Things I'll miss: #1 Getting to know Cambodians

Back in May, when the sun blared down and the water in the river was low, but rising, I took my new bike out for an afternoon over the bamboo bridge. The bridge is a seasonal feature of Kampong Cham. It's built at the beginning of the dry season each year, and each year, as the water level rises and the waters come, the bridge washes away and the island's residents have to fall back on the ferry to get themselves and their goods to market.


The island is an oasis. It is made of the fertile red soil for which Kampong Cham is famous. Outside practically every house are slender trees dripping with the weight of heavy pumelo orbs. Bananas are also in abundance, those tiny sweeter-than-sweet yellow fingers. The rice fields are a piercing green and even the cows are nobler than some in Cambodia. There's very little traffic other than a few motos here and there, but the island is mostly silent and idyllic.

That afternoon, I biked around the perimeter of the island, about 10 kilometers. The small space between my fender and tires grew thick with red mud and my feet and ankles were caked completely. Near the end of the trail, a boy came out, hands waving to stop me. "Where are you going? Where are you from? Are you alone?" And then finally, "Come in, come in, my family wants to meet you."


For the next two hours, I sat with Sophy and his family talking with them about their work out in the rice fields, but mostly answering questions in my broken Khmer about my own life, and life in America. They patted my stomach and and asked me if I could cut their hair short too. Sophy asked me about scholarships to study abroad and his aunties admonished me for riding all alone, for not wearing long sleeves, for not wearing earrings (because they would be so pretty!)


When I finally left, they made me promise to come back to visit. Sophy got my phone number and started sending me "i miss you" text messages every so often.

Despite some rough moments, I have found so much openness and compassion here in Cambodia.

At first I was tempted to accredit people's friendliness to curiousity. "What's up with the foreigner?" But then I see the way that people share babies in a crowded car, or the way that strangers talk like friends in the marketplace, and I see that this kind of personal connection is the norm in Cambodia.


I'm going to miss smiling at random people on the street. I'm going to miss calling people sister and uncle. I'm going to miss random belly pats and friendly advice from total strangers. I'm going to miss Cambodia.

Things I'll miss: #2 Cooking with friends

I love the way that my Cambodian friends seem to come together in a kitchen. Starting at the market around 7 am, watching them in action is like observing the industrious and mysterious workings of a beehive or colony of termites. First someone comes up with a plan. What will we make today? Once the plan is agreed, everyone spreads out in their own separate directions to the meat stalls, to the dry goods, to the green grocers to collect the requisite ingredients. It's not at all clear who's buying what or how much, but somehow, when we reconnoiter back at the house, all the ingredients are there in perfect ratio.


At this point, I pull out my pad and paper and start to take assiduous notes -- what's that vegetable? fry for how long? but can you substitute...? -- while the others are in a flurry of chopping, peeling and pounding all around me. As at the market, the flow is remarkable. At any one time, there can be 5 to 10 pairs of hands in the mix yet it seems like the old adage about "too many cooks" just doesn't hold true here. There are 4 dishes going on at once, and the person peeling the shallots seems to know just how many to do and where they all belong. Neighbors come and go, lending a hand, squatting to pound some fish, falling seamlessly into the action for a few minutes before heading home to cook their own meal. There's gossip, laughing, tasting, scolding, and then miraculously, there's lunch.


We spread a mat on the floor, dish out the rice, and partake. Generally the eating portion is done in a fraction of the time it takes to prepare -- no longer than 20 minutes, and then the dishes are swept away, the mat rolled, and each one to her house and a nap. The cooking is obviously the main event of our "small parties," the eating merely a polite afterthought.


I'm going to miss this camaraderie that came from chopping, frying, and learning alongside all my friends.

Things I'll miss: #3 Raja

My little kitty has new parents now. The lovely Muoy and her fiance John have adopted Raja and she left to live with them on Tuesday last week. It was a difficult transition, but Raja's beginning to settle into her new life now, eating and drinking and back to her usual playful antics.

Though I came my kitty in a manner somewhat against my will, I grew to love my feisty feline companion and miss her like the dickens already. My favorite thing was when she would crawl up on my while I was sleeping and fall asleep across my neck like a thick furry scarf.

Bye Raja!

