An overdue write-up of our recent goings on...

It has been a long time since my last post, and it's mostly because I feel like there is so much that has happened it's hard to fit it all in one post - overwhelming. But I will do my best to post a few blips from the last month and a half...

Phnom Penh
After Siem Reap, Jill and I headed down to Phnom Penh, the nation's capital and biggest city. When we arrived, we quickly realized that the streets are not on a grid and their numbers do not make any ordered sense, and most tuk-tuk drivers do not know where you want to go even if they emphatically assure you they do and you trace the route on a map three times for them. We wound up walking to many places, which was fun because we often passed interesting places we came back to visit later.

The bulk of our time here was spent arranging and having meetings with a variety of NGO workers. It was fascinating to hear the responses they gave to our relatively standardized set of questions. The heart of what we were trying to learn was what constitutes an effective program for girls who want to leave the sex trade. Aspects of skills training, healing, restoration of self-image and family relationships, and then job provision and reintegration/social inclusion, post-program, were discussed. Some of the most successful programs were those that provided a job with a salary that included training. Daughters had a cafe and spa, and sold shirts and crafts; Bloom Cafe made gorgeous wedding cakes and ran a trendy cafe; Hagar provided catering and restaurant training alongside their in-depth recovery/resilience model of rehabilitation; and Jars of Clay is now a restaurant run completely by Cambodian women. It was exciting to be in the midst of so many passionate and innovative people, their ideas swirling around in our heads and helping to inform our ideas of what might work well in Poipet.

Because so many of the initiatives we were learning about involved food preparation, we did a lot of eating in Phnom Penh! I still can count on one hand the number of bad meals I've had in Cambodia. We had a small kitchen in our guest apartment, so we cooked a few of our own meals since this was the only chance we had to do so in 3 months. I must say that I ate so much good food I think I need to balance it out this winter with many small and simple meals...

Training for a 10K with Pip's running club in Poipet is hard to do when I'm not in Poipet... so I ran around Victory Monument, which was close to our guesthouse. I looped around the Royal Palace and went up to the waterfront and back. Around Victory Monument and the surrounding green areas, there were huge patio-like spots where crowds of Khmers would gather to play sports or do aerobics. There would often be as many as ten different groups dancing to the beat (sort of) of the music coming from ten different boom boxes. Intermingled were groups of boys playing soccer, couples playing badminton, and older people selling fruit or peanuts or fried dough balls. It was fun to be running and observing the scene rather than walking and constantly being asked if I wanted a tuk-tuk ride or souvenir.

Jill and I took an afternoon to visit S-21, Tuol Sleng Prison, which was once a high school and is now a museum. When we walked in, there was an eerie quiet that filled the campus, even though there were crowds of people wandering in and out of the buildings. I walked into the first several rooms, which had been used as torture chambers, essentially, by the Khmer Rouge as they interrogated individuals. Other rooms still had the shoddily built brick cells which prisoners were kept in while they awaited their interrogation. Most of the rusted torture implements, shackles, bedframes, and chamber pots were left in their original rooms from when the Khmer Rouge fled in 1979. There were rooms and rooms full of photos of each individual - haunting mug shots of people who all wore the same Khmer Rouge haircut and black pajamas, though their individual faces wore varying expressions of fear, confusion, despair. Not one was smiling.

This was enough for one day, but a few days later we visited the Killing Fields, a bit of land outside the city that the Khmer Rouge used to murder and bury masses of people. There was even a tree that the Khmer Rouge used to smash babies against. The site has been partially excavated, and the bones that were uncovered were sorted by type and placed into a tall stupa. Many of the graves are now sunken in, and chickens from neighboring yards wander freely over them, but there is an eerie quiet that fills this place similar to Tuol Sleng. There were bits of bone and clothing still coming up through the earth, which people collected and placed on top of the donation boxes.

I did not see this myself, perhaps because it has been painted over by now, but another traveler that had been to Tuol Sleng years ago said that on the wall under the stairs of the last school building, someone had written in English graffiti Our revenge will be the laughter of our children.

Thailand!
As our visas were set to expire, we headed back to Thailand, and took a rest at the Juniper Tree in Dolphin Bay. For a few days Jill and I listened to the waves, swam in the pool, and visited some caves in the Sam Roi Yod National Park. We rented a moto for the day and I had so much fun riding it! I was sad to return it at the end of the day. One of the caves we visited was a favorite spot for the King of Thailand to stop and stay in. Other caves had stalactites and stalagmites, sparkly and salty looking, some worn smooth by the many visitors that preceded me. We also encountered strange smells, bats, and spiders, so we did not linger as long in those caves!

One of the best things about our time at Juniper Tree was the people we met. There were retired missionaries, families doing development work, and young students like us that were wonderful to interact with and learn from. People from Sweden, Scotland, Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Germany, India, and Cambodia, Canada, and America (us) found it easy to enjoy meals and laughter together. We were served a dessert one evening of green, spongy bread-like triangle sandwiches with something creamy inside, and I asked what it was. John, a retired missionary from Britain, said, "Saint Paul talked about this dessert, oh yes. He said 'Behold, I show you a great mystery!'"

Back in Poipet
Despite the fun we had in Thailand, it was time to head back to Poipet to continue our work. We arrived back in time for me to run in the 10K I'd been training for all this time, but my own plans did not prevail... Our first night back was another unfriendly welcome: we got food poisoning from a dinner of massaman curry. Jill and I could not eat or drink anything for two days. I was completely dehydrated and it took all of my strength just to walk across the street to buy us some water and juice that we couldn't even keep down. Our room was on the corner of our building facing a street that monks decided to use for a fundraising event. I wouldn't have minded this at all if they were not chanting through loudspeakers for hours and hours every day of our illness. Earplugs and closed windows couldn't drown it out, and we were robbed of healing sleep. Eventually, though, our systems recovered and we were able to start functioning normally again! And of course, as soon as we were well enough to leave the building, the fundraiser was over!

