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.
