Meet My: Favorite People and Things

One big thing they teach you in training is called IRBig. Inter relationship building. This is a big part of what you do in Peace Corps. It's so important to build good relationships with people in your town. When you get to know a Cambodian they will look out for you and help you in any way they can.

Here are some people whom be built good relationships with and whom we enjoyed seeing every day.

First is our vegetable lady. The first time we went to the market we went to a different lady and she totally over charged us. The next time we went to a new lady and she gave us awesome prices, and thus she became our veggie lady. Her and her husband were always there and they always asked about Hal if I went alone and visa versa.

 Next is our drink lady. We would always stop at her little stall which was on our road, close to the crossroads with the main road, so we passed it a lot. Her entire family knew us and they were all incredibly sweet. She lives next door to our host aunt, so in the evenings when I would ride past on my way to teach I'd have a big crowd of waves.

 The next woman we didn't know super well, but we loved what she made. It's one of our favorite things, and I am so bummed I forgot to bring some back. She makes Skaw Tuh-nout. Or translated as brown sugar. But it's probably actually palm sugar. You could go in the afternoon and she's take down the bucket collecting sugar from the tap in the tree and you could watch her turn it into what she's holding below. This stuff was so yummy and creamy and perfect in oatmeal.

Next up is the K2, the previous volunteer's host family. They are the sweetest Cambodians I have ever met. They were our Khmer tutors, and the host dad is also fluent in french. I just love this family to death. Our host dad told us that once they asked if we could come live with them instead. They have two sons, a daughter in law who is gorgeous, and one grand daughter. The baby was never really interested in us, and was often a little scared. The picture below is our last dinner with them days before we left and we gave them some of our Cambodian wedding pictures. The baby saw them and all of the sudden her attitude towards us change. She was playful and loving towards us after that. Anyway, I adore this family.

I already told you about one of my favorite girls in town, but here's some more. These little girls lived where my favorite puppy lived. I once tried to go take pictures of him, but he wasn't there, so they went on a quest to find him. These munchkins already knew my name, and the little girl on the left is named Lisa. Everytime she was home when I rode by she would yell "Hello Sam" and I would yell "Hello Lisa" back. She would always seem so shocked that I remembered her name. 

In conjunction with this picture, is a missing picture. The woman who lives next to the family above is our Sugus lady. Sugus is a candy similar to starbursts. I am really sad that I somehow never got a picture with her. She looked out for us. Whenever we'd be walking down to the road to catch a taxi or a bus to Siem Reap or somewhere she'd always ask where we were going. She'd always notice when we came back. She is actually the one who found the dog in the above picture sleeping under her little stall. She was so sweet and we joked around with her a lot.

I figure I should round this out with at least one man. This is Muny. He is my host uncle, and he teaches economics at the high school. He speaks fabulous English and has one of the best world views of any Cambodian I've met, mostly because he lived in France for a bit. I posted about his engagement here. He is probably the best young Cambodian man I've ever met. He bought a touri (a large van) so his family could all come to his engagement in Siem Reap. Well, he was so nice and gave me the best deal and drove my girls to and from Siem Reap for Camp Glow.

I'm sure there are many more people and things which deserve to be on this list, but this is what I have so far. Cambodians are just the greatest people and I am so lucky I've had the opportunity to get to know some of them.

Meet My: Town

I'm trying to finish up my posts about Cambodia, but it seems like every time I get on the computer I think of something else I want to share with you about our experiences there. Here's some glimpses of what our town looked like.

These are two pictures from a tall house by our market. The first one is looking west, at the road our market is on. The second one is looking north towards the road our house was on.

I really liked our town. It was a good distance from bigger towns that we could go to when we needed it, but it was big enough that there were things to do while we were at site. A national road runs through my site and it's in between two big tourist spots so every once in a while we'd see people biking through our town, and one time we even saw an older foreigner walking through our town. I remember my co-teacher asked me as we watched him walk past the school, "why is that foreigner just walking?" I don't know co-teacher, I don't know.

Before we left our town I really wanted to get some video of where we lived. Below are two videos of my town. The first is the street that we lived on, so I walk north facing east and then walk back to the house facing west.  You'll see our house, Hal and my host mom and then our taxi filled with all of our stuff as I walk by. The last video is one I took from the taxi window as we drove out of town. You'll see the school at the end of the video.