The next few weeks we were busy writing our final anthropological paper on the cultural contributions to, and perceptions of, sex work. It was actually a depressing paper to write, and many times I felt like I must have been exaggerating, but all of the articles and interviews I drew from were consistent: the majority of Cambodian men use sex workers, and beat their wives, and sex workers are often pushed into it by their parents and then shamed by society. The Khmer word for prostitute is literally "broken woman," srey koich.

Siem Reap
We took one more trip to Siem Reap, during which Jill and I endured the final, painful stages of our anthropological research papers. We found that we had learned a lot about Khmer culture in the process, even though we did not feel as though we knew much about Cambodia when we started the papers.

The day we arrived, I went with Pip to register for the Angkor Wat Half Marathon (though we were only going to run the 10K!). We realized that the entire race had been filled, and Pip negotiated hard for about an hour until she finally got a spot. She then tried to give it to me! But after coming back to the registration table several times that day to no avail, I decided to come to the race in the morning and ask then if there were any openings. I did, and there were! A 5am wakeup is not so bad if you know you are going to run through the forest and past the temples. When the gun was fired, a huge mass of people blobbed forward so that I could only walk for the first few minutes until the blob thinned out. Once I actually started to run, I really enjoyed myself. I kept a good, steady pace, and observed all the different people around me (some in animal costumes!), not to mention the wildlife (a monkey and an elephant) and the temples, of course. At the halfway mark a group of Japanese drummers were playing, presumably to psyche the tired. The whole 10K went by pretty quickly. When I neared the end, I started to sprint, and tried to pass each person in front of me. As I approached the finish line, I dashed across it to just barely beat the girl who had been in front of me a second before. I was so concentrated on beating her that I forgot to look at the clock! No one else was tracking our time, so I had to guess that I came in around 50 minutes... but who really knows? Unfortunately, I had tucked a $20 bill into my shoe for the tuk-tuk ride home, but when I tried to find it it turned out it had slipped out of my shoe during the race! My guesthouse owner exclaimed that that would feed a Cambodian family for a week. I hope that whoever found it put it to good use.

We did most of our Christmas shopping in the psar, market, full of clothes, scarves, trinkets, carvings, spices, plenty of things to buy and plenty you don't need. I hate shopping, but it was fun to haggle the prices. Jill and I both got bags from a company called Smateria that is recycling garbage (plastic bags, fishnets, moto seat covers) into bags and purses.

Another highlight of this trip was our visit to the Banteay Srei Butterfly Centre. A lovely hour-long tuk-tuk drive outside the city, past rice paddies, fields, forests, and water buffalo, we arrived at the year-old Centre and found a giant netted garden, the largest in Southeast Asia. Our friendly and knowledgeable guide explained that the Centre pays poor rural farmers to collect pupas they find. He showed us the stages of metamorphosis (Jill marveled at how the caterpillar is literally liquefied and rebuilt as a butterfly inside the cocoon). We sat in bamboo hanging chairs and chatted for awhile about what we had seen before heading back.

Battambang
Another week in Poipet, and then one last weekend in Cambodia. We celebrated the birthday of our dear friend Sophy by taking a trip to Battambang city, where she lived for several years after she first left home. We had a hilarious photo shoot including more makeup than I had ever worn before, even fake eyelashes, and an apsara costume. Jill and I called them our graduation photos since our official commencement from graduate school occurred that same day.

Sophy took us to her favorite places to eat and get a tukalok, coconut smoothie, after which we walked along the riverfront (every major city in Cambodia has a riverfront). Sunday we went to her church. Every Assemblies of God church I have visited, no matter where in the world, has felt familiar to me! The pastor took us to his house afterwards for lunch and his niece gave us manicures. We talked for awhile about ideas for Cambodia's future, mainly revolving around education. That really seems to be a major key to development here. Then we went to do an interview with an organization called Rapha House, after which we rushed off to ride the bamboo train. Jill started laughing when we walked up to a bamboo platform, sort of like a Cambodian bedframe, with a movable engine and wheels. It's only one track, so if you meet someone coming the other way, which we did, whoever had fewer passengers (always the other folks! There were ten of us) had to get off, pick up the bamboo bed, and lift the wheels off the track to let us pass. We watched the sunset over a pond and rice paddies, headed back, got a last taste of the best tukaloks in Cambodia, and hopped into a very crowded taxi back to Poipet.

Our very last week in Poipet actually went quite slowly. Jill and I were beginning to feel the itch to go home so badly. Every day dragged and it was hard to focus on our work. On the last day, we said goodbye to several people, and then Leng, Sophy, Mao, and Jeff took us out to eat at a Khmer restaurant over a small lake where they kept the fish they served. I ordered fish amok, one of my favorite Khmer dishes, but when it came the fish were so small and full of bones it took a long time to eat! Still, the dinner was delicious, and we spent hours talking and laughing. At one point, I was reading the labels on the cans of mysterious drinks, and I asked, "What is grass jelly drink?" Mao answered, "Oh! It is a drink with jelly in it, made out of grass." We Westerners all burst into laughter. He didn't mean it to be funny, but we were so amused at his enlightening description we couldn't help it.

I hate saying goodbye, and I didn't want the process to be drawn out, so we left early in the morning. I'd much rather say "See you later - next time!" because I do hope to come back to Cambodia sometime, stay longer, and learn more. Three months is such a short time in one place; it's just long enough to begin to draw one into the culture, but not long enough to learn and experience as much as I wanted to. I definitely felt like it was time to come home though.

Bangkok again
A bus ride to Bangkok later, we stayed at a small, cozy inn near a Starbucks made out of an old house. I appreciated the huge mugs of steaming lattes with fresh milk. Bangkok is such a busy place, it's best to pick one spot and stay in it. I didn't really want to go to Khao San Road even though it's backpacker central; I see enough frat house behavior in the States. I savored a last few cheap and delicious Asian meals.

