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.