"Don't talk to crazy people"

I have written about the woman at my school who thinks she is a teacher, and I think I have mentioned the woman my host mom chased away with a stick during training (that’s quite a story so you guys will have to let me know if I have not in fact shared that experience). There is a strange man who often shows up at eating establishments I frequent and raves about people trying to kill him and wanting my phone number. Now we have a new character. I was at the market the other day buying fruit and chatting with my fruit lady when this woman walked up. She wore glasses and had a trendy haircut (signs of $$) so I did not realize right away that she was talking nonsense. Of course, the fact that her sentences consisted of Khmer, English, AND French, didn’t help. Anyhow she was showing me random stuff out of her purse and the fruit stand ladies were giving me “we don’t know what she is saying either” kinds of looks. So finally I completed my fruit transaction and walked home. I had been sitting chatting with my jolly yay for a few minutes when this woman appeared in front of my house. She sauntered on over and sat down next to me and proceeded to sing me a song while pointing to various injuries on various parts of her body. I sat there looking puzzled for a bit before my ming (aunt) looked at me and mouthed “GO IN THE HOUSE”. So I did. Later my business yay asked me about it. I told her that I didn’t know the woman and that she had followed me from the market and I didn’t know what to do. Her advice was this; “Cher, do not talk to crazy people.” Duly noted.

This past several weeks also included another golden moment with my Khmer tutor. I asked her the Khmer word for “rub,” as in “rub in ointment,” or something along those lines. The dictionary had several contextual options for “rub,” one of which was “rub one out,” and I naturally laughed. She naturally wanted to know why I laughed. I attempted to explain the slang meaning by having her look up relevant words, as a result I discovered another glaring omission in the Khmer dictionary (well, the one we were using at least).

Every once in a while I am struck by an unexpected memory of my pre Cambodian life that leaves me feeling nostalgic. This week I was contemplating Halloween and my thoughts wandered to Kay. Kay is (or at least was) the organic chemistry lab coordinator at Linfield. I thought of her because she took Halloween seriously. Every year on Halloween Kay came to work in a full body lion suit, complete with tail, and lab coat. Arguably, a full body lion suit is not the best idea in a chem. Lab, but that never stopped her. I was debating dressing up for Halloween this year, but I think I will in honor of Kay.

Foo is still a little monster. I have included photographic evidence in this blog. The other night he stuck his head in my mosquito net and started banging on the keys of my laptop until he noticed the movie that was playing and then asked if Hannah Montana is my friend. Yes, I was watching the Hannah Montana movie.

Goals

Not much new has happened in the last several weeks. I did a little traveling and a little relaxing around Cambodia, celebrated the k4s swearing in in Phnom Penh, and had a couple low key weeks at site waiting for school to get going again. It has been fun getting to know the new volunteers in my province since swear in. I know it isnt new years but I feel like the swearing in of new volunteers is a good time to re-assess goals. So here is a list of my new goals for the last 10 months in Cambodia:

1)Learn to like beer. It's far more economical.
2)Start reading things of substance again. I recently rememebered that I like learning, and moreover, and I hate how much stuff I have forgotten. (Dad I now understand why we used to find you reading chemistry textbooks in the garage,I wish I had mine here)
3)Teach less EFC and more creative things. I surprised myself with the realization that I really like teaching, I just hate the EFC (the English Language Curriculum used here).
4)Try more new recipes. I made pumpkin soup last weekend and it was a success. I really should learn to cook khmer food too...
5)Travel outside of Cambodia. It seems ridiculous that I have been here over a year and haven't gone anywhere (except America of course...)
6)Get khmer-tastic photos taken.
7)?
8)?
9)?
10)Figure out what I am doing after Cambodia.

Khmer Medical Terms

I am in Kampong Cham once again helping with training. Today one of the volunteers had an English/Khmer dictionary of medical termonology. While waiting for community activities to start a few of us went through the dictionary, as a result I now have a number of new favorites.

the khmer term for sperm literally translatess to "the boss of life"
the khmer term for speculum literally translates to "Tool to open the golden door"
the khmer term for anus literally translates to "big door"
AND last but not least, the khmer term for priapism translates to "angry penis"

Gross

It has been nice taking a break from busy and just hanging out at site. It’s nice to feel that way. I have spent a considerable amount of time recently laying in my hammock, eating pomegranates, and reading the Chronicles of Narnia and various other novels of comparable intellectual magnitude (in addition to mornings at the health center, lesson planning and translating, of course).