Things I'll miss: #4 Going to the market

Market set-up in the wee hours of morning

Chicken lady

Beansprouts, tofu, and noodles

My home goods vendor

Marketing was scary at first in Kampong Cham. My first week in the city, I subsisted largely off of packs of dried ramen, not out of laziness, but because I couldn't muster the courage to get myself to the market. My first Saturday alone in my house, before I had my bicycle or motorcycle, I ventured out to catch a moto to the market. Would he understand where I wanted to go? How would I get back? Would I be cheated at the market? How would I endure the staring and the titters? I headed downstairs, out to the street, only to scamper back inside and boil some water for another noodle lunch.

Sunday was a little better. I managed to wave down a moto man outside my house and made it all the way to the market. That first day, I bought (what else?) some more dried noodles, some eggs and some vegetables before my courage gave out and I retreated back to home base to plan my next mission.

Each trip I became bolder. My Khmer lessons centered mostly around learning words for food and for bargaining and as my vocabulary improved, so did my confidence. By the first month, I was bargaining for meat, finding flour, picking out coconuts. When I got my moto, I learned where to park and how to pay the attendant. I came to recognize faces and became a regular at certain stalls. I had a place for housewares, for chicken, beef, pork, fish, eggs, tofu and beansprouts, veggies in the late afternoon.

Beside my staples, I was always discovering something new. The market had all kinds of treasures -- huge sacks of dried lentils, gooey, steaming coconut cakes, dried flattened bananas, sausages brought in from Siem Reap, dried fish in at least 30 different forms, stinky shrimp paste -- and these things changed month-to-month. You only had to seek out the fruit stalls to see the degree to which the market was ruled by the seasons. My first months were ruled by juicy yellow mangoes and rambutans. Then came the custard apples and famous bright red longans. Pumelos began to pop up with more frequency around July and pomegranates appeared soon thereafter, followed by tiny orange tangerines. Through it all, dragonfruit, bananas, and pineapple were mainstays.

Going to market was a ritual that made me feel part of the thrum of Cambodian life.

My eyes loomed large during my first visit to the Lucky Supermarket in Phnom Penh. Neatly packaged apples in styrofoam and plastic wrap, a-la Trader Joe's. Ice cream and yogurt and Prego pasta sauce and Cornflakes. Olive oil and Camembert and lunch meats, all within the confines of the one air-conditioned building. An entire chocolate section. Dark, light, hazelnuts and almonds. More than almost anything else in Phnom Penh, the supermarket was a place that brought me back to the Western world, with all its dazzling choice and convenience, and with all of its air-conditioned, odorless sterility.

And now I'm back to that world for good. Farmers markets are the closest I'm going to get to recreating the market experience, and they don't really come close.

Things I'll miss: #6 Coffee and condensed milk and grilled pork and rice for breakfast

Rumdourl and I went out for our last breakfast together on Monday morning. Grilled pork and rice at the restaurant just beside my house. All those months living there, and I had never checked it out, mostly because in all the time I've walked or ridden my bike past by the place, I've never seen a single female sit down to eat. But Rumdourl assured me that this place was yummy, so we braved the testosterone and ordered our rice and my coffee.

Sure enough, there were more than the usual share of curious stares. Rumdourl knew half of the people there -- a fact that never fails to surprise me given that Kampong Cham isn't a tiny town (supposedly over 60,000 people) but that didn't stop them from ogling unabashedly and giggling in their somewhat disconcerting leering, but nervous sort of way.

But really, all this is beside the point of what I'm going to miss. Breakfast has always been one of my favorite meals and Cambodians are much the same. If we have an appointment in the field at 8, we arrange to leave at 6, to ensure ample time for a roadside stop for breakfast. And even if we're running late, everything can be postponed to accommodate an hour for a steaming bowl of kway teiouv noodles, khmer donuts with coffee or garlicky pork rice.

I'll miss the food itself -- rice, meat and pickled veg is pretty atypical as western breakfasts go -- but what I think I'll miss more is the mentality that prioritizes breakfast and body over productivity. Sure, it can be irritating when you're running late for a training, but I admire the peace and patience it takes to ignore (or at least postpone) so-called obligations to take care of primary functions first and foremost.

