Rice Fields

The town where we're doing our training is not very large, in fact it's the smallest of the 3 current training villages. They had to split us up into 3 villages since there are 60 of us trainees. Because our village is rather small, it consists of what most of rural Cambodia consists of: rice fields.

Rice fields are very simple, yet they are stunningly beautiful. Everytime I ride past the edge of town I am amazed at how beautiful Cambodia is. The endless rice fields with palm trees (a symbol of Cambodia) off in the distance. It just seems so serene. 

We took a back road through the rice fields a few weeks back and it was amazing. We met a group of men who fish in the rice fields. Who knew that they were so full of fish, crabs, snakes, and many other little creatures.

One of my friends had the opportunity to throw a net out and try his luck at fishing in a rice field. Alas, he had no luck, but a fisherman did come show us his catch of the day. Too bad it was covered in leeches, Hal's one big fear. And too bad he didn't notice the leeches until after I took this picture.

A Visit to Kampot

This past weekend we had a mini vacation to Kampot town. It is much bigger than the provincial town here at our training site, and even has some western food restaurants, so I was really excited. It turned out to be, as I like to call it a "foodcation" The whole trip was centered around eating. It was our third anniversary earlier in the week, so we used this as an opportunity to splurge on food and hotel. A good guesthouse (Paris Guesthouse) was recommended, and ended up being where most trainees stayed, so we splurged and got AC! It's nice to come back at the end of the day and not sweat in your room. Sometimes a fan just doesn't do enough.

Kampot has a beautiful river, and along the river are strings of restaurants with western food. The other side of the river is the "khmer side"where the market and Khmer restaurants are located.

We found this particularly delicious restaurant, run by a british man( Rusty Keyhole). He had ribs, and mashed potatoes, and everything delicious you could think of. We went there for our friend's birthday dinner, and ended up there again for lunch the next day.

Do you see that pie in front of her? Now I am not the biggest fan of chocolate desserts, but this, this was the most delicious chocolately pie I've ever had. It tasted like the best brownie I've eaten. My mouth is watering just thinking about it! If you're in Kampot definitely go to Sisters II for some pumpkin spice pancakes and  brownie pie.

After eating lunch they brought out my order of mashed potatoes, but I was literally so full I couldn't eat anything, so Hal asked them to "take it away" so a few minutes later the waitress brought it in a "take away" bag for us. Oops, it was a British restaurant after all. I was glad to have the potatoes later, because even cold they were better than most Khmer food.

And now we are in our very last week of training before becoming actual Peace Corps Volunteers. Wish us luck, we will be sworn in, in one week, and one day.

Site Announcement

This last week Hal and I found out where we are moving for the next two years! I really liked how they told us the news. We started out after a lunch of pizza from Phnom Penh. Pizza!! It  had been so long since we'd had pizza, people literally ate an entire pizza themselves. I had just downed a dragon fruit because I thought we were having more Khmer food for lunch. Much to my dismay I was too full to eat more than 3 pieces.

After lunch they gave us a commitment speech. It was actually a really nice speech, and helped build up the anticipation, since they wouldn't let us go upstairs, to our normal meeting room.

We were so surprised when we went up there and they had taped to the floor a map of the Cambodian provinces, and there were numbers all throughout the each province, obviously, everyone's sites. So they started out by calling a number out of a box and that number had someone's name attached, and then they handed you a large envelope which said your province and site name on it.

I was lucky and was probably in the first 10 people called. Good news, I got the site I wanted! I can't tell you exactly where we're moving, but we're going to the north.
Below is everyone going to our province

The very next day we headed out for site visit. We spent all day on a bus. I think we got in around 7 or 8, which is like almost midnight by Cambodian standards. We stayed one night in our provincial town(the biggest town in that province) and then the next morning we met our host families and went to our prospective villages. It was lonely being the only ones in our village, but I think we'll really like it there.

We visited Hal's Health Center (above), and the director was very friendly. It took us a while to track down the school director, but apparently he had been trying to track me down as well, so I was able to meet with him also. My school it seems is rather large, they have 8 English teachers, which is more than anyone I've talked to.

Our host family was awesome, and their house is pretty nice! We only have a small room, but hey, we have running water! I haven't had running water since we got here! And the best part of their house? In our bathroom, is a FLUSHING toilet. You don't know how amazing that word is until you've been using a bucket to clean yourself for two months.

