Swear In

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I know I'm a little bit late on this post, as I've already blogged a little bit about life at permanent site, but the pictures from our swearing in are just too great to not post. Now, remember how in my last post I said my camera was acting up and finally died? Well, it was acting up this day, and this was the only picture I got. Hal had to teach someone to tie a tie right before we left for swear in.

So thanks to everyone for letting me steal these pictures from facebook!

Our Peace Corps swearing in was legit. At least I thought it was, we had the Minister of Health there, who gave a speech, and went way off his speech so we all had no idea what he was saying since he was speaking all in Khmer. It was awesome.

Did you know that Peace Corps Volunteers take the same oath as the military?

So...now you get to see pictures of us celebrating! It was the last day that we were all together, and we were finally volunteers after 9 weeks of training. And, we were dressed to the nines!

Many girls wore traditional wedding outfits. The skirts are called sampots. They are the traditional Khmer skirts that I have to wear every day to teach. You can get really expensive silk ones that are just gorgeous, but those are mainly for weddings. The tops, as you will see I didn't get one made, but they are barbie princess-o-licious!

 Enough to make any little girl playing dress up seriously jealous, no? The girl in the middle, my friend Erica had my favorite top of the day!

 These are two of my closest friends I made during training, holla to Erica and Stewart.

The sweet gang sign they made up to represent us as a group, that's supposed to be K5, as we're the 5th group of volunteers in the country.

Don't mind the fingers in this picture, it's still fabulous. This is everyone from my training village, we totally had the best training village, Traing showed everyone else up!

We had to have a sweet party all together that night, as every PCV in Cambodia was in Phnom Penh, I'm not one to go out and party very often, but I had a blast that night.

 And check it out, we made the news, and I'm even in the picture!

Failures vs. Successes

While some would view today as a fail,

-My camera finally broke : Fail

-I forgot my old cell phone to use as a spare because I knew my camera was acting up: Fail

-We went to the local mountain pagoda and the monkeys were not there: Fail

-No pictures of said trip, as camera broke: Fail

-I forgot to put on deodorant AND sun screen: Ultimate Fail


I'm choosing to see it as a giant success


-We rode our bikes through a flooded road where the water level was up to the peddles, and made it across with only our shoes wet: Success

-The chicken on a stick lady was at the market so we had a lovely picnic at the pagoda: Success (and it's delicious!)

-Our market finally has apples, it tasted like the most delicious apple I've ever had: Success

-The pagoda was extremely beautiful, and although I realized how much more I need to get in shape, hiking all of those stairs gave us the most spectacular view of our area: Success

-We bought baby sized pumpkins to carve for Halloween, since they don't do Halloween here: Success

-We found the only monk at the pagoda who spoke any English, he asked us if we were on Facebook, and then proceeded to give us his legit business card with his skype and facebook names...only in Cambodia: Success

-We ran into one of the VSO volunteers at the pagoda and his newly arrived girlfriend, and had a wonderful time talking with them: Success

-We had fettucine with olive oil and balsamic vinegar for dinner, and it was delicious: Success

-We found Fanta Sarsi, the Fanta version of Rootbeer in our local market: Ultimate Success!!

This is an adventure.

I want to be really open and honest about my Peace Corps experience, because I think to outsiders it's often romanticized, and after you go home, the bad things kind of seem to fade away and you can only remember the good times, so I am going to try and do my best to document both the good and bad times. And please, if you read my posts, or any PCV's posts lend your support, a PCV can't ever have enough support.

We have now been officially at our site for just over two whole weeks! It is a strange feeling to go from having 20 people around you all the time for two months to having 60 people around you all the time for a week to having just your husband around you for the next two years.

We had a hard first week at site. Well, mostly had a hard couple of days there within the first week. It was hard for me because things weren't what I expected. All along they said have no expectations, I didn't really think I had any, but then they kind of led you to have some expectations of how things would go, with getting set up working at site. You get to site, go to school and start observing all of the English teachers, and then pick your co teachers from there. That's what I expected. That is not what happened. My school director picked my co-teachers for me, before I even got to site. This made me feel much discouraged in the beginning.

It has been slow going at the school. I still don't have my schedule figured out as the school director just changed all of the English teacher's schedules this week. I also haven't been able to observe one of my co-teaches yet, mostly because well, he hasn't showed up to class when we agreed, but I guess such is life in Cambodia. I'm slowly learning to be more flexible, which if I can achieve this, it would probably make coming out here all worth it, especially in Hal's eyes, as back home I was often very rigid with plan and time changes.

After struggling for a few days I made a list, benefits of going home and benefits of staying. As I wrote the last item on my to stay list I realized that I would never go home right now, that I'm supposed to be here. Making this decision made me feel a lot better. It doesn't make living in Cambodia a whole lot easier, but it makes me feel happier living here.

After that I started to look on the bright side. At least my school director picked some good teachers, who I'm excited to work with. Hal has been trying to involve me with his work at the Health Center, because even though I'm here as an English teacher, I am also very interested in the work of the midwives. We have a "soda pop lady", we found the "nom jake" the fried bananas, which are my favorite treat, one of my co-teachers has been SO sweet and has taken us out to dinner twice, we met her friends, and one lives across the street from us. I don't think she knows it yet, but she's going to be my friend too. It feels good to realize all of the amazing things about living in Cambodia.

As I told Hal last night. I hate missing out on things back home, especially my family, but back home I felt like I was missing out on an adventure. Hal told me that we need to make sure that this is an adventure then. Hopefully that will be our moto while living here, This is an adventure.

