In Khmae, the cardinal directions translate word for word like this:

North - Direction of your feet
South - Direction of gems
East - Direction of birth
West - Direction of submersion

East and west are clearly referring to the sun, but I've had zero luck so far finding anyone who can explain what your feet and gemstones are doing in the cardinal directions.

Peace out.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Excited

"Nich, are you excited to dance tomorrow?"

Blank stare.

"Are you excited to dance for Semester at Sea tomorrow?"

Quizzical look.

"Do you know the word excited?"

Shakes head no.

"Are you happy to dance for Semester at Sea tomorrow?"

No.

"Why not?"

Because my mom can't see it.

Peace out.

Pcchum Ben

Czech it out.

Peace out.

The Chicken

Today one of our older girls came back to the orphanage from her home province with her two sisters. She's maybe 19 or so. I saw that she was carrying a black chicken in her hand, so I called her over to ask about it.

"Where did you get that chicken?"

"I brought him from my province, of course!"

[P.S.: That means that she was holding the chicken in her hands while in a shared taxi with herself, her two sisters, and probably 7 other people, in the car the size of a Toyota Camry, for three to six hours]

"Can I touch him? Will he bite?"

"Mmhm, he's very nice, you can touch him. Don't you know that all chickens don't bite? Unless you try to take their babies."

So I touched him for a little while and he was nice and soft and didn't bite.

"What do you want to do with him?"

"I want to eat him."

Peace out.

Roam, See, Buy

HEY DUDES.

Want to see/listen to my favorite Khmer song? Click here.

Peace out.

Mondulkiri (Part A)

//

I just took the first hot shower that I've had in almost three months. Man. What a luxury. And while it was pretty nice, the water pressure was almost non-existent, so it was still kind of terrible. As in, it took minutes to actually make my hair wet at all.

Speaking of which, my hair is long again, just so you all know.

Dinner turned into a karaoke night. The videos are all extremely melodramatic. I need to learn one Khmae song for situations like this (which occur strangely often).

If you want some more fun stuff to look up before I write about it, there's an ethnic group here in Mondulkiri called Khmer Junjiet that isn't found anywhere else in the world. They look a little different, but hard to describe. Like a mixed chinese+white baby but with darker skin. And, apparently, all very poor farmers.

Peace out.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Aup Sauk

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]

//

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.

//

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.

Wednesday

This Wednesday was a pretty good day, so I think I'll use it to show you what a normal day here has been like me for the past month or so.

The first thing I did in the morning was teach a calculus class to about five or six of the oldest students here - most of them are going into 12th grade, but one of them graduated and just wants to study some more, and one is going to 11th grade and just wants to get an early start. They're usually a little bit late, which is kind of annoying and also kind of weird. The girl, the one going into 11th grade, sometimes yells at me when I come late to teach her piano, screaming, "JEFF! ON-TIME STUDY!!!" which I find both effective and hilarious. She usually doesn't scream that about calculus though, even though she's already been awake for two hours at that point doing Khmae dance, so it's not like it's too early or something like that. Oh well. Anyway, that class was pretty good - we pretty much started limits that day. As it turns out, that's a little bit harder to explain that I had imagined. I think maybe I don't have "the beginner's mindset" down as pat as I hoped it would - but more on that later, I think. It might also just be difficult to explain the idea of "infinitely close but not actually touching" to a non-native speaker of English. Oops. In either case, after the first few examples they seemed to get it pretty well. But then we worked on sin(x) and they didn't know what that looked like, and then I got very worried. But I tried to control my anxiety for the time being.

[Concerning the beginner's mindset: I think that I'm pretty good at explaining how things fit into a bigger system (at least in English?) and I feel like that should be an effective way to learn for most kids. Like, instead of memorizing the sine of every angle from 0 to 360 in the unit circle, just understand that the unit circle is the outcome of a single fact that sine() is the y-component of said argument... like I said, maybe it's best in English. But Mike also said that due to gaps in their math education and also a systematic lack of emphasis on understanding/critical thinking, my method might not fly so well]

After that, I went back to my room for a while to talk to some people back home, and then left at 10:00 to go teach music to the two girls who also come to my calculus class - the 11th grader and the one who already graduated. The one in 11th grade has been working on her favorite song, Arom Pel Bek Knea with me for about an hour a day for a week or two and is getting pretty fluid at it by now. She's played piano for a while but rarely has time to study due to the crazy schedule and location of all of her different schools. The older girl used to play a little bit of music a long time ago but says she's forgotten all of it, and I told her that I could teach her everything she needed to know in a few weeks if she could understand how it's a system, so we were working on that. Basically, trying to get her to understand chords and scales, how they work and how they are used. I've only had two hours to teach her so far, but she's done pretty okay at it. She said she wanted to play the same song as the other girl, and so she tried doing that, but her fingers weren't cooperating with her very much.

Later in the day I went back to the music room and just started playing Love, Selfish Love by Patrick Stump while that older student was watching and she just said, "I want to play that." The chords to that song were much easier - there were only three of them, and only one of them contained a black key - so she was able to pick it up a lot faster, and I think she liked that.

At lunch, I got more pineapple meat stuff, which I don't like too much, so I asked Mike if he thought I could trade it to the other kids and he was like, "Absolutely, are you kidding?" So I went to give it to them, and they all gathered around to ask for it, which made it a little bit difficult, so I just handed it to one of the slightly older students and asked them to please share, and then got some of their food in return, which was string beats and some spiced chicken, which was awesome, and in my opinion, much better than fruit meat.

Then I had some time to myself for a while, so I did some programming challenges from Project Euler, and I think finished a few of them in a short time, which is always a nice confidence booster.

I think the power was out, so I decided I would go to the post office and pick up some stuff that was delivered, specifically two packages from Emily U and her family. I didn't understand why, but they said that the charge total was "14500" and then wrote "14500" again so I'd have to pay "29000" and I thought they were trying to swindle me, but then I got there and realized that they had sent TWO huge packages. And yes, just so you know, you do have to pay to pick up mail in Cambodia. And that's in riel, so 29000 = $7.25. I came back home to open them and they were FULL of markers/crayons/colored pencils and more books than I thought could possibly fit into two boxes of that size. Like, well over a hundred books. So that was awesome. Most of the kids are on vacation to their hometowns/provinces right now, but they're going to be pumped when they get back - especially about the coloring stuff, they go crazy for that.

That also included some peppermint patties for me =)

After that I went to teach computer science, which used to have more kids, but then one moved away and some decided that it was too hard and/or that they'll never use it in real life, which I think is totally fine because honestly most people won't use computer science in their real life. But the two kids that still come to do it with me are interested in seeing if they could do it for a job/study it at university. Anyway, I was trying to get them to write a program that would 'translate' everything into a code, where the code was that each vowel would be turned into the vowel that comes next. So for example, "This is a code" would be turned into "Thos os e cudi." They got pretty close on their own and had most of the right ideas, but were kind of slipping on keeping their variables in track. Beyond that, they also made the mistake of not creating any temporary storage, which is incredibly important in computer science (and life!), and so I showed them a few examples of that real quick, and then it seemed like it made a lot more sense to them. Just as an example, I'll explain what happens and why it's important.