Meet My: Co-Teachers

Co-teachers can make or break your time in Cambodia. They have a serious impact on the amount you end up teaching. My school director had chosen my co-teachers for me when I arrived. I worked with 3 co-teachers, all whom have names that start with S, so they shall be S1, S2, and S3.

First is S1. I never really got a good picture of S1. He had been teaching for I think 15 years, and was pretty set in his ways. He was a great teacher when he actually taught. He had another job working for a cell phone company, and since that one paid more, it came first, before teaching. I only taught one 10th grade class with him, but those students were smarter than all of my other classes....probably combined.

S2 is a newer teacher. It was only his second year teaching. He teaches middle school level and is going to school to get his degree to teach high school. He was so great to talk to. We had a lot of great conversations, but he would often want to talk over teaching. Once he told me, "I don't want to teach today, I am sad." I wish that I had pushed him to teach more, but it's hard to know where that line is, especially as a woman interacting with a man. Our 7th grade students were notorious for leaving after their first class if their teacher didn't show up, so we'd go to teach for the second set of classes and no students would be there. I taught 1 7th grade class and 1 8th grade class with him.
He got married suddenly and I was in china so I ended up missing his wedding. It seems like it was kind of a shot gun wedding. I'm not really sure. I couldn't get a straight answer out of anyone.

S3, good ol S3. I was so lucky to have a female co-teacher to work with. She is the only female to teach English at the high school level in my school. I worked with her a lot on my projects and she was my main co-teacher. She started a private English school in our town where students could come and for a rather reasonable price take extra English lessons. She's currently expanding her school to add more classes in things like computer skills. She has so much drive compared to a lot of Cambodian woman and is probably considered a spinster in Cambodia. But she's lovely and she's successful, and she's one of the people I miss the most.

Lastly I'll include my school director, Mr. P as I'll call him here. He was always so friendly and nice to Hal and I. Especially Hal. He really liked hanging out with Hal. He was a supportive school director and never said no to any project I wanted to do. He loved maps and would study English on his own every single night. He always looked out for us and was upset when I didn't turn to him for help when I had dengue. He is a nice guy, but lets his teachers get away with everything.

Between co-teachers not showing up to school and students either not showing up or leaving early teaching English at public schools in Cambodia can be very very difficult. If they do show up, the current text book is pretty horrible and out of date. Thanks to Peace Corps and some partnerships, hopefully that will change soon thanks to a new textbook in development.
But when you do get those moments where you click with the students and they get what you're talking about, they're magical. Those are the moments that get you through the weeks where you end up teaching only one class.

Meet My: Host Family

This post is a long time coming. I know, I'm so bad that as we're getting ready to say goodbye to them, I'm just introducing you to them. Of course I've posted about all of them before in little stories of our adventures over the past here, but here is your opportunity to see them.

First we have our Host Dad (X-Ray):
X-Ray, is the radiologist at our local hospital. When Hal broke his elbow we went there and he took some X-Rays of his arm. He learned English when he used to work in a border town with Thailand, but he gets very nervous when we speak English to him. Apparently his English is very good when he's drunk.

And then our Host Mom (Bookie):

We call her bookie because when we first moved in our host dad told us she just worked from home. Little did we know, those number's she's shouting on the phone every month, they're for the town lottery which she runs. Oh, and did I mention she's a loan shark? Pretty baller, eh? 

Our host mom is part of the reason why we love site. She just loves to hang out with us and be involved in anything we're doing. She has the most genuinely funny laugh I've ever heard in Cambodia. Here she is using her mortar and pestle to grind some pepper we brought back from Kampot. She makes a mean pumpkin curry, and likes pizza.

Next is our younger Host Sister (Moto Accident):

You can probably guess why we call her moto accident. Right after we moved to site she got in a moto accident out on the main road. Luckily X-Ray could come home and patch her up. She wouldn't eat anything all day except for what we gave her. We made cookies and gave her some of our favorite treats.

This is also a sweet introduction to how most Cambodians take pictures with awkwardly straight faces. Oh, and she's pretty awesome at doing nails. Here she had just done her nails, painted them red, put sparkles in the corners and then added princess stickers. The most beautiful Khmer nails ever. She graduates this year and wants to go to school to be a beautician.