I realized the other night that there is a major omission in my khmer language knowledge, an omission which most certainly needs to be remedied given that I live with a 3 year old boy. The word I seem to be missing in my Khmer repetoir is “gross.” I know how to say various things like “not delicious,” “I don’t like,” “…smells bad,” etc… But I do not know how to express disgust at another person. It would be natural at this point to be wondering what brought to light this hole in my education. The incident occurred around 6:30PM on the night of September the 3rd, 2010. I was cooking my dinner and in marched Foo. He climbed up onto a stool next to me as he often does when I am cooking dinner. He began asking me various “Cher, what is this? Where did you buy it? etc…” types of questions as per usual. I looked over to respond to his inquiries and saw that he was buck naked with one leg on the stool and one on my counter/cooking surface in a lunge-like position. I laughed; 3 year olds like to run around naked, whatever. But then he started eating things; things that are not meant to be eaten by themselves. It started with an uncooked penne noodle. No big. Then he had his hand in my oatmeal tin. Then he started tasting my spices (and crinkling his nose after each one and yelling “Doikanea!!” which means ‘the same’). Then he was sticking his finger in my spaghetti sauce. None of this is terribly disgusting but then I turned away to stir my pasta and when I looked back Foo was standing on the counter, still completely naked, shoveling the contents of a can of low-fat milk powder into his mouth with a spoon. GROSS. I mean if it had been frosting or something, sure, but low-fat milk powder…not delicious.

Oh wait, I know stuff...

The last month or so has been rather busy. There isn't a whole lot to report though. I spent a good chunk of time helping out with training of the new volunteers (welcome k4!). The main result of this was a realization of how far I have come in the last year. It's funny how you can fail to see your own progress until you catch a glimpse of where you were before. I realized just how much I have learned about Cambodia, khmer culture, and language as well as issues in the healthcare and education systems. Moreover, it occured to me how much more comfotable I am with our khmer staff after having lived here for a year. So thats a nice confidence boost.

Ryan was also here for 10 days. It was great to have my brother here and get to share my Cambodia life with him a bit. That also opened my eyes a bit to how much I have adapted to my life here.

Babies don't grow in the vagina...

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.

MISC.

This week I had the pleasure of explaining to my khmer tutor that sperm and bacteria are not the same thing.

So, I am prepping this lesson on reproductive health. Really basic stuff; these are the kinds of birth control available, here is how they work, these ones are the best, etc… I doubt that any of my girls actually need this information but many of them will probably be married soon so I figure I might as well give them the info now. My Khmer tutor was helping me to go through the lesson and translate it. Even though I have help with translating the lessons while I teach them, I try to make sure I at least understand the basics of the language necessary so I will know if there is a major mistranslation. This particular topic is proving to be a challenge, not because I am shy about teaching it, but because getting someone to translate it is proving difficult. Trying to explain what I want to say when my teacher does not have the vocabulary in English, or the practical knowledge in her own language…tricky. This challenge led to an interesting conversation during my last session. My tutor was explaining to me that she knows about condoms because she teaches HIV/AIDS education. She is a primary school teacher. I got rather excited thinking that they actually taught sexual education in my district. WRONG. They teach HIV/AIDS education in 6th grade, but from what I gathered, there is no sexual education taught in the schools. I have been here long enough not to be surprised by this, but I have to say the logic seems faulty, teaching safe sex to kids who probably don’t even know the mechanics of it. I know there is debate even in the states about how much should be taught in schools but it seems to me that if you are going to teach about things like condoms you should probably make sure people know the basics.

On a more serious note: Recently I began reading the Twilight books. I have resisted this for a long time, but finally illness induced boredom got the better of me. Now I could go off on a shpeel about how you should be required to have a college degree to read these books so as to ensure that you don’t take them seriously, I could rage about how they completely normalize and even idolize violence in the context of romantic relationships, I could add to all of the commentary about anti-feminism and what have you, or perhaps the whole issue of forefitting your SOUL for a boy…but I won’t. Instead my mental processes have been entirely consumed with this question: Edward or Jacob? As far as personality and general attractiveness I would have to go with the werewolf. Ultimately though, I think the choice is entirely climate dependent. Living in Cambodia for a year has taught me to value cold things. So I would say Pacific Northwest Meghan is all about cuddling with a personal heater and Cambodia Meghan is all about shacking up with a walking air conditioner. In short, friends and family, this is what my brain has deteriorated to.

This past week I taught my health club about exercise. My friends at home can go ahead and keep laughing. They really did not know much of anything about how much exercise you should do or basic kinds of exercise you could do. They wanted me to demonstrate some things which was fine. We started with really basic things like sits ups and push-ups. I kid you not, these girls are itty bitty but maybe 2 out of 20 of them could actually do a sit-up. Also, I wanted to smack the lot of them because they were asking questions about how to lose weight or make their thighs smaller etc and so forth…because a 000 isn’t small enough already.