Say that you want to turn a -> e, e -> i, etc. Well, you can't do that all in one step in a computer, so just pretend that you'll change all of the "a" letters first. Let's say the code you want to translate starts out as AEIOU. Then after you're first step, you would get

EEIOU. Now you change all of the E letters to I. now you have

IIIOU. Now you change all the I letters to O.

OOOOU. Then O becomes U.

UUUUU. And finally, U becomes A.

AAAAA. Clearly something went wrong - we started with AEIOU, and instead of getting EIOUA like we wanted, we just turned everything into an A. What went wrong? Basically, we tried to do too much at one time without putting it off into a separate container first. Now imagine what would happen if you did this. Turn all the As into 1. Then the Es into 2. Keep doing that until U is 5. Then, change the 1s into E, 2s into I, 3s into O, etc. Then your progression would look like this:

AEIOU 1EIOU 12IOU 123OU 1234U 12345 E2345 EI345 EIO45 EIOU5 EIOUA

Then, before dinner, I installed some stuff on the older girl's computer that she asked about (Skype, etc.) and then went to play some basketball, which was fun, because it's an excuse to run around and I don't get to do that very often here. I guess I probably could run around more often, but the truth is that I only have so much patience for tag, especially when the kids don't play by the rules, which (to me) kills all the fun. I know I'm being a bit of a Scrooge or whatever, but oh well. The kids don't follow the rules in basketball either and I still like that.

At some point during the day I also went to go buy some water - I think that was right before playing basketball. Have I mentioned the water in Cambodia yet? First of all, I'm beginning to suspect that the sink water is clean. Secondly, it costs $1 for 20L of water. Could you imagine a deal like that in America? Also, that makes me even more incredulous that anyone would ever pay a dollar for a bottle of water. But maybe it's good that the price is so high and maybe then less people buy it in America. Anyway. I needed to change money because I only had a big bill, but the money changer's shop belong to the brother of our disciplinarian and kids hang out there all the time. When I stopped over, two of the girls who always hang out just outside my door were there, and so was Mike. They were trying to watch some music that they could dance to, but couldn't find any. The one girl - the one I wrote about first in my post about some of the kids - kept trying to get me to give her 500R to do Khmae dance for a minute, but I kept saying no, then she would dance and demand money, and she thought that was a lot of fun. It was pretty much the first time that she talked to me since I gave her a 0% on a homework in my math class for cheating, and I was kind of afraid she'd never talk to me again, so it was really nice to know that it wasn't going to be the case. The other girl that was there was the smartest student we have - and also the one that she cheated from - and she was also in a really giggly mood, which is kind of rare for her and was fun to see. Also, this weird guy who lives on our street walked by and touched my hand, which was a little weird, but I didn't mind. Then I went to pick up my water, and he scared the crap out of the first girl, who had walked onto the street to try to make me pay her again.

Later, when I came back to the orphanage, two of the kids who were in my math class asked me to teach them extra, which was awesome. We sat at the table right outside the door to my room and worked on simplifying algebra expression and then some easy equations where we solved for one variable, and they seemed to get it. The girl that was there is the one that I put up the picture of before (with the Ginzvi video) and is really bubbly and talkative. The boy is a bit more stoic but still a bit of a joker. At one point he made a joke to her along the lines of, "When I finish, I get to kiss you!" and that made her pretty mad at him. All the boys like her. She doesn't really like any of them.

When we were done, I went outside to the big whiteboard on the boy's side floor and saw that my oldest girl math student was teaching another one of the boys who used to go to math class with me, and also saw that he had bought a copy of the book for advanced students that I had given to that girl I mentioned above, the smartest girl who was in a rare giggly mood. I bought it for her because she is so smart and academic that I thought she might actually find it fun. The boy that bought it is not so serious of a student, from what I can tell, but I guess that he really wants to pass the 9th grade exam. I should mention - the book is written with Khmea letters but "English" numbers - the way that all math is done in Cambodia - and it's pretty damn hard. As in, it's more like the problems you'd see on a high school math contest than an end-of-year exam for a 9th grader.

I was really happy that the kids asked me to study and also that the boy had gone to get a copy of that book for himself, so I went and got all the kids ice cream. I wanted to get them the good ice cream from the woman on the north side of the road, but she had already closed for the day, so I went to the Chinese guy on the south side of the road, who doesn't sell anything quite as big or good as the woman does (but it's cheaper). I asked a question to the guy at the store when I was there, and a girl about my age who was standing there was caught off-guard and said something to the effect of, "Oh wow, you speak a lot of Khmae!" I told her what I usually tell people - I can speak much better than I can listen and all that - and I'm sure she could tell from my construction of that sentence exactly how not-good at Khmae I am. But anyway, we talked for a minute or so in Khmaeglish, and that was cool. I think she is a student somewhere around here, judging from the fact that she was in a school uniform, but I don't know where, and that also was strange because schools usually don't require a uniform for classes at night.

Finally, when I came back and was done talking to the kids who were doing math, I came back to the area right outside my room and saw that the two girls from the money-changer store earlier were playing a game, so I played with them. It's a not-so-interesting Khmae game where you put out a mat divided into six squares with a different animal in each (or a pot) and then you pick one or two. Then someone rolls three dice and you see if you picked anything that matches. Then, based on picking the animal that comes up or not, you can either hit or be hit up to four times on a turn. You're supposed to play for money. Anyway, there were only a few kids around so I got some peppermint patties to share with them all, and they seemed to really like them.

That was basically all. So yeah, that's what a normal day is kind of like here. Well, a nice normal day.

Peace out.

Entrance Exams

So a lot of people think that just because Cambodia is basically an impoverished third-world country with a pretty low literacy rate, its schools must be useless as well. Well, other than the fact that people cheat often, please allow me to completely disillusion you of that notion. Here's a problem from a college entrance exam that one of my students is taking this morning, which is similar to problems you find on the national high school exam, which you must pass to graduate:

Try to find the value of x without using WolframAlpha or some other CAS. Think you've got what it takes to get in to college in Cambodia?

Peace out.

Vann Nath

If you want to learn some more incredible stuff about Cambodia's modern culture, you should check out this article about Vann Nath.

[Click for full size]

Peace out.

EGBOK

Today I came to lunch a little bit late because I was teaching one kid music upstairs, and then I wanted to stay and play after they left, and ended up staying fifteen minutes past lunch started. By the time I got downstairs to eat, Mike was pretty much almost done, although he did talk a little bit about The Wire, which he started watching recently and has gotten really into. But he ate much much faster than usual because one of our students, a boy in maybe 9th or 10th grade, is leaving our orphanage to go to another branch of the organization. Basically, he decided that he doesn't want to go to high school and college, so instead he's going to a kind of brother-org of ours called EGBOK that teaches kids English and hospitality professions and helps them find jobs in hotels, restaurants, etc. Mike had to take him to the spot he was being picked up, and needed to leave at about 11:30.