When Jill flew home, I tried hard to get my flight switched to a day earlier, but I couldn't do it without paying a few hundred dollars, so I stayed an extra day, and got to visit a really neat place called the Jim Thompson House. The name belies a mysterious building: a house designed by a man named Jim Thompson. He was a silk businessman in the 50s and 60s who designed his house out of 6 or 7 different traditional houses from all over Thailand. They were all joined together into a beautiful home, not a mansion, but larger than most Thai homes. Each house was made into a room, and he added a few Western elements such as a dining room table and chamber pots. He also had quite a collection of Asian furniture, decorations, carvings, and porcelain. There was a nice garden and a boat landing, since he was right on the river across from a Muslim community who spun much of his silk.

That was yesterday. Today was the longest day... it has been 12 hours since I woke up, and now I am sitting at the gate, waiting another hour until I board. I am so ready to go home and see family, snow, friends; hear the sounds of quiet, snow falling, wind blowing; smell pine needles, rosemary, crusty herbed dark bread, bacon; taste cheese, nuts, chocolate, olive oil; feel iced snow crunching, clean cats, my winter clothes. For now, I'll be content with Emirates' delicious meals and film selection, and filling the last few pages of my journal.

I am typing this from my room in Dolphin Bay, Thailand, with the wind blowing and the waves crashing outside my window. Through the fog I can see the silhouettes of mountains and islands in the distance. Jill and I are here at the Juniper Tree, a rest house for missionaries and development workers to come and get away from everything. It is so quiet. The loudest sounds are the wind and the waves, really. After Poipet and then weeks of traveling through Cambodia and staying in noisy cities, this is desperately needed... I am so grateful for the opportunity to reflect for a few days and breathe in the salty air.

My last post ended with our trip to Battambang Province, which feels like aeons ago now. So much has occurred since then.

Our return from Battambang to Poipet was quite a rude reminder that we are strangers in a strange land. After a long, bumpy taxi ride, Jill, Sophy and I headed up to our rooms in the gueshouse. I unlocked the door to find that the dirty blanket I had intentionally put under the bed was balled up and sitting in my suitcase - gross. I was taken aback but at first I thought the guesthouse owners had come into the room to clean or something, which they don't normally do. Then I saw my box of Bang! cards sitting in Jill's suitcase, and a horrible sick feeling washed over me. Our entire room had been rifled through and we had been robbed of many things. I had foolishly left behind my laptop because I wanted to travel to Battambang lightly and not think about schoolwork for two days, but I realized my folly... all of our electronics, some of Jill's clothes, jewelry, and shoes, even our shampoo and cereal had been taken. So, the first thing Jill and I did was sit down and pray. We audaciously prayed for a miraculous return of my laptop and the other electronic items we needed to carry out our research. I tried to hold it together but found myself crying when we opened our eyes... Jill left to tell Sophy, who was in a different room.

Sophy came in and notified the guesthouse owners, who seemed shocked, and then found that the lock had been bored into and popped open. Sophy had a sneaking suspicion that the people across the hall had something to do with this. She had noticed that they would often open their window and watch us talking in the hallway. So, the guesthouse owners looked in the rooms across the hall, and, sure enough, found Jill's plastic bag that had contained her electronics, and her empty box of cereal (!). We went to the police and told them what happened, but only one policeman was on duty, and he said that because it was a holiday all the policemen were partying that night and would not be able to do anything about our case until morning.

By this point, Jill and I were feeling pretty numb. We headed to the casino area, where we could use the internet and contact our families, friends, churches, cohort, to let them know what happened and to pray for us. I had no idea who had my laptop or what information they could access on it so I changed all my passwords. Ugh. We went back into town and booked a room at the safest guesthouse in town I could think of... and hunkered down there for the night.

The following morning, we got a call around 8am saying that the police had caught the two girls that were staying with the two men across the hall. We came in and repeated our story, with Sophy as our interpreter. We wrote a detailed list of everything that had been stolen from us. We had to fill out various forms stating what we had lost and what outcome we wanted: getting our things back. We knew this was a silly thing to ask, being on the border of Thailand, and knowing the thieves had stolen from us about 24 hours before we returned and discovered the theft. Still, we persisted, and it took quite awhile. Jill, Sophy and I grew quite familiar with the police office we were filling our paperwork in. The hard wooden bench, the mattress folded up in the corner, the dress shoes with the heels crumpled down... the policemen were quite thorough, and had us sign and stamp every paper with one or both thumbs.

They let us break for lunch, and the police officer gave us a ride to John Cena (the name of the restaurant near the border :) ). When we returned in the afternoon, the police took us back to the guesthouse to look through the rooms and take pictures. The two girls across the courtyard from us had to come too. I tried to look them in the eye, but every time I did, they did not hold my gaze for long before looking away.

When we arrived at the guesthouse, we went into Jill's and my room first, pointed out all the things that had been disturbed (pretty much all of our stuff - the thieves did a thorough search of our belongings), and we even found two cigarette butts on the bathroom floor. I felt gross being in that room again, violated, knowing strangers had invaded and then taken the time to smoke cigarettes. They must have known how long we were going to be gone in Battambang in order to be so leisurely about their robbery.
When we went across the hall, the first room we went into the police went through every single bag, box, even the trash, asking us to point out everything we recognized. Jill found two of her earrings, and when she pointed them out, the girl staying in that room protested, saying that she had gotten them in Siem Reap. It was strange to see Jill and this girl exchange looks over these stolen items.
Jill also found her sneakers behind the door - the tops of them had been cut off, strangely, so that only their soles were left. Again the girl claimed her husband had gotten them for her in Thailand.

