A Typical Day in Tuk Phos...

Greetings to everyone from back home! I hope you all are happy and healthy. I’ve finally found time to post my first story from abroad. It’s been almost three months since I jumped on a plane to Cambodia, but it feels like a year has already flown by. I am in my last week of training and currently preparing for the Peace Corps swearing-in ceremony on October 4th. That marks the day when I actually become a volunteer. After that, it’s off to my permanent site in Kampong Thom province for my two year stint as a high school English teacher.

The past 10 weeks have been occupied by non-stop cultural and language training. I’m by no means proficient in Khmer (pronounced Khmai), but I can go to the market, travel alone, and order food at a restaurant, etc. Conversation with me pretty much goes as follows:

Host mom: What are you doing today?
Me: I like chicken.
H.M.: What time are you going to school?
Me: I go to school today.
H.M.: What time do you go?
Me: Yes, I like bananas too.
H.M.: (gives me a strange look and walks away)

Although my language is very basic at best, I am somehow finding a way to function over here. Most days follow a predictable schedule. I usually wake up a handful of times each night to the barking werewolf dogs, the mice in my room, or because of the chirping bugs and frogs outside. Then at 4:00am every morning the monks begin beating on the drums as a reminder to the farmers that the sun’s coming up and the rice fields need to be tended to. Unfortunately for me I live across the street from the Wat and my bedroom window also faces that direction, so sleeping late in Cambodia is never an option. I lie awake and wait anxiously for the sun to come up because I’ve got to wash yesterday’s clothes before I leave for breakfast at 6:30. I walk or ride my bike to the market (p’saa) and usually buy some fruit before meeting my friends at our usual breakfast place on the main road in Tuk Phos. At the food shop you either order noodles or rice with one of the following: veggies, chicken, pork, or beef. I usually get noodles and veggies with lots of hot sauce. I have yet to get sick over here (knock on wood) and I attribute that to the massive amount of Thai peppers that I eat everyday, and the fact that I eat a coconut every afternoon.

After breakfast, all of us head to language class for four hours. Yes, four hours of language class! It’s cruel. In my training village there are three groups of roughly four people each. Each group is assigned a bilingual host country national who teaches us the basics….new words, pronunciations, and sentence structure. After being grilled on the Khmer that I’ve already forgotten from the previous day’s lesson, I go back to my house and eat lunch with my host family. Usually we’ve got a little break in the middle of the day so I sit in the shade and drink a coconut before taking my second bucket bath of the day. It’s so hot here that most Khmer people take 3-4 bucket baths per day to cool off. I’m happy to follow suit because I drink an ungodly amount of water and sweat it all out between 1 and 2 o’clock. Later in the afternoon we typically have teacher training, a community development session, or cultural training for a few hours. By 5:00 I’m on my way home to eat dinner with my family.

Dinner is awesome in Cambodia. Until a few weeks ago I ate on top of the crey (short table thing) with the family. We now eat at a table for some reason or another, maybe because I was terrible at sitting Khmer style. The food is served communally on one big platter with 2-3 different dishes. Either my host sister or myself will dish up the rice in a particular order; guest (if there is one), host father, host mother, host sister, and me (if Srey Mom is dishing up the rice she is last). Then we all dig in taking one spoonful at a time from the platter. My family knows that I love hot peppers, so they give me my own bowl of soy sauce loaded with those little guys. My host mother is a fabulous cook and I do enjoy most of the food. We eat a ton of fish soup, grilled frogs, and various stir fries with meat and vegetables. However, I have eaten some things that were a little too different even for my taste: a pig’s foot, cow tendon soup, chicken brain, chicken stomach, pig intestine, and fish eyes (although Amy and I used to eat these as kids) top the list.

After dinner my host sister and I clean up and I take another bucket bath in the kitchen/cooking shed out back. I usually study Khmer, write letters, read a book, or watch TV with my host family and try to pretend that I know what they are saying to me. I’m under my mosquito net by 8:00 every night and soon thereafter I fall asleep. One thing that shocked my about the tropics is how short the days are. We only have about 12 hours of light because we’re so close to the equator. So, it gets light around 5:45 am and turns pitch black by 6:30 pm. The bugs come out of the woodwork at night too, so I like to be under my net to keep them at bay. I spend the rest of the night drifting in and out of sleep, and waking up often to scare the mice back into the walls. My favorite nights are when I lay under my mosquito net and read while listening to the rain and the croaking frogs.

As you all can tell I am enjoying it here in Cambodia very much. Occasionally there are days when I’m so homesick for Colorado that all I can think about is riding my bike in the mountains and sometimes there are days when I want to hide from everything Khmer and not eat a single grain of rice. But those days come and go and I always find a way to get through it. But in general I enjoy being here and I am looking forward to the next two years as an English teacher.

Thanks for reading everyone! Keep checking back for new posts because I will have access to internet in my new village starting on October 5th. Also, check out the pictures.