I finished eating maybe five minutes after I sat down, and without Mike to talk to, there wasn't much reason to stay. So I gave my extra food and rice to the kids at the tables near me - I still can never eat everything I'm given here - and then went over to the sink to wash my spoon. While I was, I noticed a few kids standing near the kitchen door, and usually I just look and smile and say hello when I see people, so I turned my head to do that, but then saw that one of the girls was crying very obviously, and so was her best friend standing right near her. I had no idea what it was about. I wondered if it was because one of them did very well on a math test last night and the other one night quite as well, but I then I decided that was probably not it, and wondered if I could ask someone what was wrong.

Before going back to my room to put my spoon and water bottle away, I walked over to the boys' side of the orphanage, which is near the gate. I noticed that older boy who's leaving standing on the steps ready to leave with his bags, and he gave me a hug and said goodbye. I asked if he was excited, and he didn't answer. I asked again, he said, "Yes, very excited." I asked if he was sad, and he said, "Yes. But I am a boy." So you can't cry? "No."

He got on the back of Mike's moto, and I could smell the gasoline burning inside the engine. They put the bags on, too. I noticed the girl and her best friend in the background, watching, faces red. They didn't want to be seen anymore once Mike began to drive, and disappeared out of sight.

Peace out.

DAAAAAAAAAAANG!

Look at all this stuff I got!!!

Thanks, Mom and Dad!

Peace out.

Interwhat?

Sometimes things can be a little bit frustrating around here.

The internet is one of those things. Let me give a few examples.

Around the time of my mom's birthday, the internet had been down for a few days. Well, it turned out that it had been down for almost a week on the other side of the orphanage, but had only been useless on my side for about three days at this point. I was really hoping to use the internet so that the birthday gift for my mom wouldn't arrive over a week late, but, alas, I was out of luck.

I asked the tech guy here if could fix the internet. He said he would, he'd reset the routers, it should be fine, don't worry about it. The next day, the internet still didn't work. Mike tried resetting the router in the library himself to see if that did anything, but still nothing. I asked the tech guy the next day if anything was wrong, and he said no, but I heard through the grapevine that he suspected someone was stealing our internet wireless signals and thus might have changed the password. So I asked him if he changed the password, and he said no.

The next day, he told someone that the bill for the internet had not been paid yet, and that's why it wasn't working. But I noticed that the director of the orphanage was using the internet with no problem wired into his computer in the office, which makes absolutely no sense if you think you have a problem with the internet.

Finally fed up, I called the tech guy into the office and said, "Okay, he has internet there. We have internet. Reset this router." I pointed toward the router in the office. He unplugged it, plugged it in, repeated, reset, and then, magically, it worked.

If only he had done that days ago.

Once, later, in the library, we noticed that everyone's internet seemed to have uber-died. I mean, sometimes it dies, and leads you to the website of the router company, or the internet company, or something like that. But this time it was like giving us anti-internet. Anywho, I went to reset the router in the library just to see if that would fix the problem.

While there, I noticed that the ethernet slots on the back of the router were labelled as follows: 1, 2, 3, 4, and WAN. The ethernet cable was plugged into the port labelled "1." And I remembered that the most common error that I would get when using the internet was the router company website/splash page saying, "No ethernet cable connected to WAN port!" So I took the ethernet cable out of "1" and plugged it into "WAN." Everyone's internet worked again, and I haven't seen the "No ethernet cable connected to WAN port!" warning one time since then.

It's kind of funny that the person who did it wrong gets paid and the person who put it right has to pay just to live here. Oh well.

Peace out.

Ginzvi!

Okay, so we to Ginzvi on Sunday, and I knew it would be pretty cool so I made a video about it that night when I got back. It took me literally five days to upload it because the internet kept failing. That's another blog post to come shortly, I think. Anyway, if you want to see the video about Ginzvi, just click below:

[P.S.: This girl is one of my favorites. She's really funny and also super smart - she's skipping two grades this year because she's so out of the league of other kids in her grade. Also, she's totally adorable. THIS IS WHAT HUMAN BEINGS SHOULD LOOK LIKE. PLEASE TAKE NOTE, READERS.]

Peace out.

Rain

If you want to know what a pretty standard rain storm looks like here in Phnom Penh, just click this image to see:

Peace out.

Linguistic Fun Fact 002

The Khmae word for "moon" literally translate to "Mr. Month" or "Sir Month." The word for "sun" is the same as the word for "day."

(The word is kinda like "loke kigh," and "loke" is how you address a male who's much older than you or of much higher social status. "kigh" is just the word for month.)

Peace out.

Counting, It, and Motodops

One little thing that I noticed is different between Cambodia and America is the way that we keep track of things as they're going. By which I mean, in America we use tally marks. In Cambodia, they use a square with a diagonal line through it. I don't know if it's standardized, but from everything I've seen, people start on the bottom left, then go up, right, down, left to complete the square, and then diagonal to the upper right for the fifth item. It's much more efficient from a how-much-does-your-pencil-move standpoint, and also easier to see if you skipped anything since it would not be a square if you did, or have no room for a diagonal, etc.

One thing that's the same is that they play rock paper scissors. When you're playing a game like tag or hide and seek, and someone new joins, they go to the person who is "it" and play rock paper scissors with them to join. Whoever loses that game is "it," and you continue on. When games start, everyone play rock paper scissors together, and you just keep going until it turns out that everyone has picked one of two options - so maybe it happens that everyone picked either rock or scissors. Then, everyone who picked scissors has to keep playing the same way until they have a final loser. If there's too many people they split it into groups.

//

One thing that kind of annoys me now that I've been here for a while is the moto drivers outside of the orphanage. Before it was okay, but now that they know I speak a little Khmae and that I'll be here for a while, it's gotten annoying. Most specifically, they always ask me if I like to stare at and flirt with the pretty women who walk by, and then try to make me do that with them. And I don't really know enough Khmae to say, "Well, sure I enjoy seeing a pretty girl, or really just pretty things in general, but it's pretty impolite to stare and I know the girls in the orphanage who you do this to, and they really hate you and want to kill you, and I think you should stop." If I just say "No" they'd probably think I was gay or something, which is a huge problem in Cambodia. So I just say like "Okay, yeah, sometimes," and then stand with them for about thirty seconds, and then walk away. The worst part about it is they talk to the girls and make kissing noises at them, and sometimes walk after them a little bit. The other worst part is that sometimes the boys in the orphanage do it too.

Peace out.

Some of the Kids

Okay, I figured now that I can remember their names and keep them straight, I should tell you a little bit about the kids and their backgrounds and what they're like and where they come from. I'm not going to say their names or give their pictures to protect their identities - this feels a little too public for that - though to be honest there are other easy ways to get that stuff if you want. But I won't do it here. Anyway.