We went into the second room, and in that room was the plastics bags we had found the day before that we had kept our electronic items in. We also pointed out Jill's cereal box, and her dictophone packaging (in English and in French - only to be found on Canadian items). The police had Jill point to the items she claimed as hers, and take photos.
I spotted a small clear plastic tab, the one that had been covering the end of my iPod/USB charger. When I pointed it out, the police took a picture of me. Then, they brought in the girl that had been staying in that room, and made her stand next to this tiny piece of plastic to take her photo. I looked at this girl, trying to hold her gaze again, and saw that she was shaking and her eyes looked like she was about to cry. Partly because I was straining my muscles leaning away from the camera so as not to be in the incriminating photo, I realized that I, too, was trembling.

It was a very strange moment for Jill and I to be in the same room as the people who stole from us, and to look them in the eye. Talking about it later, we both felt more sad for these girls than anything else. They were probably about our age, and even though the first girl was quite brazen in her denial, we had no idea what they had been brought up in, how these men (who had run away and left them here) treated them, what they may or may have been told or taught from a young age. Jill and I realized that the kind of girls we had come here to "help" may very well have been the ones stealing from us. It was a pretty harsh reminder that human frailty manifests itself in very difficult ways.

When we went back to the station, we had to write up more lists of what had been found that we could claim for certain were ours. More translation, more thumb stamping, more waiting. They let us go at dinnertime, and told us to come back in the morning.

So we did... we got another call early Monday morning telling us to return to the station, because the thieves had been caught. When we arrived, we saw two men shackled together across the courtyard, but we were quickly ushered back into the same office we had been in the day before. Another full day of waiting, signing, thumbprinting. We tried to fill the time with reading but it was hard to concentrate. Near lunchtime, the policeman pulled out his cell phone and showed us two pictures: one of a collection of all of our smaller electronic items, the other of a white Mac in a clear plastic case.

Could it be?

Jill started crying, probably from a combination of emotions, but the police officer said he knew that we were good people and that was why they worked so hard to get these things back. Still, we did not see them with our own eyes yet, and they let us break for lunch, which was agonizingly long.

When we returned, we were greeted with a table arrayed with my laptop, iPod, Jill's dictophone, most of our various chargers, thumb drives, power cords. The police chief was there, standing proudly alongside us for pictures. I felt my gratitude went to the policeman who had worked with us these last two days, but he was not even in the picture:



We were ferried in and out of the office a few more times, and the last time we came out the press was there interviewing us and taking pictures of us with our retrieved items. The whole thing was pretty embarrassing, but when we walked out and saw the two thieves standing there we felt horribly ashamed to see that one of them was only in his underwear. I asked Leng several times if I could say something to the thieves but he wasn't sure if we could. I just wanted to tell them that they were made for something better than this. We didn't get the opportunity though.

Suffice it to say that I cannot tell what means the police (and perhaps other parties involved) used to track down and retrieve our items - but we were so grateful that our prayers, and the prayers of many others in our communities, churches, and families back home, had been heard. When I brought my laptop home that night, I opened it up (thank goodness it was password-protected), unlocked it, and found that everything was as it had been before it was stolen. I even found a paper I had pre-written before coming to get Jill, and I emailed it to my professor with what I thought was a very valid excuse for its tardiness.

The end of this episode culminated in a few days' illness - my body collapsed after this battle was fought and won...

Siem Reap

The following week, we traveled to Siem Reap, one of the major cities in Cambodia, about two hours east of Poipet. When we arrived, we were thankful to be out of Poipet and in a different setting for awhile.

Siem Reap is tourist central. The temple ruins outside the city attract many foreigners, and downtown Siem Reap is a smorgasbord of restaurants, pubs, massage parlors, guesthouses, coffeeshops, and gift shops. Food and drink are cheap, delicious, and cater to the Western palate. I probably ate three or four cheeseburgers that week, some pizza, and a few burritos. I like Khmer food but I definitely won't turn away my other favorites... I don't even eat burgers that often at home, but they were pretty good here!

We took a day to visit the temples of Angkor Wat, Bayon, Angkor Thom, Ta Prohm, Banteay Kdei. I probably missed a few names there. We hired a tuk-tuk for the day, because each temple is spread out from the others. These were beautiful and amazing sites, and I felt my own smallness and newness walking through such huge and ancient structures.

My favorite part of the day was in the early afternoon, soon after lunchtime. It was raining lightly, so most tourists were gone at this point. We pulled the tuk-tuk up in front of Banteay Kdei. This temple had pools and trees surrounding it, and the rain falling was probably the loudest sound. Everything was still, until I got to the back end of this temple, where two young Khmer boys were swimming and splashing around in the pool, laughing and climbing on top of each other and onto a branch hanging into the water. This is what Cambodian boys have done for thousands of years here, I thought; it felt more like I was walking through a piece of history and less like I was visiting a tourist site.

The rest of our time in Siem Reap, after Peter left, Jill and I researched and read and wrote and researched some more. We met with a guy who with his wife started an organization called White Doves, working with girls who desperately wanted to get out of the brothels but had no options. It was neat to hear the story of how White Doves sort of organically came into being. Jill and I ended our time in Siem Reap by getting pizza... or was it burgers? No, I think it was burritos... ;)

Anyhow, we headed down to Phnom Penh after that, which was a welcome change of scene which I will describe in my next post.

From Bangkok to Battambang

The last two weeks have been a little wild. Apologies for the much-belated post; there is more to come.

A little over a week ago, I left Cambodia and went into Thailand to take a bus to the airport. My friend and colleague Jill was going to be arriving Monday night, so I went to meet her and spend a few days in Bangkok taking care of medical things. The bus ride down was quite beautiful. I slept for part of it, and when I woke up, there were thunderclouds hanging over the landscape as we drove past bright green rice paddies and rows of tall, thin trees. I was reading a chapter about the Lua people of northern Thailand who are suffering from displacement due to environmental protection of their traditional farmland and forestland. These are complicated issues that require more thought and dialogue than they are now given, I think.