And lastly we have our little Host Brother (Silenceor):
One guess as to why we call him the Silenceor...he kind of just doesn't talk. Especially to us, and especially when we first came to site. We would ask him direct questions and he would just stand there or slowly walk away. He just never really talked much in general, but this week I heard him playing with a baby. Holy moly, it was the loudest I've ever heard him be. Apparently Bookie needs to have another baby.

He may not say much, but he will try just about any western food we make, and really loves anything sweet we give him from America. He's always happy to help us bake something in our oven and enjoys the fruits of his labors.

So glad that you could meet my host family. They're really great people and we have enjoyed living with them the last year. Bookie's family lives here in town and they're all very nice to us when they see us riding around town. X-Ray's family lives up north and have a farm where they make red rice, which truly is more delicious than normal white rice. They are truly very giving people and after a year of hinting, Bookie finally bought me some matching Khmer pjs; so overall we're pretty lucky around here.

Meet My: School

It's definitely time for another post to help you see my life here in Cambodia. This ones all about my High School. It's technically a middle school and high school all in one. My school is a little bit unique, as my school director and his son really like to garden, we have pots of plants all over the school.

This is the 12th grade building and the administration office where the school director and assistant school director can be found most of the time. I don't particularly like to hang out in there, there's bats living in the ceiling.

This is the 10th grade building, where I teach one class. This is the wall of the school I want to do an art project on.

So funny story about my school, which kind of shows how Cambodia works. They got money for a new building which they started(pictured below), but they ran out of money and so they stopped work on it. Later they were sponsored to build a new building by the company that runs a local orphanage. Of course they didn't finish the building they already started. They actually took materials away from that building to work on the new building(pictured above). It's almost finished, so hopefully next year they won't have to have classes outside.

This is the 7th grade building which I also teach in. It's badly in need of repair...or more like, needs to be torn down. If it's raining, you can't teach as the entire roof has massive leaks and many of the walls are missing.

This is one of the two 12th grade outdoor classes.

This year the high school started up a garden project. The students water and week their plots all themselves. They have little competitions to see whos looks better and who produces the most morning glory. That's pretty much all they grow there. Students were actually just able to harvest their first batch of morning glory. The blue meshed area is going to be for small trees to grow until they're large enough to be planted.

Now you know what my school looks like! Where I spend the majority of my time when school is in session, which lately seems like never. It's funny how when you're there every day you begin to not even think about the fact that students are learning outside and how the buildings are falling apart, but taking pictures of my school and looking at them makes me realize all of the troubles students have to overcome to get an education in this country.

Meet My : favorite market girl and her adorable puppy

Today marks 6 months of us living in Cambodia. I can't believe I've been living away from home for 6 months. I had never been away from home for more than 2 weeks before coming here.

To celebrate out 6 months here in country I'm going to start a little feature called MEET MY. It's to let you get to know the people, things, and the area that we're living in. Hopefully this will help make this blog more personal about my Peace Corp service, so I can look back on it and remember these great moments.

Today's meet my will go along with the picture that was posted in my guest post on Tina's blog.
Today, MEET MY: favorite market girl, and her adorable puppy.

This little 7 year old girl knows more English than my host mom, or my host siblings. She is, in a word, adorable. She attends my co-teacher's private school, and gets out of class as I head into class to teach. One day I was having a particularly rotten day and was waiting for the classes to let out. I was on my phone when I felt a hand on my arm. There she was squatting in front of me. She looked at me with her big beautiful Cambodian eyes and asked "when are you going to come play with my puppy?"

I hope that just broke your heart like it did mine.

I told her I would go the next day, and she asked if I was going to buy "me", the Cambodian equivalent of Ramen Noodles. Oh she knows my purchases too well.

In training we had the most adorable puppy which our family bathed on a regular basis. This is the first puppy in my town, that I've found which they bathe. Yay! That means I can pet him and play with him to my hearts content.

The best bit: he has a name, which is rare for Cambodian dogs. His name in English means "little little". The family who owns this shop knows when they see me coming, they go into their house which is at the back of the store and they bring out the puppy. Can't beat service like that!