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.