Bangkok was pretty interesting. I arrived at the airport and mailed off a letter, wrote in my journal, enjoyed an hour at Starbucks, and read a book a professor had given me years ago. It was about language learning, the need for which I am feeling increasingly aware. I actually enjoy being in airports and observing the people rushing by, some sitting and relaxing for hours like me, some tearfully parting or joyously greeting loved ones. It seems like nothing is unusual in an airport; people come from all over, carrying and wearing wildly divergent items and clothing, and no one blinks.

I waited in the "meeting point" area for a long time, reading my book standing up. Finally, I saw a redheaded girl wheeling a pile of bags in the distance. I had to wait behind the "no entry" sign for her, which felt silly because I wanted to run up and hug her. What a happy reunion! Jill was pretty tired after a conference and two long flights, so we headed to our guesthouse, which was quite comfortable compared to what I had been used to in Poipet.

The following day in the city was a bit strange. We spent the first part of the morning just talking and catching up over a very Western-style breakfast of eggs, toast, cornflakes, orange juice, and plenty of coffee. I didn't realize how much I had missed scrambled eggs and buttered toast! Coffee is abundant in most of Cambodia, and most of Thailand, too, I'm guessing, but they often add copious amounts of sugar, which makes it undrinkable. Not so with this coffee! After a very long time, we decided to venture out into the city to get our shots. We went to the place I had gone last month when I first arrived, but I still needed a rabies booster. Jill wanted to get the Japanese encephalitis vaccine, but we discovered they were out of those at the moment. But, they called other clinics and found that they did have a vaccine... at the Snake Farm. Jill and I thought it was just a little strange to be looking for medical care at a snake farm, but we didn't argue because we were running out of time. We navigated our way there using a combination of walking, mass transit, and taxi, and we arrived ten minutes after they closed. But we did find the snake farm! I think it took us hours.

By this point, we were pretty hungry but we were trying to figure out a place to get a decently priced but tasty meal. We wandered through town and wound up walking back north to the area where our guesthouse was. On the way I broke my flip-flop so it kept sliding off to the side... very annoying, but at least the streets were not that dirty. We walked into a place called Siam Paragon, and it was like the King of Prussia Mall. Stores everywhere, Gucci and American Eagle and a mall directory that helped us find what we really wanted: food! The lower level had a much fancier version of a food court, with more variety and better quality food. The problem was, there were so many options, and I knew it would be my only chance to have cheese, pizza, or Western food for awhile, so I was trying to make the most of it. Jill and I wound up wandering around looking at every menu for so long that when we finally settled on a place to eat I was shaking with hunger and anxiety. What a waste of time. I got Indian paneer (cheese) and Jill got Japanese. No pizza. After we finished, we walked the rest of the way to the guesthouse... and on the same street we found a place selling pizza. Of course. Next time we are in Bangkok we'll know where to go!

The following morning we had another enjoyable breakfast, Jill got her shot at the snake farm, and we grabbed some groceries before heading up to Mo Chit to catch the afternoon bus to Aranya Prathet. Much of the bus ride we spent sleeping and reading. I just love rainy drives. It took awhile to get to the border; it closed at 8, and our bus pulled in at 7:15, so we had to rush through and avoid the scams that plagued us all along the way. Thankfully, I knew where the legit buildings were so I could help Jill find where to go. We made it just in time, dropped our bags at the guesthouse, and had a nice dinner at Jon Ceena with Rebekah. I introduced Jill and Sophy, and we went to bed. Once I had Jill with me I was more conscious of my desires to live in a different, cleaner room, especially compared to what we are used to in North America.

The following morning, we hopped into a taxi and headed to Battambang Province with Sophy. Woohoo! The ride took about two hours, and the second half of it was on extremely bumpy dirt roads, rutted and uneven from the rain. We kept turning onto smaller and smaller roads, until we pulled up to a grassy walkway where the taxi driver let us out. Down the path was Sophy's family's house, a wooden structure on stilts. Within an hour of our arrival, Sophy's youngest brother, who has stayed home to farm and take care of his parents, decided to take us out to the family's rice paddies. We hopped onto the bed of the family farm vehicle, a sort of tractor with a large bed attached, and Sophy's mother sent us with a goody bag full of wafer snacks, bean and sticky rice desserts, and oranges. Her brother navigated the road so well, even though it was very bumpy and muddy in parts. He had to make several attempts to get us out of some of the muddiest parts, so we all cheered for him. Many families had their rice paddies alongside one another out in the flat, flooded field, and each one was separated by a foot-wide wall of grassy clumps. The ones belonging to Sophy's family were in a few different locations, each one belonging to a different child. Jill and I made our way out on this thin strip of bank to look at one of the fields, trying not to slip into the warm water! After a bit of this we went for a dip in a small pool where the family would catch fish. Riding back home, eating oranges and laughing hysterically at the jolts that threatened to knock hats, sunglasses, and bodies out of place, I felt very content and happy to be here, thankful to be a part of this picture.

Sister, brother, niece, wagon?

These did not stay on the whole ride, try as I might.

This is Sophy's adorable niece, Shiu Ping.