One of my favorites is a fifteen year old girl who, for a long time, both I and the other volunteer swore must be at least seventeen (she just looks older than fifteen is all). What I like about her is how different she is in different situations, which I usually don't like, but for some reason I do for her. She's one of the few girls here who is pretty by Khmae standards and also is aware of it. The other girl who's like that is more of a "good girl" type, but this one goes for the "bad girl" attitude because of it sometimes. Whenever she's around Khmae people from the age of maybe 15-23, she has more swagger than you could ever imagine coming from a fifteen year old girl. Even just riding a bike around the courtyard, you can tell she has attitude. But at the same time, she's one of the sweetest kids here when she's playing with the younger kids, and she's also extremely polite to all the adults and also really nice to me and the other volunteers. Hell, one time she broke in my room so that she could take my laundry basket and clean my clothes for me. To be fair, it's her job to do people's laundry. But if she thinks that you're taking to long to give her your clothes, she'll just go ahead and take them whether you ask or not. Could you imagine? When it rains really hard, she splashes around in the rain with the little kids and blows bubbles in the puddles with bendy straws. She helped me pick up a girl and carry her to a faucet and then turned it on to "get back at her" for throwing bottles full of water on me. She cleans up other people's dishes when they're done eating. She was dating another boy here, and they were very "coupley," which is saying a lot because public affection is pretty rare here. He got kicked out because he hit another girl here. That was about two weeks ago. Yesterday he found out that he didn't pass his graduation exam and now has to repeat a year of school, but can't live here anymore. Last night I was going back to my room, and the girl was sleeping on the table in the foyer right outside my room and she said my name, so I hopped up on the table next to her. I saw that she had tears coming from the corners of her eyes. I winced a little bit. "I cry every day," she said. Since your boyfriend left? "Yeah." Did you cry before he left too? "Yeah." Why did you cry before? "...I can't say, I don't know... I don't want to talk about it now... You can go now if you want..." I wish I had known what to say. I just told her I was sorry and that I could stay if she wanted and I don't mind people crying. The day before I also found out that her birth mother, whom I had been told was alive, was actually not.

Probably my favorite boy is one of the older ones, though I forget exactly how old he is, maybe 11th grade or something like that. He used to have long hair that was really stylist, but then he got it cut, and now he has kind of a clean-cut handsome look; he's lucky it works both ways for him. He's also lucky in that he has a brother who lives here, too, who is four years younger. Anyway, he studies math with me every day now for an hour. We started off with logs and log rules and their proofs, and I'm pretty sure I totally blew his mind, which was pretty awesome. He has really good English so he's easy to talk to, and he likes to ask about differences between Cambodia and America in dating and money and family and social life and things like that. He also has a funny habit of, whenever he hears something surprising or cool or interesting, howling a little bit like a wolf, although he clearly is not thinking at all about wolves or anything like that. It's just the sound that he makes. "oowweeuuuuu!" and very high pitched. Sometimes he talks about moving to America, and asks if I could help him get set up there, to which I say I'd like to but the visa situation makes it extremely difficult, and besides, America's not so hot, why not try a country that doesn't suck like maybe Norway or Finland, or maybe Denmark if you want your English to count for a little more? We'll see.

One of the oldest girls who just passed her graduation exam is really lively and likes to joke a lot, and can even do it in English. She's just about the only one who can understand when me and the other volunteer make jokes in English. Of course most of her jokes to me are about me having a crazy face, ugly face, or monkey face, and then I usually return the favor, at which point her face lights up and she undertakes an enormous fake laugh while pointing both hands at her sides repeatedly to emphasize exactly how funny I am. I do the same to her when she makes terrible jokes.

I'm sad that I haven't made any jokes in Khmae yet.

I should also say that facial hair, even stubble, is seen as extremely unattractive here and people will tell you that you have the face of a monkey and that you need to shave.

Mmmm... This feels weird unless you can actually see them. Maybe I will work on getting some pictures before I do the rest...

Peace out.

Cheers

Today I was woken up by the coordinator knocking on my door. "Dude, you ready to go?" I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. "We're going to SM's house!" SM is basically the head cook here and she's married to the 'doctor' that we have. I had talked to one of the kids, the older girl who's a really excellent student, about going there with her on this day, but I thought it was clear that I was joking. I forgot that foreigners don't understand sarcasm and jest in English very well at all, so my joke got turned into a real request.

Well anyway, it was about forty minutes away, and the three volunteers all went on the coordinator's 125CC Step moto, which is not very strong at all. We thought we got lost multiple times, but we were always going the right way and made it to our destination the first place we ended up actually looking. It was on the other side of the river, and this is the first time that I've gone there. It was different.

One thing that's interesting here is how poor something can look on the outside and how rich it can look on the inside. The street is what you would expect of some third-world country's street: the building are run down, things are dirty, there's trash on the side, there's pot-holes all over the places, there are motos and tuktuks but few cars, there are stray animals running around.

But then we actually got to SM's house. The floor was clean brown and red tile, it had two stories, two bathrooms, bedrooms, a kitchen, a TV, and more food than you could imagine. First we all went upstairs and just had a seat while talking to SM, who insisted that we have some Cheers Cola, bottled just an hour away in a nearby city. It was actually quite good, like Coke except for less bite, less sweet, and less carbonation, so basically a toned down version that doesn't kick your ass every time you put it in your mouth. I don't drink soda, but it wasn't a bad thing to have to drink.

I guess what I thought was most interesting about the place was the difference between what I expected based on the outside, and what was actually happening inside. SM's whole family was there, including her husband, a number of her kids, and their kids as well. They both work at the same orphanage, so they're really close with all of the kids, and a bunch of them had made it there as well. The oldest one that I mentioned earlier had even slept over after helping her prepare the day before. The kids played with each other, the little grandkids ran around like monkeys, the grandparents held them in their lap and looked at their enormous doe eyes and the kids from my place helped them fight each like tae kwon do masters. Fans kept everyone cool as they watched some Khmae TV, and we were surprised to see that one of the girls from the orphanage, CSL, had made it onto the stage at a local concert and was now a part of the show. She was wearing her signature purple, black, and flannel shirt, and had to do some little skit with a random boy they had also called on stage. Everyone watched with rapt attention to see if our friend would win the "best actress" award. She didn't. A stray cat that they kind of take care of wandered it; it's old and very very peaceful, and sometimes it would rest its head on an old man's knee, or between two old mens' knees, or right near the door in the sun, or on my lap. Eventually they rolled out the floor mats to put food on, and two circles of eight formed - the adults and the kids - and the entire space contained in both circles was so full that there was hardly room for anything. When it was done, we relaxed, I pet the cat, the old men watched TV and the young girls did the dishes. No one fought.

There's a difference between rich and wealthy, but if SM and her husband don't have a rich life, then I don't know who possibly could. That's different from wealth, of course. They don't have enough money to travel, to have copious creature comforts. If they got sick or injured then they'd really be in trouble. But I can recall few experiences like that ever happening in my life in America, and I think that says something.