We're back in our training villages for another couple of weeks. I must say, I'm really going to miss living with my training host familiy. They are so sweet and loving, and I even missed them for the 5 days that we were gone.

It feels good to be "home", but I'm sure soon enough, the north will feel like home too.

Kampuchea Vs. USA

As you may have noticed from my previous posts, things are done a little bit different around here. There are some things that are easier to adjust to than others. For example some things that were not too hard to adjust to are:

-bugs being everywhere. I thought this would bother me, but once you realize the spiders never leave their webs and catch the mosquitos that are constantly biting you, you learn to not be bothered by the spiders. Huge, as I call them "turantulasourus" spiders hanging out with you while you shower is a big more bothersome, but you learn to deal with it. I call those, I'm not conditioning my hair days.

-Rains. You just kind of go with the flow here. We are constantly subject to the weather here. It starts pouring...so you wait a few minutes to see if it will stop, and then you strap on a rain coat, and head to class. Hey, at least you're not sweating.

-Riding your bike everywhere. It's free, and much easier than trying to find transportation. I've ridden my bike more in the last month than I have in probably the last 15 years. On the plus side, I love my bike, and I'm sure I'm going to have awesomely fit legs when I get home.

-Wearing bug spray like it's going out of style. It beats getting dengue.

Other things are not so easy to adjust to:

-Always being sweaty. For instance right now, I am sweating. It is the rainy season here and  therefore, it's always humid. It's humid right after it rains, and all day until it rains. It's humid when you wake up. Right now, you just kind of can't escape it, so slowly we've been adjusting to the heat.

-Being bitten by bugs. No matter how much bug spray you put on, you will sweat it off, and when you're spending time with your family after dinner, you will get bit...a lot. I hate mosquitoes.

-Laundry. No washing machines here. Everything is done by hand with some buckets, some soap, and two hands. One day my neighbor (my yay's sister) came over when we were doing laundry, she laughed at us and proceeded to school us at doing laundry. She was literally like 20 times faster than we were. Maybe one day I'll reach that level of skill. Until then, I'll continue to be slow and add fabric softener, not so my clothes will be softer, but so they won't stink because it takes them 2 days to dry.

Even though some things are harder to adjust to, it's nice to feel like I'm doing things the Cambodia way. Next week we leave to visit our permanent site. I'm nervous, and I really want to be be able to integrate into my community and makes friends there, so hopefully, having the attitude of wanting to do it the Cambodian way, will help me love life here in Cambodia.

One Month In

I figured it would be a good idea to give you guys a good picture of what the average day is like for a Peace Corps Trainee. I had no idea that training would be so intense!

We wake up in the morning about 6:30ish, depending on the day. We get ready and say goodbye to our host family and head to the market on our bikes for breakfast. This is the only meal we don't eat with our host families.

At the market we choose what we want. We've slowly found more options, like a tuckaluck(basically a smoothie). We have also found something that resembles a doughnut, and a muffin. It's hard to find a reliable source of bread in our village, but those days we find it, it's awesome. We also found a noodle lady that is only 1,000 riel (.25 cents) and it's really good.

After breakfast we make our way to the school, we have to be there around 7:30 for langauge. We study Khmer for 4 hours. Yes, I said 4 hours. We have a practice test tomorrow morning for the test we must pass to show where our language skills are.

After langauge we head home to eat with our host families. Our yay(grandma) seriously makes really good food. The other volunteers are jealous because she makes french fries, but they're more like sweet potato fries, because their potatoes are a bit different.

After lunch we have about an hour to relax in the crazy heat before heading back out for technical training. So Hal heads to one house where he learns about CHE(Community Health Education) and what that involves, and I head to ETTT(English Teacher & Teacher Training) where I learn about what it takes to be an English teacher in Cambodia. We do this for about 4 hours.

Then we head home for hopefully another delicious meal. We try and spend time with our family without getting bitten too much by muu(mosquitos), but they like my legs so usually I head back up to the safe haven of our room after our yay's soap opera is over, and after we have finished dancing to Justin Bieber.

Funny note on Justin Bieber, I had never heard all of a Justin Bieber song in the US, and in the month that I've been here, I've heard multiple songs, and even seen some videos thanks to my host brother's sweet "new" computer, that doesn't have internet, so I'm not exactly sure how he has the videos, but they sure do love themselves some Bieber.

So although our days are long we have been having such a good time in Cambodia. Two people from our group went home this week. I'm so glad that I have been loving it here though.