Cooling off

I really loved this place. Her family was so friendly and hospitable, and even though they didn't all speak English, it is not hard to communicate kindness. They kept trying to make us comfortable and fed us so much. I think it's pretty telling that in several of the countries I've visited the phrases I've had to learn and employ most consistently are "thank you," "I'm full," and "This food is delicious." They cooked several traditional Khmer dishes for us, and everything we ate, except for our instant coffee a few snacks, was either grown on their property, or by one of their neighbors/relatives. On either side of the village are relatives from both sides of Sophy's family. Their house was raised up enough so that underneath they had several hammocks hanging, a table, a few bed-type structures to work, read, or make food on, and the family farm vehicle (it performed multiple functions I'm not sure how to explain). It was cooler down here during the day, but Jill and I loved being upstairs, too. The floors were clean, smooth wooden panels, and there was a large roofed balcony looking out over their yard and garden/orchard stretching back behind their house. We ate most of our meals together on this balcony floor. We did so much lounging, reading, talking, and tea and coffee drinking. I feel like we got a glimpse of the real Cambodia, and experienced legendary Khmer hospitality through this particular family.

Coconuts and centipedes

I had my first episode of serious adrenaline pumping this morning.
I was sitting on my bed, reading and journaling and thinking about peaceful and encouraging things. My reverie was rudely interrupted by a shiny, slithery, sneaky centipede wiggling across the floor - running under my suitcase! I tensed myself up and leapt across the room to grab one of my Chacos, then leapt back onto the safety of my bed. As I was leaping back to my bed, the centipede rushed out from under my suitcase only to run under my bed and backpack. By this time I was shaking - all phobias are irrational, right? So I know it is silly to be this scared of such a small creature, which may or may not even bite, but I couldn't help it. Give me a snake or a mouse or a lizard or a spider any day over a centipede. (Picture me gasping each time I see it come out.) I sat there, arm raised, waiting for the centipede to come back out so I could smash it, but it did not come... so I pulled my backpack out from under the bed, and as I did so I saw the centipede's antennaed head waving around before it crawled inside my backpack! I shook it violently a few times, stopping each time to pull my hands away in case it came out close to them, to no avail. So I just sat on my bed, shaking, keeping my eyes fixed on the backpack so I could see it as soon as it came out. What if it came out when I wasn't looking, crawled up my bedpost and onto my bed?! Finally, it wriggled out of my backpack and headed for the wall. I jumped at the chance to kill it before it got away. If I didn't kill it, how would I sleep at night? (Bianca, I thought of your Burkina snake stories in this moment.) I smashed it with my Chaco, but not well enough - it curled its body around my sandal and almost touched my hand. I dropped the sandal and jumped back, but determined not to lose this fight, grabbed my sandal again and this time bore down hard and ground the monster into the tile. I twisted the Chaco around an extra ten seconds for good measure. I scanned the room to make sure it had no friends backing it up, then grabbed my backpack and left the room, late for devotions... again.
Just another morning in Poipet.
Every morning I am just a few minutes late to devotions, but each time I feel like my reason is legitimate - whether it be failing to set my alarm, having a dream about bears attacking my family, or battling a centipede. Oh well. One of these days, I will get there on time.

Most days, I find a time to share a green coconut with Sophy, or an iced coffee, and eat some fruit. I usually ride on the back of Leng's moto to do a home garden visit, weaving through traffic. Dark green Toyota Camrys seem to be the vehicle of choice here. (Jenny, I think of Charlie often, and wonder if his real gravesite should have been here, among his own kind.) I've been reading a few different biographies of women in Cambodia. The stories of the Khmer Rouge, and what people did to survive, are mind-blowing. This is an incredible country.

Tonight, I went to clean up the centipede, and I have a newfound ally in the ants I had until now thought pesky: they ate the whole thing! I looked on the sole of my Chaco but could not find his remains:

Barang on a bicycle

I'm sitting in Rebekah's office right now as the dark sky threatens to pour down rain. I hope it does - it cools us off and cuts the heavy humidity in the air!

Two mornings this week I tagged along with Leng doing site visits to some of the agricultural projects CHO has been involved in. Some families were growing morning glory, which is not something I had ever thought of as a vegetable before. The plants are harvested when they are still small, only 4 or 6 leaves on them. I have yet to try them. We also saw farmers growing soybeans, pumpkins, cucumbers, long beans, and other vegetables I was not familiar with. One farmer had just harvested a nice mung bean crop.

I returned to this farm the following day to buy some mung beans from him. I also asked if I could buy one or two watermelons. They came back with a basket full of eight! They said since they had already picked them I should buy all eight of them, but then they only charged us for six and gave us the other two for free. When we left the farm, I had a backpack heavy with 2 kilos of mung beans and a bagful of watermelons that I struggled to keep steady on the moto as we jolted and slid down the rocky, muddy paths. We've been eating the watermelons around here the last few days; I brought two of them to a barang dinner last night, which everyone brought their favorite fruit to. I've been eating fruit every day, usually some bananas, oranges, and American-bought dark chocolate with almonds (which I am running out of) for breakfast. Yum!

The mung bean casings do not go to waste: they are used in a nearby mushroom-growing operation. Six people had jointly obtained a piece of property (not sure whether it was rented or purchased) to grow a few varieties of mushrooms on.

We also visited the man who had taught these people how to do this. He has been growing mushrooms for over 6 years, and for the past 2 years he has been writing a book about it. This book will include everything he has learned himself as well as all the research he has been able to find that goes beyond his experience. I think it will be several volumes long. Here he is:


He served us several cups of tea throughout the morning as he talked with Leng about his recent work. The whole conversation was in Khmer, so I sat back, drank my tea, and took in the sights around me: he lived in a wooden house on stilts above the water, with a very steep set of steps leading up to it. Underneath this house was where he grew the mushrooms, in a large area enclosed by tarps on all sides. We walked barefoot in the mud and rice hulls up and down the aisles of mushroom spores growing in small plastic bags full of various substrata.