Back at the orphanage, the disciplinarian was busy planning the party that the volunteer girl wanted to fund. When we got back, she and him went to buy some chicken, bread, and juice for the kids. By the mid-afternoon, there were huge speaker stacks set up in the courtyard, and their tables had been moved from underneath the roofed section to the middle of the soccer court. Then it started to rain. Hard. Harder then it's ever rained here before in my time. The entire boy's side of the orphanage was flooded, and given that it's still raining now, will probably be flooded for days. But it didn't matter. They turned on music and sat and chilled for a while since it wasn't dinner/dancing time yet, some kids played volleyball in the rain, some got a moto from the boy's side and drove it around like crazy people in the courtyard. Finally the food was served, about a half a chicken for each person, and I'll assume that they did like we did and just dug in with their hands. Plus bread, with sweetened milk (which is DELICIOUS), juice, and cookies.

Then it was dance time, so they moved all the stacks over to the boys' side again and pumped it up LOUD. Khmae dance, Khmae pop and American pop were all in the mix. Khmae dance always has to have an object in the center, so they took a table and put a huge plant on it, and used that to dance around. When Khmae dance songs came on, they would do traditional Khmae dance, spiraling around the table. When pop came on, they'd dance like high schoolers in America dance, or middle schoolers, depending on age. The most fun to watch is definitely the girl who jokingly calls herself my Khmae wife, who has so much testosterone that rather than just not care what people think, she challenges you to care so that she can beat you up when you do. She's actually a pretty good dancer, and discovered that a slippery floor + slidey flipflops can lead to some pretty cool new moves. The other most fun one to watch is the cheeky girl who never cares what anyone thinks and gave me the finger for no reason one day and then laughed her head off, like she always does. She's a bit more benign than Khmae wife girl, but just as fun to watch not-care.

I discovered that I hate dancing Khmae as much as I hate dancing American, and so instead I went to the side and gave the kids a light-switch rave when the next dubstep song came on. They really dug that, and I was proud to have discovered it. After a little while, some kids went down off the boys' patio and just danced in the flooded front section of the orphanage together, traditional or pop, didn't make a difference.

The kids put a plastic bag over the disciplinarians's hair, and he danced with them all.

Peace out.

We Are Not Have-Nots

Khmae has at least two distinct words to describe financial poverty of a person. Interestingly, their word for a rich is the same as their word for "to have." A rich person is "a person who has." Usually dichotomies like this in the language are resolved like "a person who has" and "a person who doesn't have" for rich and poor, but for some reason, they created new words for poor....

Peace out.

Khmae Barbeque

A week or so ago, one of the staff members here asked me if I ate dinner yet. I told him yes, but he said I should go with him to eat again. I said No no, I'm okay, but he insisted that I go. I think he said something about barbeque, and that meant at least meat and/or lots of Khmae people hanging around each other, so I figured I'd go with him. Two other boys from the orphanage came with us.

It turns out that Khmae barbeque is basically Korean style barbeque with American foods. You get a gas grill right on your table that you can control, and they give you plates of vegetables and meat and some spices, and you just throw whatever meat and veggies you want on there for a couple minutes and cook them, then eat them. Like a hot-pot thing, but not a pot, just a grill. It was pretty tasty, and also extremely cheap - less than about $2 per person, and that was with a big jug of beer for all the people except for me.

Well when my two friends from China came to visit, they asked me if there was anywhere I knew that I thought they would like, and I told them about Khmae barbeque like I just wrote here, and they said that sounded good. I told the staff guy that my friends wanted to go, and he could come with us, but we just wanted the name and the location of the barbeque place he had taken us to before so we could go there. He said okay, I'll take you to an even better place. I said, No, no, we absolutely don't want a different place, we want to go exactly where we went before. I was pretty sure he understood.

So anyway, the night finally comes around when I'm supposed to go with my two friends, and the other female volunteer here comes along as well. I think that made the staff guy a little confused, but he went along with it. We finally got there, waaaaay later than we had planned, and my two friends are waiting. I can see that this is certainly NOT the place that we had gone before. They approach me and say, "Um... this place looks really scary. I don't think we want to eat here." I look over. It is definitely a brothel. I mean, it's a restaurant as well and they serve food and alcohol for sure, but you can tell just from the way the girls were dressed that it was also a red-light establishment. To be honest, the girls weren't dressed any more suggestively than American girls would be in a college town on a Friday night, but even that is a very clear red flag. Khmae girls don't dress like that unless they work in a certain business, and we didn't really want to be around it.

Aside from that, I'm pretty upset at our staff guy. "Dude, I said I wanted to go exactly where we went before." And he says, "Yeah... this is beer garden." "What?" "This is beer garden." I think I finally understand. "I didn't want beer garden, I wanted a barbeque. The one where you took me before. With the two other boys. Like I said." To be clear: I was extremely straightforward when I told him what I wanted before that night. I think that he just didn't want to understand. And I can only imagine his surprise when not only did the female volunteer tag along, but then he found out that my two Chinese friends were also girls.

Anyway, he flagged down a tuk-tuk for us and told us that he had told the driver to go to a Khmae barbeque place, so we piled in and just talked as he drove us around the city. It was taking a long time, and my newest Chinese friend started to joke about, "He is going to sell us!" I made a joke about her being worth the most, then my other Chinese friend got upset with me. Haha. Eventually the first one continued, "...at first I was just joking but now I think I am serious!" But it was okay, of course, it was just that the staff guy once again didn't know what he was doing and/or neither did the driver, and eventually he just pulled to the side of the road and said, "Okay!" We were in the middle of a street with no restaurant nearby, and certainly not the kind we wanted. So I made this face:

and told him this was not acceptable and we wanted to go to a Khmae barbeque restaurant. We couldn't communicate and he asked me to call my staff friend, but I didn't have his number. So he called a dispatcher who spoke good English, and we finally worked things out, and about ten minutes later we finally made it to a good, legit BBQ establishment. It had been about 90 minutes since we left the orphanage.

The food was really good, and between the four of us, with all that we ate and four bottles of water, the total bill was exactly $7.

Peace out.

How it Happens

One of the most common causes of abandonment/orphaning in Cambodia is HIV/AIDS. The other volunteer here has told me that it's the case for a lot of the kids that we have, and one of them even talked to me about it once. But basically, rural villages are extremely impoverished and having even just a little bit more money can make a huge difference in someone's life there. So often, the mother and children will stay behind while the father goes to the city to become a moto driver or security guard or something along those lines. While there, many would either get a mistress or a prostitute or something like that, and (though rates are much better now than before) a significant percentage of them would be infected with HIV. Then when they visit home, HIV would go from the father to the mother. Life expectancy with HIV is just a few years here.

What I thought was most interesting about the girl who talked to me about this, though, is how acutely aware she was that HIV is a disease only to the poor. She said, "Yeah, so they had HIV, both, but we didn't have any money so we couldn't pay for medicine, so they both died... if we had more money maybe they would still be alive." (If you don't believe me that it's a disease of the poor, I encourage you to check this link out real quick)

Peace out.