Things I'll miss: #7 Storms

Storm filling up the river in Mondulkiri

One night back in April, I woke up to bright flashing lights in the window behind my bed. Half awake I squinted my eyes out of the window, but the screen-obscured view did little to tell me if it was from ambulance lights (seemed unlikely) or a strobe, or aliens (my number on hypothesis in my semi-conscious state). Totally curious, I groped for my glasses, wrapped myself up in my bedsheet (more for a sense of security than to protect from cold) and headed out to my balcony. Outside the entire sky was flashing, lighting up a wall of dark grey clouds from behind every 10 seconds. My first view of sheet lightening.

Storms in Cambodia are gorgeous. You can't ignore the negative aspects - damage from flooding, downed power lines, the aftermath of pools of waters where mosquitos breed - but the storms are also part of the cycle that sustain a way of life. The rice crop, the fish yield, they all rely on the crazy wet season. It's lovely being inside in a Cambodian downpour. The metal roofs amplify the sound of the rain so you can't hear music from your laptop speakers, let alone hear yourself think.

Things I'll miss: #8 Pumelo, dragonfruit, and longans

Pumelos are my favorite fruit. Especially the small sweet, juice ones from Battambong that are slightly pink in color (opposed to the larger, drier variety from Kampong Cham that looks green and tastes better with chili and salt). You can get pumelos in California, sure. But there's something about buying it from a lady in pyjamas who peels off everything but the base, so that the white pumelo sits up jaunty-like in its bright green base, beckoning to you.

And then there's dragonfruit, which seems like it has to be cousin to the kiwi. I didn't understand the appeal at first -- its bright exterior seemed to belie its bland white insides -- but then I chilled it and started eating it for breakfast with yogurt and a little bit of mueslix and I was hooked.

And finally longans -- not those white things in syrup you find in cans at the 99 Ranch market -- but the real deal. Red and brown and bumpy with a ridiculously sweet and fragrant juicy inside. Perfect plump packages of goodness. YUM.

Things I'll miss: #9 Cows

Cows doing their cow thing on an island in the Mekong

Outside the door of the office, in the path of my bicycle on the way to work, on the side of the road, out near the river. The cows are everywhere and I'm going to miss them. When Jaime came to visit, he said the cows here seemed statelier than in the US. I have to attribute this in part to the fact that they are not bunched together in massive feedlots, giving off noxious methane fumes, but rather roam around picturesquely in 2s or 3s posing in front of beautiful pastoral views of rice paddies or rivers. Plus, I'm of the mind that many animals up close (because you get close when you're about to ram on with your bike) are rather noble.

There's a horse trail behind my house in Fullerton, and a few ostrich farms, but no cows as far as I know. So here's a parting moo to my bovine friends.

Joyriding

Some evenings, around 5, when the sun starts to wane and the light gets silky, I like to hop on my bike and meander around town.

I head down my road, past the moto drivers waiting for a fare, past the metalshop, the carwash, the linoleum store, the agriculture supply. At 5pm, the afternoon session of school has ended, work is out, and folks are pouring down the road towards noodle soup dinners and home. On the left, I ride by the woodcarving shop with a noodle table out front, Prasac Microfinance Bank, the Cambodia British Centre where kids on crisply pressed uniforms just coming from school lounge outside on their bicycles waiting for their English class, the newspaper stand with the colorful and uniformly garish fashion magazines. Then the new fancy cosmetics store where they've installed plastic bucket chairs theater-style like those in an airport terminal or DMV, and where, around this time, they pull out a TV on the cashier's counter and unlikely clientele (middle-aged men) will watch sports. I wonder if this element was planned, or just a bit of local color, and I wonder if they ask the men to buy some whitening face cream before they're allowed to slouch down to watch wrestling.

At the corner, there's the Bruins Blue-and-Yellow Hello cell-phone shop, which was constructed and opened since I moved to Kampong Cham. Here my street intersects with the "main drag," a boulevard that I've described before, which appears to harken back from the colonial era -- jaunty decorated lampposts, and nice benches. Later in the evening, there will be the heartbreaking scene of a malnourished teen and two or three kids taking turns sniffing glue from a paper sack. But now, there's just traffic and a man in a jogging uniform walking up and down pumping his arms to an imaginary beat.

