates the end of the rainy season and the time of year when the Tonle Sap river changes direction and begins to empty the Tonle Sap lake. There are dragon boat races, with boats brought in from the villages in the countryside. There are illuminated floats along the river, one for each of the 20-odd government ministries (or so I’m told; who knows?) There are street food vendors and balloon sellers and music blaring from six-foot speakers and live bands. There were carnival games and a ferris wheel! Many of you know that I love big crazy amusement park rides - send me upside down on a roller coaster and I’m as happy as can be - but you couldn’t pay me enough to ride this thing. It looked like they imported from 1947, and it had been assembled that day by Khmer people, who despite their many wonderful qualities are not known for their precision and attention to detail. Also, it spun at an alarming rate, so that the rickety wire cages that served as seats were flung outward by centrifugal force, and even over the din of the loudspeakers, you could hear the screams of terror. (Six-year-old Fifi’s younger sister wanted to ride it, but he told her that she would be so scared that she “would cry for one year!”) The carnival games were limited to darts thrown at balloons (and sometimes dangerously close to the carnival workers’ heads) and prizes included dish detergent, cans of beer, and cigarettes.
Not only does Siem Reap rarely if ever see such wonders, but the town is crammed full of people from the countryside, who probably had as much fun riding the escalator at the Lucky Mall as doing anything else. There were very few Westerners walking through the festivities, so we got the swivel effect - as we walked by, people sometimes swiveled their heads to watch us. Steve pointed out, “People are looking at you!” (I pointed out that they probably weren’t looking at him much because he blends in so well: small and dark.) As we walked by large group of Khmer-style dancing (which means almost exclusively men, dancing counter-clockwise in a big circle to blaring Khmer hip-hop) the dancers beckoned to us to join them, and before we knew it, Steve and Lori and I were swept into the circle and doing our best to keep up. I was passed from one to another as men took turns dancing with me - I don’t what was going on for Steve! - and a tiny little Khmer woman hugged us and nestled her head in my armpit with a huge grin. After a couple of songs, we went on our way, exchanging big smiles. And I must say, Khmer hip-hop is the best dancing music ever!
Because of the water festival and the number of people who come to town, the street in front of the desk house is a traffic jam for most of the day. Pick-up trucks loaded with 20 or 30 people standing in the back bounce down the street alongside cars, motos, tuktuks, and bicycles. Getting across the river to the other side of town has been close to impossible most evenings, but it makes for excellent people-watching.
Last night was the grand finale of the festival, and we walked down the street to a rooftop tapas bar to enjoy the evening breeze. We had been texting back and forth with Jaz (we all have cell phones, though the network was often jammed with so many people in town) so she could meet us, and eventually she appeared, bringing along her new friend Borey, Rithy the English teacher from Tchey school, and three of her students. We dragged our tables together and invited them all to order food and drinks, which caused great consternation about what to order. I don’t know whether the students had ever seen printed menus, but after much conferencing with each other, they each ordered iced coffee, of all things. Jaz and Borey and Rithy each ordered from the tapas menu, as we had already, and the nine of us shared fried string beans and bruschetta and morning glory and spareribs. It was a delightful surprise, and I’m not sure which group thought it was a bigger adventure, the three of us or the kids. The students (who I had taught in English 2 last spring) practiced their English.
“How is the weather?” one asked me. “Well, I think the weather is very nice. How is the weather for you?” He thought the weather was windy, and he was correct. Borey is a delightful 19-year-old young man who works in one of the big tourist hotels, so his English is quite good, and he’s very outgoing. We ate and drank and watched a beautiful sunset, and we could hear the merriment along the river. Then the full moon came up and fireworks began. It was quite an evening.
After leaving our rooftop perch, we all walked along the river together. After a little bit, Rithy decided it was time to go back to school with the students, so all four piled on his moto and headed out of town. They sleep at the school on the floor of the computer lab, so they can practice English and use the computers. It amazes me.
So many things here amaze me. It’s delightful being amazed so regularly; I highly recommend it.
There’s more to tell, I’m sure, but I think now you have the highlights. Tomorrow we go back to Knar school, someday soon Steve and Mim and Lori may take a cooking class, Thursday and Friday evening we are invited to a wedding. Jaz is actually
in the wedding, though she doesn’t know the bride and groom. They are related to Ponheary somehow, and I guess it will be an interesting novelty to have a Western girl involved. She will wear a wine-colored strapless satin and sequined dress, chosen by someone in the family, and today we went to the market to buy her “hooker shoes,” as Lori calls them. She will be tottering on her high heels, but she will look marvelous! There will be no shortage of photos, I’m sure.
And really, I promise to get photos up soon. The obstacle is the number of photos to sort through and the limited bandwidth to upload them, but they’re coming, really. (Actually, I was going to upload a couple now, but the TravelBlog photo uploader isn't working.)
And could someone please send a case of soap and some antibiotics?
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anne
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SOAP ETC
JESS AND STEVE, I'M LEAVING ON THE NEXT PLANE WITH A BOX OF SOAP AND A CASE OF BACITRACIN. THIS ALL SOUNDS SO WONDERFUL. HOW ARE WE GOING TO KEEP YOU GUYS IN THE GRAY NORTHEAST...???!!!!