Tonle Sap

If there was only one thing you could learn about in Cambodia to educate yourself as much as possible, the Tonle Sap would probably be that one thing. It's not really a river or a lake, it's kind of both, and is unique in that its water direction flow changes twice each year and that its flood plain is so enormous relative to its dry season size.

Rather than write it all again myself, I'll quote from Wikipedia:

"For most of the year the lake is fairly small, around one meter deep and with an area of 2,700 square km. During the monsoon season, however, the Tonlé Sap river, which connects the lake with the Mekong river, reverses its flow. Water is pushed up from the Mekong into the lake, increasing its area to 16,000 square km and its depth to up to nine meters, flooding nearby fields and forests. The floodplain provides a great breeding ground for fish.

"The pulsing system with its large floodplain, rich biodiversity, and high annual sediment and nutrient fluxes from Mekong makes the Tonlé Sap one of the most productive inland fisheries in the world, supporting over three million people and providing over 75% of Cambodia's annual inland fish catch and 60% of Cambodians' protein intake. At the end of the rainy season, the flow reverses and the fish are carried downriver."

[Click to see full image]

Of course the dark blue is what it looks like in dry season, and light blue is what it looks like at the peak of wet season. It's August now so it's filling up at the moment, and will be at its largest size sometime in October. You can see Phnom Penh down in the south escaping the floodplain, which is because of the city's elevation. "Phnom" actually means "hill" and "Penh" means something like "satisfied/pleased," so Phnom Penh translates to something like "Pleasant Hill."

Anyway, the Tonle Sap is basically the keystone of Khmer culture and society. If it weren't for the Tonle Sap, this whole place would be basically lifeless and barren since there wouldn't be enough water, resources, or nutrition of any type to support any sizeable population. I mean, people could live here for sure, but it'd look a lot more like Western China, for example. The biggest holiday on the calendar, Water Festival, is a week-long celebration of the river's changing water direction, ensuring a healthy amount of fish and rice for the whole country. It used to be much more extravagant, but still (for example) traditional rowing teams from every province come to have a race in the river with crazily decorated boats. Angkor Wat, the famous temple complex, was built just north of Siem Reap, which is conveniently situated just on the border of the Tonle Sap's floodplain.

Another thing that you can learn from it is how things go wrong. In particular, oil exploration is now starting, and if things don't go splendidly, the entire country could be totally screwed. I mean, imagine a totally impoverished country that has always survived (nutritionally) because of the bounty of the Tonle Sap, which provides most of their rice and 60% of their meat, and then imagine a Deepwater Horizon oil spill right in the middle of that. Nowhere to grow food, and no money to buy it, and it'd be decades or centuries before it was usable again.

Another threat, which is totally out of Cambodia's control, is whether or not Laos will decide to put something like 10-15 dams on the Mekong River, which could affect water, nutrient, and animal flow in almost completely unpredictable ways - except for that it would be negative. In either case, as you can see, the history, culture, and viability of Cambodia is completely entwined with the Tonle Sap, and it has to be protected for the country to survive.

Peace out.

Linguistic Fun Fact 001

Khmae has a word that nounifies any verb! Of course it's most common with certain words, but you can technically use it on any of them. The word is "gaa" (same vowel sound as "cat") and if you say "gaa study," with study as a verb, it becomes "studies" as a noun. If you say "gaa travel," with travel as a verb, it becomes "travels" like the noun. Of course, you'd use the Khmae words for study and travel.

English, take note.

Peace out.

Udong Mountain

One of the things the volunteer coordinator told me I have to do before I leave is go to Udong Mountain, which is about an hour away by van or tuk-tuk, and has a bunch of temples built into the top and sides of a mountain. Today, the other volunteer and I took a couple kids and got a van to go for the early afternoon.

I guess rather than describe everything I saw, I'll just put up a few pictures and let you see for yourself:

[Click each for full-size]

Of course, my most lasting memory of the place will have nothing to do with the place itself but instead something that could probably happen just about anywhere. As soon as we got out of the van, a swarm of Cambodian kids came up to the door, as if they had been assigned to us. Some of them spoke English to me and the other volunteer, and one of them was actually quite good, but we didn't really want them because the game is always the same: they follow you around asking for money or offering to give you something small until you pay them... and then they continue to do it until you leave the place. Standard fare for this is jasmine wreaths, sweet-smelling flowers, water, incense, things like that.

At first I thought they would go away once we started up the mountain, but they followed us all the way. One of the older boys, the one who works with me on TOEFL in the library, told me "Don't say you're tired, don't look tired. Even if you are you have to look and say like I'm happy!" Not like it was a huge deal, but I didn't want to be bothered with the whole thing. I should mention that if you did look tired, they would wave a hand fan at you for a while and then ask for money. One of the older girls, the only one who came with us, did end up getting tired after the first big set of stairs and sat down, sweating, and a girl jumped at the opportunity.

This continued on the whole way, and it got kind of tiresome. I just wanted to enjoy the place with my friends, not be bugged by any person while I was there, beggar or rich man, and they never went away, the whole time. Up and down the mountain, the kids were with us the entire time. When we sat down to eat, they still hung around us. Actually, even more came up. Some of them didn't even offer anything, just straight up asked for money. One guy about our age came and sang for us, I think somewhat at our request, and we did actually pay him because he was pretty good. The older girl shouted "soam layk to-r'saab!" at him, which is basically "Give me your phone number please!" (For the curious, the words literally translate to "please number telephone" - see? Isn't Khmea so easy!?) She saw him again and said it again as we left. She was mostly joking though.

But the whole thing is that I don't know how to feel about that situation, whether I should feel bad for the kids/give them money or not. I mean, it's complicated. In general I think it's the whole global system that takes the majority stake in casting this whole country into poverty, and even after that, there are a bunch of systemic factors that prevent those kids from having a high quality of life regardless of my actions. Hell, the most obvious, they were begging instead of going to school - what will they do when they're too old to evoke sympathy? There was a donation box at the end of the trail, but I thought, Do I really think this will go to the kids? And so I considered giving to some of the kids, but I thought, Will this really help them in any way, and if people keep doing this, doesn't it perpetuate the problem of them not working on something else?

I guess that's why I'm here in the first place.

Peace out.

IMPORTANT UPDATE

TODAY I DISCOVERED DELICIOUS PANCAKES IN PHNOM PENH. CONSEQUENTLY, I SHALL EAT MANY PANCAKES.

THAT IS ALL.

Peace out.

Sah-aaht

"Sah-aaht" is the Khmer word for beautiful, handsome, pretty, attractive, etc. I mean, of course they have other words for more specific cases, but "sah-aaht" is kind of the crazy-catch-all. One dictionary that I read said it best equates to "lovely."

The most important thing for being beautiful is light skin. Not caucasian, not as white as me for example, but maybe the color of this girl I found on a Google Image Search would be considered very beautiful. And really, once you have skin that color, nothing else really matters, you're pretty by default. You don't need to have a good face; light skin trumps everything else. So there are a lot of times in Cambodia where you'll see a girl put up on a poster or billboard as beautiful and we as westerners might think she's not so attractive at all, but to Cambodians, as long as they have white skin, that's about all they need to be beautiful.