Across the boulevard, I pass the Chinese School Market -- bustling in the late afternoon. In front of me, there's a man in garish camo pyjamas and a fisherman's hat with the drawstring strung tight across his neck. There are kids, kids, kids in their white oxford shirts and blue pants, sitting 3 to a moto, or riding on the back rack of the bicycle, some heading for home, but mostly for the riverside where they'll ride up and down in packs, laughing and flirting. There are ladies in Khmer pyjamas -- like the scrubs of nurses who work in a pediatrician's office -- shapeless uniforms with prints of teddy bears or bunnies or bright flowers. Market-going attire.

On the corner in front of the cellphone repair shop run by Rumdourl's brother is my pumelo lady. Perfect green orbs stacked neatly in a pyramid. I pass the meatball stands in front of the Vietnamese Clinic, pass the woman frying bananas in sesame batter, pass the sugarcane press. The men on motorcycle row call out "hello" as I go by, and then I'm passing the plaza with the painted-gold statue of Hanuman the monkey fighting his brother, and then I'm at the riverside.

The bridge is beautiful in the evening light, so I turn right and head down a ways and then stop to look out over the water. The water is way down in dry season and the pylons are bright orange on the bottom where the water used to be. Huge trucks with lumber from exhausted rubber trees and perhaps from as far up as Mondulkiri make their way over the bridge, passing lovers on motos heading the other direction towards the roadside stands where you can lie in hammocks drinking soursop juice and eating fresh cobs of sweet corn, either grilled or steamed.

A bit further down the riverside is a school. There's smoke billowing in the courtyard and spilling out to the street -- it smells sharp like plastic so I try not to breathe in too deeply and wonder how the kids can continue to run around and fly their kites in the middle of the cloud of fumes.

Riverside vendor with his kites and inflatables

I'm feeling especially alive, so I decide to take the path through the Cham village, where it's marketing time. No pigs here, only shiny beef and vegetables and sometimes a random goat. Then I'm past the ladies in their headscarves and the bearded men with turbans, past the huge Muslim Aid banner, and up next to the white mosque, with its silver tiled minarets that glow at this time of day.

A picturesque trash heap right before the Cham village

Kids play in the courtyard of the neighborhood mosque at twilight

I take the quick route back into town, by this time it's nearing dark so I make a careful circle at the roundabout and head up onto the bridge. It's tough going with no gears. The bridge is relatively steep, but I power on until what seems like the highest point, where I get off and survey the mighty Mekong. Across the river, you can still make out the outline of the signal tower. Then there are some disco lights, and behind, the "skyline" of Kampong Cham town. There's always a breeze up here, even on the warmest days and it's pretty much deserted, for which I can thank Cambodian superstition about the ghosts of frustrated lovers who jumped and now haunt the bridge.

The Kampong Cham skyline from the bridge

Riverside at night

Eventually, I head back down, coasting all the way back around the circle, down the street to the Starmart where I head in to pick up some vanilla yogurt -- which always comes with tiny plastic spoons.

Things I'll miss: #10 The Khmer Language

Consonant practice

I gave up my Khmer lessons back in September, but I still pick up new words every now and then, generally food-related, like how to ask for sticky rice at the market. I love surprising people by going beyond your usual "Hi, I'm from the USA. I like mangos." to asking about their family and their work and other advanced-beginning sorts of topics. Even when I tell people I've been here 9 months, they're still amazed that I've picked up enough Khmer to ask them the number and age of their children and explain what I'm doing in Cambodia. There's the joy of talking, and then there's the letters, which are so beautiful that just practicing them was like meditation. So many signs are in English here, but I'm delighted when lettering is in Khmer -- even though I can't understand it (I gave up before I made my way through all the vowels) it's pretty to look at.

It's going to be sad to go back to the States where only a small number of people even know what Khmer is. I will have to take some trips to Long Beach to practice.

Home Alone

Cambodians with their hard-core family values are always shocked when they hear I'm here alone, and constantly asking whether I'm lonely ("op sop?"). At first, the answer was honestly no, there was too much to do and see and cook and think about, but after I came back from a brief jaunt with my family over in the USA, I got a little sad, and sometimes a lot sad -- especially when I didn't keep busy.