The reasons for these agricultural projects are many, and intertwined: since CHO started as an anti-trafficking organization originally, agricultural projects were started with some families as a means of poverty alleviation. Families here would sell their children to feed the rest of the family or they would leave during the day to work, leaving their children more vulnerable to being trafficked if they were home alone rather than in school. One of the farmers used to travel across the border into Thailand every day to work, but since he has started gardening, his income is greater than it was before and he is able to stay home with his family. I hope he sends his children to school now too. Here is a picture of the platform people use to cross the border.
Another reason CHO has invested so much in agricultural projects is to support and strengthen the local economy. People will often buy Thai produce because it is cheaper, but if more farmers and gardeners grow a variety of crops and produce in and around Poipet, it will keep more money circulating in the local economy... more about this later.

Rebekah and I talked yesterday about Jill's and my plans here with CHO. We hope to write a program plan for the Hope Transformation Center, a transition home for women who leave the sex trade. Jill and I both have already written similar project proposals as part of our class in Program Planning. This will be a good use of some of the research we have already done, and it will be a great help to CHO, which so far has nothing in place yet as far as a concrete plan for the HTC. They already have a building purchased and floor plans (4 floors), but our main task here would be to write up what would actually be taking place once the program opens up and women start coming into the center. We are both really excited about this, and one of the first things we will do is meet with other organizations (mostly in Phnom Penh - that's where most NGOs are headquartered) that already have similar programs in place. From this we hope to glean best practices and ideas, as well as connections and info-sharing opportunities as we find people and projects that are innovating in this area and doing well.

My agricultural visits thus far have been informative and educational for me, but I hope to integrate them into the HTC plans. Women who leave brothels are often funneled into programs that provide training in handicraft-making, for example, but the handicrafts are not always locally sourced or sold, or even beautiful or marketable. Many of these businesses depend on Westerners to buy and ship these items across the ocean. Being able to grow your own food is always a useful skill, and people always need to eat. I would hope that these women could be further involved in their own communities and contribute to the local economy, as stated above. I'm hoping to build into the program plan a way for those women who are interested in agriculture to get plugged into the ag projects already existing within CHO. The same goes for some of the other branches such as sewing and cooking in the restaurant.

I visited the Safe Haven Center this afternoon, where children in transition stay. It has a big piece of land that can be used for agricultural training, and there is already some vocational training taking place in the form of woodworking and sewing classes. There are hopes and maybe plans to build a Bible school here, and this place might be a hub for CHO activities in the future. On the way there, Rebekah and I rode on her moto, me wearing a helmet with the lining falling out so it kept flopping over my eyes. I took it off once we turned onto the dirt road leading to the SHC. (In a strange way, I like the anonymity afforded by wearing a helmet - I am better able to hide my identity as a barang, though only a little bit.) This road was flooded in several places, and I had to get off and wade through calf-deep water flowing across the road. Several people were swimming around and one guy was trying to fix his car, which looked pretty hard to do considering the water was almost touching the parts he needed to get to! We came to a wooden bridge lashed together with bamboo and wire, and used it to cross... guys kept talking to us in Khmer but we didn't pay any mind. Once we got to the SHC we found out that we were supposed to pay them a "toll" for using the bridge they had built! Oops. We paid on the way back, silly barangs.

Now, I have a bicycle CHO lent me. I can get around on it pretty well, but it is a one-speed so I pedal like crazy to get any kind of speed, and I'm on the bottom of the totem pole in terms of road vehicles. Oh well! Fun times.

Inundation of the senses

Suosday!
That is Khmer for hello to someone you already know. (I thought this would be a good progression from the formal "chump reap suor" from my last post :) )

The last few days have been quite busy. There's a lot going on in Poipet. I noticed that it's a very active city when I went on my first tour through the streets. Several times a day I hop on the back of a "moto," motorcycle, and ride short distances to wherever we need to go. It's sort of like riding a horse, I find - you might want to tense up and hold on tight at first, but the best way to ride is to just relax and let your upper body sway and move with the curves and jolts of the moto. Dust blows up in your face from the street, so I have to close my eyes and sometimes hold my breath when trucks pass. Despite this, I enjoy riding around town, looking around at all the lives dependent on the heartbeat of this small city. There's something about the smell of oily cooking smoke and fresh fish, the brightly colored storefronts and Khmer characters, the laughing teenagers and wandering dogs.

This morning CHO ran a campaign for children's education. They want to increase enrollment in government schools by encouraging parents to send their children to school instead of keeping them home to work or labor for money, or increase their vulnerability to being trafficked. We met early in the morning, waited around a long time for all of the teachers to arrive, and then paraded down the streets of Poipet with flags, loudspeakers playing Khmer music, and banners exhorting parents that their kids being in school is the best thing for them. I came to the campaign dressed in shorts and a tshirt, but all the rest of the CHO staff was wearing their uniforms! I felt bad so Sophy and I made up for it by dressing up to go to lunch afterwards. CHO staff all had lunch at the casino buffet, which is reminiscent of the casinos in Atlantic City. :) This buffet had many Thai and Khmer food items, so I loaded up my plate with as many things I couldn't recognize as possible. I ate some vegetables I could not identify (some of which tasted rooty and soily), boiled lotus root, raw spring rolls, neon noodles, and a bowl of soup labeled chicken coconut. When I spooned through it, I found a big square of what looked like purple tofu. I cut it into pieces and found that the middle was pinkish. I took a bite... and asked what it was. My suspicions were confirmed: pig's blood, congealed. Yum. I couldn't quite finish the whole chunk. Maybe next time.

I went for my second run with Pip this afternoon, and last night the whole running team had dinner together. We talked about what we were learning about ourselves, God, one another, and "running the race" from being part of the running club. It's been neat to get to know so many young Khmer people who are eager to learn and experience new things. One of the boys I was talking to was telling me he has to finish high school, and work at the same time, because his family is very poor. But he wants to go to school in Thailand, and become a pastor and a lawyer. So inspiring; makes me mindful of the opportunities we have here.

