We're in the middle of a holiday right now that sounds kind of like "Pyome Ben," and since it's one of the biggest holidays of the year (probably the 3rd most important), almost everyone goes to visit family. For most people in the city, that means going back out to the countryside to visit where most of their family still probably lives. For example, almost all factory girls are 16-26 year old girls whose families still live in the countryside as farmers, so you could see trucks full of factory girls heading out of the city for the past few days after shifts let out. For the kids in orphanage, that usually means going back to the town that they grew up in, whether it's to see an aunt and uncle, step-mom or step-dad, grandparents, or sometimes even a living parent.
So, most of the kids in our orphanage are gone - about half, and more are leaving pretty much all the time. I can hardly keep track of who is here and who's not - I even thought Mike had left even when he hadn't - but I think the count was 27 today at lunch time, and tomorrow I think at least one more will be leaving. All classes and official activities are stopped. There's no school at the orphanage, no school for the public schools, no classes at the universities, no Khmae dance in the morning, nothing. For the kids that are left here, there's nothing to do at all, so a lot of times I hear them complaining about being bored - "aup sauk."
Some of the boys handle it by screaming and goofing off and fighting with each other playfully, some of the boys and girls cope with it by sleeping, some of the girls put on make-up and talk on the phone with boys or family or whoever they can. But a few people are like me and just want to hang out, which is very lucky for me. And more fortunately, a few of them speak really good English, too. One of them is the one girl that I teach piano to every day (this is the same girl in 11th grade who's going to my calculus class). I was sitting on one of the tables on the girl's side after lunch today when she walked by complaining about there being nothing to do, and ended up talking to her (and other people who came and went) for pretty much the rest of the day. And her story was pretty fascinating.
I can't remember the sequence in which I learned it, so I'll just tell you what I can remember.
She was born in a small village somewhere near
Battambang, which you can see right here, close to Siem Reap and the Thai border. She had one sister who was born before her, by maybe three or four years. Her father was more or less a farmer, and her mom - like most farmer's wives - stayed at home to cook, take care of the house, raise the kids, and things like that. After her, her mom gave birth to another sister, and then another sister, and then another brother, and then another sister - so there were six of them all together. (The one born right after her is the giggly one that all the boys love. All six of them are extremely cute by western standards of beauty, though. Anyway.)
When she was very young, she went to school. Her family didn't have very many kids, so they had enough money to send their older ones to school and not worry about looking out for all the younger ones. When she studied first grade, she did really really well, and might have been number one in her class, though I forget that detail. In second grade she was doing really well too, but in one of the first weeks of class she couldn't do the math that her teacher asked her to do, and so he hit her, and she felt really embarrassed. So she went home and told her dad, and he said that he would teach her math every night from then on. Each day, after he was done work around 5:30 when the sun goes down and they had finished eating dinner, he would teach her math in the dark or with a candle, since they didn't have electricity in her village back then. Her teacher never yelled at her or hit her again and I think she ended up getting number one in her class that year as well.
That year, her youngest sister was born and her mom got really sick afterwards. In addition, the dad took a job in another province even closer to Thailand to fell trees and then help build houses with them. He could only come home at most twice per month, and even then sometimes he wouldn't be able to make it that often. Sometimes he would just send money with a friend. Since her mom was sick and there was no father around to help watch and take care of the children, the mom asked the older kids to stop going to school so that they could help with all of the housework and the kids. So after second grade, she stopped going to school. Her mom couldn't work the farm all by herself, either, so she became a cook instead.
After a while, her dad stopped coming back so often. Sometimes he wouldn't send money with a friend, either. After it had happened too many times, the mom demanded that his friend tell her what's going on. He said that he had another girlfriend now, and might move to Thailand with her. That made the mom extremely sad and frustrated. The girl who I was talking to remembers being sad about it too, and being sad to see her mother so upset and alone all the time. And once her mom knew that her dad wasn't coming back or sending money any more, there was no way that the kids could go to school, or else they'd never have any money to pay for food and clothes and other necessary things. So I think at that point all of the kids stopped going to school, and anyone who could do work did work, and also helped to look after the youngest ones.
Her mom knew that she was really smart and she wanted her to find some way out of her village, and so she started talking to other family members to see if there was anything she could do. For a short time she lived with her uncle, but she couldn't stay there for some reason, and so she left there. Then she went to live with her grandmother for a while, but she couldn't stay there either. So she went back home for a while. At this point, it had been about two years since she had gone to school.