I think, though, that even worse than sadness or boredom, is the self-indulgence and egocentrism of living without the norming influence of other people (especially in a place where unannounced visitors are pretty improbable). That's why I think there are certain stigmas associated with living alone that I think are entirely justified. The appearance of Raja the cat circa month 3 doesn't necessarily make things any better -- crazy cat lady is something that still scares any misanthropic tendencies straight out of most young women.

Hermits run around naked in the deep woods and eat snakes and tubers and maybe even psychedelic mushrooms they find lying around. I refrain from the drugs, but I've been known to lie around without a scrap on reading a new book (or, let's be honest here -- watching 4-5 episodes of Gilmore Girls in a row) and eating my refrigerator empty on a Sunday afternoon. No wonder Mr. Sambath noticed the 9 extra kilos. And the #1 problem with this type of behavior is that it's addictive and the further you let yourself go into the antisocial, self-centered spiral, the more difficult it is to dig yourself out. When you become irritable when company's coming because that means you have to put your clothes back on, that's when you know it's gone too far.

The physical seclusion aside, emotional and mental solitude are also tough. Even when I venture out with friends here, it's very difficult to get critical input or opinions on what I'm thinking. I have recently been reflecting on my experience here and considering what I want to do next when I come back and all the ideas floating in my head seem exciting and possible, but also maybe trite and crazy (?) and what I really need is a sounding board.

Me and Raja, home alone.

Fat today

Before (April)

After (November)

People here in Cambodia tell it like they see it. And the way they see it, I'm fat. Depending on the audience, this fact is positive (healthy), negative (not enough exercise), or neutral (just stating the facts, hon), but there's a resounding consensus that I'm huge and I might not know, so I better be told.

Thankfully, most Cambodians also like my face and whenever I first meet someone, they generally say, wow, she's fat and pretty (toat nung s'art)!

In the past four days, I've had no fewer than 5 comments from 5 individuals:

• The lady downstairs: "Your arms are fat again, you ate a lot in Thailand!"
• The landlord's wife: "Oh good, you gained some weight back" (she thought I was eating poorly for a few weeks)
• My friend Rumdourl, while patting my belly: "Yes, you like to eat on your trips!"
• Mr. Sambath, the district coordinator: "Wow Jess, you look very fat today"
• My friend Rith's neighbor: "She's so fat, but she still has a waist which is why she's pretty, not like me!"

And my all-time favorite from my best friend in Cambodia, Rumdourl: "Wow Jess, I think you're the fattest foreigner I've ever seen!"

I've gained about 8 kilos or almost 20 lbs since arriving in Cambodia, so comments on my weight are justified, but I'm consistently thrown off by the daily reminders. You'd think all those comments would convince me to start cutting down my rice portion at lunch or start ordering ice coffees without milk, but no... I guess I've resigned myself to it until I get back to the US where people will politely lie while I try to work it off.

The (food) price is right

Here's an overview of the basic prices of food in Kampong Cham. It's a good overall indicator of the general cost of living in town. Meat tends to be pretty expensive, relatively speaking, but I tend to eat very little of it so my grocery costs per week are around $15 if I splurge on some dairy.

I'm back in the States in December, and I shudder to think about what I'm going to have to pay for a carrot.

For reference, the street exchange is 4000 riel to one dollar (bank exchange is more like 4200/$1 or so)

1 big carrot = 600 r
1 green pepper = 600 r
1 kilo katna ( or most other green leafy veg) = 3500 r
1/2 kilo beansprouts = 1500 r
1/2 kilo greenbeans = 500 r
1/2 kilo eggplant = 500 r

1/2 kilo s'vai (mango) = 5000 r
1 kilo kroich ch'ma (limes)= 2000 r
1 small pineapple = 1500 r
1 kroich t'long (pumelo) = 3000 r
1 kilo kroich touch (tangerines) = 3500 r
1 kilo pomme (apples) = 5000 r
2 pomegranates = 2500 r
1 kilo grapes = 13000 r
1 kilo dragonfruit = 3000 r
1 watermelon (1.5 k) = 2000 r
1 bunch bananas = 800 r
1 kilo rambutan = 2000 r