Tomorrow is the Sabbath... so in preparation, I tried to clean my new room, which was supposed to have been cleaned before I moved in, but people use the same word to mean different things. I c l e a n e d that room for over an hour and have made a slight bit of progress. Some of the things I found under the bed made me not want to know the history of this room. I mopped 5 or 6 times over and am going to give it another good scrub tomorrow, if I can. I also got a laundry tub and hanger-rack. There's something about washing and ironing clothes by hand that I find stilling, peaceful. As much as I want everything to be clean and in order right now, I need to write a paper. Oh life, when will you let me finish being a student?

Poipet

Chump reap suor!
Hello to everyone back home and abroad, and thanks for coming to my blog. I'm new to this but I figure it can't be that hard, right?
I'm writing this in my new home in Poipet. My head is propped up on two pillows and my walls and ceiling are a little cracked and dirty, but they'll do. I'm on lunch break right now but have to head back to CHO at 1:30. For now, I will try to tell some stories from the past few days.

I flew out late Monday night, after driving through a double rainbow all the way from my family's house to the airport. Both of my flights went very smoothly; I was spoiled by Emirates' delicious food and wide film selection. (David, if you are reading this, I finally watched the Book of Eli.) My layover in Dubai made me want to stay there and check it out, but eastward I continued. Once I arrived in Bangkok, I was in a bit of a daze, but my excitement won out. On my way through the line to get my Thai visa, the guy processing me kept trying to send me to the back of the line because I did not have a hotel in Thailand listened. I told him four times I was not staying in Thailand that night, but he kept repeating that I needed to tell him what hotel I was staying at. I did not want to go to the back of the line and wait forever so I insisted that I was staying in Poipet, so he told me to talk to the woman posted next to him, and he left. I guess I was too much for him! Then, this lady kept looking at me suspiciously because my passport photo apparently did not match my current appearance. Does my short hair make me look that different?! She had to call someone over to verify that it was me.
Once I left the airport, it took me awhile to travel around via public transit. (I felt like such a tourist, doing all the things I learned not to... I knew no Thai phrases and it took me several times to catch onto the bowing and pressing your palms together when addressing someone.) I did not know exactly how to get to the clinic to get my vaccines, so I had to figure out where to go... it took awhile, and I had to switch a couple times to get there, but eventually I got a shot in each shoulder and hopped in a taxi juuuust in time to catch one of the last buses to Aranya Prathet. I had been praying all morning that I would make it onto the 1:30 bus, and I literally got onto the bus about a minute before it drove out. The drive through the Thai countryside was pretty, but long... I arrived in Aranya Prathet and people kept trying to take me to Siem Reap (they did not believe me when I told them I was staying in Poipet, I guess). It was hard to find a tuk-tuk driver that I thought would be reliable. Finally, a guy who spoke decent English offered to take me to Thai immigration. I rode up to a dingy little table outside on the side of the road. He dropped me off there, so I thought this was the immigration office... but after several minutes of wrangling with a group of young guys trying to charge me a "service fee" for processing my visa, and pressuring me to do it quickly before the border closed, I decided I was just going to start walking east until I found the real immigration center. One of the guys handed me a phone just then, and it was Peter, one of the people in my cohort! I guess the guy knew Peter already, and recognized it when I mentioned his and Rebekah's names. I explained the situation to him, and I handed the phone back to the guy, who walked off by himself to talk to Peter. He came back and looked at me and said, "Ok, we go." We walked to the Thai immigration office, and there I met Rebekah. Thank God I made it through all right! Rebekah was so helpful in walking me through the rest of the steps, and we rode in another tuk-tuk to my guest house, which was very nice. We sat down to a dinner with Chomno, the director of CHO, and I got to know them a little bit before going to bed. My room was pretty nice but the A/C was actually too cold for me! I had to turn it off partway through the night. I guess I like sleeping in hot weather.

My first morning with CHO was interesting - we had devos at 7:30 and then I had a meeting with a guy named Leng and the rest of his agricultural team. It has been a bit hard to communicate since I've arrived, and I feel so bad I don't know any Khmer. People have to translate for me, and I feel terrible only speaking to people in English. With time, I'm hoping to learn it. It's a tonal language, so it's more difficult to learn than Romance or Germanic languages. Realistically, three months is a short period of time to learn, but I still want to make an effort to learn the more important and basic phrases.

Yesterday I met with Peter and his housemates, Pip and Jordy. Pip lives here and has been doing lots of sports ministry with kids here. She just started a running club, and last night I became its newest member! We are meeting tonight for dinner, and in November we are running in a 5K/10K here in Poipet. Physically, I've been feeling fine for the most part since I arrived, besides the usual swollen feet and swimming head. I was hoping to run my headache off yesterday, but it came back in the middle of the night. Oh well... I'm sure I'll be fine in a few days' time.

The food is great. I had lunch yesterday with Sophy, a lovely Khmer woman who just recently moved to Poipet to work for CHO. She ordered 3 dishes for us (I love Asian meals where everyone shares), and they were all delicious. Two of them had green tomatoes and pineapples cooked with fish or meat. YUM. We also visited the market, where there were some vegetables I had never seen before, but really wanted to try. If I eat something different every day I don't think I'll be able to sample all the things there are to eat here... sigh. While riding on the back of Leng's moto yesterday, we passed women carrying plates of fried caterpillars on their heads. I had the strongest urge to reach out and grab a handful as we passed.

Leng, the agricultural director, is very helpful and kind, and his wife just had their first child, a daughter. He took me around Poipet and no man's land yesterday, past the casinos and through the muddy, muddy streets. The main drag is paved and so are a few other roads but most of everything else is sticky, clayey mud. My apartment building is on the main road so there are beeps and honks and yells coming in my window during the day, not so much at night. Traffic is exhilarating to say the least - everyone drives giving less berth and caution than I am used to, but there seems to be very little road rage as a result.

I have to head over to CHO in a few minutes, but I will post some more pictures later.