Which is kind of cool, because to be beautiful all you need to do is kick up the brightness in Photoshop.

And it also comes from a somewhat legitimate place. Of course a long time ago everyone worked on farms in Cambodia, and if you had superdark skin that meant you were exposed to the sun a lot, and of course that could lead to skin cancer, and my guess is that people noticed over time that the people who spent the most time in the sun and thus had the darkest skin were most likely to die young because of some weird growth on their skin. But now dark skin is less about cancer and survival and more a marker of poverty or wealth. If you're rich, you either (a) don't work in the fields, so you keep your light skin, or (b) you can pay for whiteners and make your skin white.

The really sad downside, though, is that for not-rich people who are just naturally dark, they're ugly and there's nothing they can do about it. I mean, some days maybe they can powder their face, but in general they're ridiculed. There's one girl here who looks like a Disney princess, she's going to be absolutely beautiful when she grows up, but she has fairly dark skin (think Usher) and so here she's considered ugly. Kids make fun of her by calling her goan a'freek, or "child of Africa," and when westerners try to tell her that she's pretty she shakes her hands in the air and screams "NO!" and runs away. Face doesn't matter - she has dark skin, and that's all, not beautiful.

There is actually a Khmea word for a beautiful person who has dark skin, but I forget what it is, and I think it's what you would call a "book word."

Another thing that makes you beautiful is long fingernails. And the longer, the better. I mean, an inch long is really stylin' here. That also comes from "Look at me, I don't have to work on a farm!"

Also, having wavy/curly thick hair is seen as unattractive here. I'm not sure if that's just a fad, or if that's kinda timeless like the light skin, but it's unfortunate for the guys/girls that have beautiful naturally curly hair and feel ashamed about it and spend time straightening it some days and just feel embarrassed about it on the other days.

These rules don't really apply to white people though. White people are basically put into categories based on weight and age, and other than that there's kind of a they-all-look-the-same feel to their perceptions of us. So for example, they think it's pretty that I have a high and narrow nose (relatively speaking, of course), white skin and blonde hair, but I'm still not as attractive as a feminine Khmae guy with really good Korean fashion sense, which is all the rage here. White people are kind of in a parallel category that doesn't quite compete with Khmae people, except for the perception that we all have a million dollars, which makes you as beautiful here as it does in America.

(Strangely enough, dressing effeminately is attractive, but being gay is unacceptable)

Peace out.

New Chickens

When there was an H1N1 breakout in southeast Asia, the method of prevention for farmers was not as technologically adept as that of American farmers, for example. Rather than vaccinating the animals or putting antivirals into the food, they would keep animals separate from each for about ten days, and if any in the group died unnaturally, the whole group had to be killed. If they all survived, they could enter the general population. This is a well known practice and had been in use for lots of other diseases throughout time in Cambodia as well.

When there was an outbreak of another flu in Cambodia, the director of the orphanage here bought face masks for everyone (so popular in Japan) and insisted that everyone wore them. Of course, they were hot, uncomfortable, kind of funny-looking to westerners, and they aren't so good for your skin, and so the three American female volunteers refused to wear them.

After a while, some kids came up to Mike and said, "Mike, the new chickens won't wear their face masks." And Mike had no idea what they were talking about, so they said again, "The new chickens. They won't wear their face masks." And Mike still was totally clueless. And then they turned to each other and started speaking Khmae, checking the words with each other. The concluded that the Khmae phrase "moo'in t'may" definitely did translate to "new chicken," but Mike knew those words so he stopped them in the middle. "No, no, I understand the word 'new' and the word 'chicken,' but I have no idea what you're trying to tell me about the new chickens, or why we have chickens at all."

They actually didn't piece it together for a while.

Peace out.

Cheating Books

One thing that I've somewhat unfortunately learned of and also noticed myself is that cheating in academics is built into Cambodian culture, at least in the places that I've seen so far. Students tell me that it's the norm in the country.

Basically what it all comes down to is that if you pay your teacher, you're going to get a higher grade, and the more you pay the better off you are. Even the director here has to give the kids money for their teachers sometimes because the grading is unfair without it. Not that it's just to help kids get an edge, but they will actually grade you more harshly if you don't have money. I asked the other American here what the kids do about that, since they don't really have any good access to money at all, and he just said, "Well, some of them study their asses off, and sometimes they can pay."

The other thing about paying teachers is not just that they'll give you more favorable grades, but they'll also look the other way when they catch you cheating. And I should be clear, just about everyone pays for that. One of the students came back to the orphanage today with a few books, about a dollar each, that were maybe the size of 50 index cards stacked on top of each other full of cheat sheets for whatever subject you want - writing, morality, history, math, etc. I asked her how you could possibly get away with using something like that without the teacher seeing, and what it boiled down to is, "If you pay them, they won't look at you. And you have to pay, because if you don't someone else will, and then you can't beat them." Other people around confirmed that this was essentially the case. They asked if we had anything like it in the United States, and I said that sure people tried to cheat, but we don't have a pocket-book industry built around it, so I don't think it's really comparable. Apparently the "rich people can go to any university they want if they just donate enough" trick still works in Cambodia though.

Peace out.

What Khmae Sounds Like

If you want to know what Khmae sounds like, click on this link and scroll down until you see "Listen to the Latest News" on the right side, then click any recent date they have there, Morning News or Evening News doesn't matter.

Peace out.

Already!

One thing you'll notice about any English-speaking Cambodian people you ever happen to run into is that they will use the word "already" with surprising frequency. That happens because in Khmae, rather than conjugating a verb, you use words in other places in the sentence to denote the tense. So, for past tense sentences, you use a word that kind of sounds like "howie." If you want to say, "I ate," the words you would use sound kinda like "knyom nyam howie," or "I eat already." If you want to say "I went," the words sound like "knyom toe howie," or "I go already." There's no way to say "went" or "ate" or any other past tense word, which is super cool.

So of course, when little Khmae kids are learning English, of course one of the first words they're interesting in translating is "howie" since it's so important in their own language, and they're told that the best translation is "already." Which is more or less accurate. However, they never really get over the habit of using that structure, even when they have all the other structures right. I'll actually hear little kids say, "I ate already," even though "ate" is already past tense, and older kids will say like, "I took the computer from the library, but Mike yelled at me so I put it back already." The other day when I gave the kids in my class a quiz, as each one finished their test they would put their pencil down then look at me and shout, "ALREADY!!!" Even Mike will use the word "already" with alarming frequency when he's talking just to me. I made fun of him for it the other day, and he told me yesterday that he caught himself about to use it needlessly and decided not to say it. But then he told me about it so I made fun of him anyway.

Peace out.

A Little on the Khmer Writing System

(click to see full size)

Okay, so if you're actually interested at all in my life then you've seen some Khmer writing by now. Just so we have something to work with, I put some up at the top.