1 coconut = 2800 r
5 grams basil, mint, etc. = 200 r
1 bunch (5 stalks) lemongrass = 200 r
1 kilo onions = 2500 r
1 kilo garlic = 1500 r
1 kilo shallots = 2500 r
2.5 grams turmeric bulbs = 200 r
5 grams kaffir lime leaves = 400 r
5 grams chilis = 300 r

1 kilo potatoes = 4000 r
1 kilo good quality rice = 3000 r
2 pats of fresh noodles = 500 r
1 kilo flour = 4000 r
1 dried noodle pack = 300 r
1 "big" loaf of French bread = 1000 r

10 duck eggs = 4800 r
4 blocks tofu = 1,600 r
1 kilo beef = 20,000 r
1 kilo pork = 20,000 r
1 chicken = 20,000 r
1 kilo fish = 13,000 r
1/2 kilo peanuts = 3000 r

1 box milk = $1.80
1 yogurt = $0.60
1 bag of granola = $4.80
1 bottle of decent red wine = $8.00
1 box of Khong Guan biscuits = $4.20
1 loaf of sliced bread = $1.00
1 can of the good brand of coconut milk = $1.20
1 jar of peanut butter = $3.50
1 knock-off Magnum ice cream bar = $1.20

To market to market...

To market, to market, to buy a fat pig.
Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.
To market, to market, to buy a fat hog.
Home again, home again, jiggety-jog.
To market, to market, to buy a plum bun.
Home again, home again, market is done.

Marketing is one of my favorite activities in Kampong Cham, and there's no dearth of variety -- from the main Psah Tom (big market), a pungent labyrinthine jungle of dried shrimp, just-butchered meats, fresh fruit, cookware, clothes, to the unassuming but oh-so-convenient Psah Sala Chun (Chinese School market) where I go for fresh veg after work.

A friend of Les Frenchies at Psah Sala Chun

But my favorite place to shop is the morning market at Psah Bangkot. The real action gets started around 5 in the morning. By then, most of the greengrocers have settled back onto their heels, surrounded by their multicolored produce, the fishmongers have set out their huge aluminum basin of writhing eels and fish, the piles of pineapple are stacked just so, the squeals of slaughtered pigs have just cleared from the air, and the breakfast ladies have started to light the fires under the huge Lot Cha woks.

I park my blue bicycle in the designated area and pick up a slip from the attendant, roll up my pants, then head into the fray with my co-op tote slung over my shoulder. At this market, I have a few favorites: my pork lady, who sweats under her precious pink and white frilly bonnet as she deftly hacks and slices choice cuts with her cleaver. Then there's egg woman who runs a no-nonsense operation. I like her because she delivers my ten eggs nestled in a bit of straw, and she always serves customers in the order they come. Fair and equal.

If I need beef, I head inside where ladies perch on raised concrete stands, hunks of the good stuff hanging from hooks around their heads, viscera and other odds and ends on display in front, often a bucket with skin on a stool just in front. Some employ switches to wave away the flies, some seem not to notice, but my favorite lady keeps her choice cuts in plastic and produces them with a magic white-toothed grin when she sees me coming.

Inside, I can also get tofu, beansprouts and delicious pats of fresh snow-white noodles, which are wrapped up in giant lily-pads (lotus leaves) and deposited with titters in my canvas bag. Just down the row from the tofu, past the bags of tobacco and rolling paper, begin the stalls of housewares. Here, I'll usually stop to commisserate with another friend who asks where I'm going, tells me about an accident with her arm, and then offers me a good price on plastic bowls for my kitchen. Just a week ago, I got some great chopping knives for just $3.

This is a morning place. By 8, the market is too hot to enjoy and by 10 or 11, it's a ghostland, but in the early hours, it's a gorgeous world of mud and meat and leaves and real food.

Medicated

I went to the doctor for the first time in Kampong Cham last week. I convinced Rumdourl to leave work a little bit early to make the visit and we headed off on my moto to the market to look for the ENT guy who supposedly had an office near Rumdourl's family cell phone shop.

It took a bit of doing, but finally we located the right doctor. The "office," like most here in town, was the bottom story of somebody's home. When we walked in, the doctor's wife (also the nurse, receptionist and pharmacist) let us know that he was out, but would be back in 15.