Mad Men

Well now that we're at permanent site finally we have a lot of free time. Especially right now as I'm just observing teachers and figuring out my schedule for teaching. We had such an awesome plan to go to this mountain wat about 4 km away from here. Apparently there are wild monkeys there. We had a plan. We were just going to watch 1 episode of Mad Men and then go in the afternoon. Umm, a season and a half later it was 8 pm and we hadn't left the house all day. Good thing we had some food stored here, otherwise we couldn't have accomplished an entire day of Mad Men. So...here are my thoughts about this show.

Umm, I love it. I loved the first three seasons and ate it up and wanted to watch it all the time.Luckily I was busy all the time during training, or else I probably would have watched all 4 seasons by now.

I have a serious girl crush on January Jones after watching this show. And a real crush on Jon Hamm. (Anyone remember him from 30 Rock? haha, pre-mad men sexy days).

But we just started the 4th season and it's so different. My love for Betty Draper is almost gone. And Don is just a drunk. Please, someone tell me that there is a method to the madness? And that I'll still love the show at the end of this season.

I am so bummed that season 5 doesn't start until March, and then I'll have to wait until it's done airing to find it at some little shop for like $6 or something. Gah, anyone know of a website that would work in Cambodia where I can watch current shows happening in the US? I have a lot of free time and am missing 30 Rock!

Pan Am looked so good, has anyone been watching it? Ok, let's just face it, I love time period shows.


P.S. You guys should let me know of new TV shows that come out that you love, so I can see if I can find them here come May or June. And the same for movies!


Update: Just finished season 4 and I'm even more mad!(pun intended) Seriously, her? Faye was way better. Ugh, March better come quick, although they always skip forward, never starting where they left off.

Pchum Ben

 Pchum Ben is a Cambodian holiday that is related to the Buddhist religion. The holiday is for Cambodians to pay respects to their deceased ancestors. The basis for the holiday is that the gates of Hell open and their ancestors who are there need to be fed, so they go to the pagoda very early in the morning to "throw sticky rice". 

We got up at 2:30 a.m. Yes, A.M. We saw a text that we didn't actually have to get up until 3. So I went back to bed, and Hal stayed up. We met another volunteer at the end of our street because her host mom wouldn't let her out that early without making sure that she wasn't going alone. We road about a kilometer down to my teacher's house where we met about 10 other people and we rode off to the pagoda. Have you ever looked at the stars in a small Cambodian village at 3 am? I wish I could have captured it in a picture, it was the most amazing sky I've ever seen.

We got to the pagoda around 3:30 and apparently were the first ones there, so we ended up waking all of the monks up. We waited in the pagoda for a while with nothing really happening except more people arriving. Around 4 they started the chanting. Sometimes I wonder if even Cambodians can understand the chanting.

After about 20 minutes of some men chanting, we joined the monks in a different temple within the pagoda grounds. Everyone put their plates of sticky rice down and then the monks started chanting. After about another 20 minutes of chanting the fun began.

Surrounding this temple were about 10 of these baby sized temples with small boxes next to them where you toss the sticky rice. Hal and I got our own place of sticky rice balls to throw in the boxes.

 

It was a really cool experience to get up that early and to take part of an important religious holiday. Pchum Ben is one of the top holidays here in Cambodia. It's what I call the equivalent of Thanksgiving for Cambodians because everyone comes "home" for 3 days. Pchum Ben actually lasts 15 days, but the last 3 days are the most important, and it's what everyone comes home for. I loved meeting all of my yay's (host grandmother) children. Now that we're at permanent site with our new family, I am so glad that I was able to spend that holiday with the family that I had grown to love for 2 months. We're already planning our trip back to visit. Our yay told us we must come during mango season. mmm mangoes.

Transportation in Cambodia.

Transport in Cambodia is a funny thing, really I guess it's more of a dangerous thing. There are lots of different modes of transport in Cambodia. Our main mode is a bike. We ride our bikes everywhere. I'm psyched to have super fit legs at the end of two years! It is a bummer that because the roads are often dirt or just really crappy you can get flat tires a lot.

During training we took what's called a romorque (or "roma") to our big meetings every week. They are like a hay ride, minus the hay and tractor and add in a moto and rust. If you're quick and grab on the back it can make for a fast bike ride.

As Peace Corps Volunteers we aren't allowed really to ride motos, but that doesn't mean that we don't interact with motos every single day. It's probably the biggest mode of transport in Cambdoia. There are so many of them on the road and they drive super fast and don't really have any respect for anything else on the road, especially bicyclists. They often drive on the wrong side of the road, and often appear out of no where.

And that's why my very first week in my training village I was hit by a moto. I was late to class, and missed my turn off, so I had to turn around. I looked behind me and didn't see anything so I started to turn, and that's when I was T-boned by a moto. I'm not really sure what happened as it all happened really fast, we both went down and at one point I remember the moto was on top of me. I don't know if it was the adrenaline, or if it was something else, but I wasn't in any pain.

The people pulled their moto off of me and many other people stopped to help me collect all of the papers from my basket that were now thrown all over the road. There were people screaming at me in Khmer from so many directions, so I was lucky when a man who spoke English stopped to help me. He actually fixed my bike so I could ride to class. All I could think about was how I was late for class. He even followed me to my class, because he found my key on the road. It was probably a good thing, because he told my teachers what happened. When I sat down to finally get looked at it all just came out, just talking about what happened made me cry, I kind of hate that adrenaline does that to me.

I was really lucky though. I wasn't seriously hurt at all. I had some scratches, and some big bruises, and definitely limped for about a week, but for being hit by a moto I was seriously lucky. This is the only evidence of my moto accident.

My tid bit of advice for riding bikes in a moto country...wear your helmet, I wore mine and it probably helped save my life. Also, always double or triple look both ways to see if something is coming, because often times there's a moto headed down the street on the wrong side of the road.