On Sunday I taught a lesson on reproductive health focusing primarily on birth control methods and how they work. I don’t think I have ever said “egg and sperm” so many times in the course of an hour. I spent a lot of time explaining things we think of as very basic, like fertilization, and the fact that the vagina and uterus are not the same thing. They only giggled a little bit when I drew a penis on the board. On Monday and Tuesday a friend of mine came from Battambang to do a workshop on female health and hygiene with my girls. Khmer women, especially high school aged, tend to be very shy about these topics so I wasn’t sure how it would be received. I was pleasantly surprised though. I had 20 girls show up for the two day workshop. They not only showed up but participated, answered questions when asked, and asked a lot of their own questions. I was very proud of them. I had two favorite moments. The first was when Meghan and her Khmer counterparts were teaching about good hygiene before sex. They asked the girls if they had any ideas about this and one of my students suggested that “taking off your clothes” is good pre-sex hygiene. Not sure how much it has to do with sanitation, but hey, it’s a good idea anyway! Later they were answering questions that my students wrote at our last health club meeting. One of the questions was about what they could do to be more beautiful. In response to this question Meghan’s main Khmer counterpart suggested things like exercising, eating well, bathing often, etc… but her last bit of advice was “you should have an orgasm every day because when you feel good you look good!” Now in America I would not advocate saying something like that to a bunch of teenage girls. But here, it’s a different story. It is highly unlikely that unmarried girls here will be doing anything sexual, so statements like that wouldn’t be perceived as encouraging promiscuous, unsafe, or even immoral behavior. Even in married women though, sexuality tends to be incredibly repressed. It is rarely looked upon as something that should be pleasurable for a woman, and the concept of fore-play doesn’t really exist, which brings with it a whole truckload of related problems. So to have a married Khmer woman openly talking about enjoying sex is AWESOME. AWESOME and funny.
On another amusing note; I have written about the “crazy lady” at my school before. I will recap though. There is a mentally ill woman in my community who thinks she is a teacher. She shows up at the school every day, in teaching clothes (button down blouse and a floor length skirt called a sampot), carrying a notebook, and wanders into classrooms talking nonsense. She seems to think I am interesting or something because she shows up at least once in just about every class I teach. I didn’t think to warn Meghan about her, and during the workshop she just wandered in and started telling a story about a relative in Battambang who had just gotten engaged. It reminded me that where we are from that would never every happen. In a way I appreciate that it does here. She fits into the fabric of the community so much more easily here than she would where I am from where she would either be viewed as an unacceptable disruption or a danger.