It's read left-to-right like English, but it doesn't have spaces between the words; only between sentences. It's more or less phonetic, but in a way (like English) ends up feeling not-so-phonetic to its native readers. By that I mean, sure you could sit there and sound out "eh nuh guh luh ih sh.... ENGLISH" if you wanted to, but by now you just recognize the group as the word, "English."

Groups in Khmae are more like syllables than words; that's how people can instantly recognize something as they're going along. Most of the time, the syllable is built off of one of the 33 consonants, which is like a building block of the group. 33 might seem like a lot but it's strangely little; they duplicate sounds a lot and they actually don't have the sounds to match our "F" "V" "W" or "X," and their "J" is more like a "CH" than a "J." But they also have some sounds that we don't have, such as the initial "ng" sound, also common in Vietnamese.

Well anyhow. So each consonant character actually has a consonant sound and then either an "aw" sound or an "oe" sound (like in "joe"). So there's one character that I'll call "c" that you call "caw" and another that I'll call "C" that is pronounced "coe." When you see those characters standing alone, you would say respectively "caw" or "coe."

However, you usually add vowels. The vowels go in different places, so it might be like the following. If we wanted to say "cee," we would first write "c" and then above it write two "e"s. If we wanted to write "ca" we would write "c" and then to the northwest put an "a." That's how the placement of vowels works, but they are always read AFTER their base consonant, even if they're placed to the left of the consonant. Furthermore, depending on whether you use the "caw" or "coe" version of the consonant, the vowel marking will change its sound. So, "c" with "ee" on top of it might be "cee," but "C" with "ee" on top of it might be pronounced "ceh."

Making sense?

Look at that last character in the first line of regular text. That character that resembles an upside down U is "(bp)oe," somewhere between our B and P sound. That little guy floating above it is a dependent vowel, and here it makes the "EE" sound like it "meet," so you would see that group and read "(bp)ee."

There are lots of subtleties, some that I don't understand yet, but that's in general how most of Khmae is written. There are some independent vowels that don't need to have any consonant sound near them, and there are also "sub-consonants" that help make consonant clusters at word starts, such as the "kaw" symbol with a sub-consonant "m" sound, which would start the word "kmae" (Khmer). Also, a plain old -aw/-oe consonant at the end of the word only makes its consonant sound. So yeah, there's still much more that I'm working through, but I thought ya'll might like to know for now.

Also, it's just so damn pretty.

Peace out.

World's Worst Shower, aka The Magic of Cambodia

So my shower is on a bad fuse. Like, a really, really bad fuse. I turn off all the electricity on the fuse except for the water heater (otherwise it's pretty damn cold somehow) and the light in my bathroom. Even so, typically I get a good thirty seconds of warm water before the fuse blows for the first time. Often this happens at night, so I have to climb over the dozen mosquito nets in the house foyer to get to the fuse box, while naked/wearing only a towel, flip the switch, then crawl over them all and come back and try to finish before the fuse blows again.

Well anyway, last night was a night just like that. I was determined to finish before the fuse blew again, and I was actually did, hooray! But the very last step, of course, was to reach up and turn the water heater off before the fuse could blow again, so I had to do it quickly as possible, or else it's three more minutes of naked towel crawling to the fuse box. So I'm in my little shower-cube thing that only goes knee high, I turn around, reach up to put the shower head in it's place and feel my knee hit something.

Then, I see water spewing out of a knocked-off faucet top at a rate I had never seen before in real life. AWESOME. That was the water that had been going to the shower head, and it was still on, because I didn't reach the machine to tell it to turn off yet. Hell yes. And I mean, this water is REALLY coming out, like it would hurt my hand to stick it into the stream, and it showed no sign of letting up at all. Fortunately there's a drain just in the middle of my bathroom (that's how the shower drains) so it wasn't flooding so bad at all, really.

Well anyway, so I grab the faucet which has fallen to the ground, and try to put it back in. It looks like it's fitting, it's getting closer and closer, and the pressure reduces the amount of water coming out, but it just won't go. I'm working up a sweat even though there's cold water spewing all over my room. I can feel my heart beat, that's how much pressure I'm putting onto this thing. And then, just when I think I'm about to get it, the piece of pipe that the faucet adapter is connected to snaps off. So now water is just bubbling up vertically out of a pipe, again at a pretty good clip. And I'm just like: Crap, I'm naked, I don't speak the language, there's water spewing everywhere, and I have no idea what to do for something like this even in America. So I do the only thing I can do: Plug the dyke. So I stuck my finger in the pipe, and it actually did work. For a second. It's not that the pressure built up, it's just that it was a huge amount of pressure and I couldn't sustain pushing down that hard for too long.

I decide: It is time for a new strategy.

I get a towel on and open my door since tons of girls sleep there (thanks to the fans) and just start saying, "Hello? ...Hello? ...HELLO? ...HEEEEEELLLLLLLLOOOOOOOO?" They can sleep through ANYTHING and on ANYTHING and in ANY position. It's amazing. They're champs. Finally the older woman who sleeps upstairs woke up and came to her balcony. I tell her, Please come here, I give her the international palm-down sign for "Please come here," I say "Help" multiple times and say water in English and Khmae. She kind of just waves me off. I don't know what else to do, so I go back in side and revert to Plan A, covering the hole.

Eventually I give up again on Plan A. My new Plan C is to single out a single kid and get them to help me. I know that P.N. is supersmart, so I go outside to the foyer and call her name. I think I woke her up and she said, "What?", but right at that moment a middle-aged staff woman came in. I show her the problem. She looks at it and then walks off. I don't know what else to do, and just stay there covering it, thinking maybe I'll stay there until someone who speaks English comes in the morning or something.

Fortunately, the woman had actually gone off to turn the water off at the whole orphanage basically, which happens from time to time when people break pipes. I found that out later. But anway, she came back to my room and motioned me to take my hand off the pipe, and for the first time nothing came out even when I wasn't forcing my hand down on it. Success! Then she left. I felt bad. Like really, really bad. But went to sleep because I didn't know what else to do.

The next morning I got a knock on the door at about 6AM, I think from L.S.M., but I'm not totally sure. And I know that two kids came in later to look at it and figure out what was broken and wrong, and then they left. Then they came back and said it'd be $10 to fix, so I gave them a $20, and they came bag with a bag of pipes and parts about 15 minutes later and gave me two $5 bills. Then one of them took a little blade/saw/cutter and just started going at it. Thirty minutes later the pipes were all fixed and working again.

I think only in Cambodia can you get your shower fixed at 6AM, six hours after you broke it, for $10.

Peace out.

Cambodia

//

So this blog used to be for Semester at Sea, but from here on it'll be for sharing stories from my time in Cambodia. I can't embed videos right now because I'm on my phone, but if you wanna see where I'll be, check here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgSounRXQFg

I'll be in China until July 7, and then in Cambodia until December 15th. Hopefully I'll have good things to share.

Peace out.
Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry