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.
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