By then, her grandmother had found a job at this orphanage as a cook. She talked to the director of the orphanage and asked if she could still come, even though she had a living mother. The family was extremely poor, with six kids, a poor school, a sick mom and no father. He said that he would take her for the time being, but would have to check with the Japanese monk who was funding the orphanage before making a final decision.
So she got on a train to come to Phnom Penh with her grandmother. Even though it's only a few hundred miles, it was a 13-hour train ride. She remembers being impatient and feeling like it took forever. When she first came to the orphanage, no one talked to her. She was young and very skinny and looked like a farmer with dark skin, and she spoke very slowly with an accent and lots of words that people in Phnom Penh don't use, because that's how people talked in her village. She missed her mom a lot, but she didn't have her own cell phone and her mom didn't have one either, so they couldn't talk often and she cried most nights in bed. The only way she could talk to her mom was on planned phone calls from time to time with her grandmother's phone, who lived near her mom in the village. The first friend she made was a girl who had the same name as her, and so they were nice to each other. That was her only friend for a while. Soon, the funder of the orphanage came, and since she wasn't on the official list yet, the director here had to hide her from the funder. So she had to go live outside with a staff member and not come to school here. After he left, the director asked him if he could take in this girl even though she had a mom, and when he convinced him, she could finally come back and stay for good.
One time when she was talking to the director, he mentioned something about her being the only kid, and she didn't know what he was talking about. "I have five brothers and sisters," she said. Clearly he was missing something important, because that was part of the reasons that she was brought to the orphanage in the first place. So after some more convincing, the director convinced the funder to let all of her brothers and sisters come as well.
This girl, her older sister, and the sister just below her all study really hard. They were number one in their classes often throughout school. But the older sister had been out of school for so long that she was much too old for her classes and it made her feel extremely uncomfortable. She decided to go with our sister organization to learn hospitality skills and got a job at a restaurant and hotel in Siem Reap. This girl is also a little bit old for her classes, but she skipped one year of school, so it's better for her. She was always number one in her classes until then. She used to always study with her older sister, and so everything was easy. But one time she had to leave school for two weeks, which was the same year that she skipped a grade, and since then she's had more trouble with getting the top marks. Her sister just below her is the one who asked me to study math at night, and asked me to teach her English and singing, and who all the boys love. Her three youngest siblings, though, all seem to be very lazy students so far. And one of them is something of a bully, as well.
Her cousin came to visit today. She works as a maid in Phnom Penh and got some time off for the holiday so she came by. She's really proud of the girl here. She works really really hard all the time and will be the first one in her family to go to university starting next year. She was even allowed to start a pre-university program a year early, which is a pretty big deal because they almost never make exceptions for anyone like that.
Recently her dad came back to her mom from Thailand, but didn't tell me quite why he came back. Her mom called her and asked her what she thought she should do, and she said, "I don't know, I think you should decide." So her mom asked her grandmother and she said, "I think he can come back if he goes to the hospital and shows you he doesn't have HIV. If he does, he has to leave." So he went and got tested, and it turned out that he was negative, and so her mother let him back in. Even so, the girl here still does not like to talk to him. She feels angry at him. She wishes that he had been there to tell her what to do for her whole life and not made her mom so angry. She also said that she'd often wished for an older brother so that someone could look out for her and tell her what to do, or that her older sister could look out for her.
[possibly related: she also talked to me today about how she hopes to marry a boy a few years older than her once she is out of college and has a job. i asked her why, and she said because an older man could help her and know what the right thing to do is. i wondered if that was because she didn't have a dad or older brother, but she says no, it is very normal to marry an older man, especially if you have an education. she also told me that she started going to the kitchen every day to learn with our cook so that she could cook better when she's married. she really is a sweetheart]
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Today, one of the girls cried because she missed her homeland so much. Her sister went home, but she couldn't go. She's very small and takes an injection of hormones every day to help her grow and the directors don't want her to miss a day, so she doesn't leave. I let her borrow my phone to call her sister at home, and when she talked to her, she cried.
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I know that most of the other kids find the inactivity of Pyome Ben kind of boring, but I actually kind of like it. It lets me do one of the things that I think I do best but haven't had a chance to do here yet - chilling out. And now that I can speak some Khmae and actually make some jokes in Khmae, it's getting easier to know people and get their stories. I hope that sometime soon I won't have to rely on English at all.
Peace out.