The first thing I noticed walking in was an entire wall of framed certificates, a rectangle of rectangles at least 5 x 6 wide. Above there were blown up prints of the doctor's family hanging out in Singapore and at Angkor Wat.

There was a small counter just inside the door which served as the pharmacy, and next to that was a big wooden platform where the family was sitting. On the opposite side of the room was a wooden bench (the waiting room).

The wall behind me was covered with posters touting various medical maladies -- skin conditions, ear conditions -- from the banal to the grotesque. Rumdourl was obviously disturbed and she told me that this was why she could never be a doctor -- she would never be able to eat anything delicious again.

The doctor eventually returned on his moto in a grungy white t-shirt, shorts and plastic slippers. He headed straight into the examination room in the back. From my perch on the bench, I strained to see if he was washing his hands (he was!). The nurse sprayed what I thought might be disinfectant around the room; when I went in later, I saw (and smelled) that it had just been air freshener.

Rumdourl explained my issue -- I had had an ear infection two weeks before and my hearing was still muted since then. The doctor could speak some English, so he reassured me and began preparing his nifty medical toys. This guy was obviously a gadget geek -- he seemed to have more and better equipment than the clinics I had been to in Phnom Penh. He started up his computer and turned on a big machine. The machine turned out to be a camera that could look right up into your ear. He even had a wall mounted TV, so I could see what was going on, and he took a picture for me to take home. Nifty!

Eventually, he decided that my ears were no longer infected and I had nothing blocking them, but that I must have an issue with my Eustacian tubes.

He prescribed me a barrage of medications (5 in all) which ended up making me really dizzy, and didn't exactly clear up the problem.

Oh well. Upon return to the states, I plan to have an exhaustive physical and then make a new proactive health plan to get myself back in working order.

funk city

This has been the week of the funk. A deep, pathetic funk that settled like a large alien object way down deep into the pit of my stomach, so that I felt too heavy to get out of bed in the morning and couldn't concentrate on anything I was supposed to be working on. The seed of funk was planted way back in August when Jaime came to visit and I took the trip home for a few days.

It took some time to germinate. I kept busy with movie making, new friends, trips out to Phnom Penh, and various illness, but eventually it sprouted into an ugly, self-pitying, anxiety-ridden goblin that fed on feelings of isolation, uselessness, and insecurity about the future.

I'm trying various forms of therapy -- company for Pchum Ben, long bike rides, recruiting my coworkers for various social outings -- but this exorcism appears to be taking some patience and dedication to ongoing self-treatment.

My prescription combines lots of happy music, exercise, riding my moto with my hair flying in the wind, looking forward to trips out to the field and to my travel plans in Singapore and Thailand, meditating on self-affirming phrases ("Yes, I'm healthy, happy and strong"), and forcing myself to be social even when I would rather ball up under a sheet tent in my bed.

My Little Two-Burner

This is my little two-burner miracle stove.


Cooking over the past 6 months has been such a stretch of the imagination and such a joy. Here are a few of the things that the stove and I have turned out:

Creamy Lentil Soup With Caramelized Onions

Thai Green Fish Curry

Mexican Tofu Stir Fry with Fresh Avocado and Spanish Rice

-- Vegetarian Coconut Curry Soup
-- Pan-fried White Fish with Tumeric
-- Spicy Beer-Soaked Meatballs with Dark Greens
-- Red Beans, Ham and Rice
-- Sweet Soya & Ginger Beef Stew
-- Shredded Mango & Peanut Salad
-- Vietnamese Fresh Mint Noodle Salad
-- Crepes with Yogurt and Caramelized Bananas
-- Scallop Noodles with Fried Egg and Chinese Broccoli
-- Deep Fried Battered Bananas
-- Sesame Rice Porridge with Fish
-- Handmade Paratha
-- Lemongrass Pork Patties
-- Spaghetti with roasted tomato & garlic sauce

And more.

Yum!

Interweb Braindump

It's been 17 days since I got the internet in my apartment.

Less than 2 weeks after the new JICA volunteer Fukimi told me that she had wireless in her apartment, Voila, I'm connected once again to the world. Specifically, now I'm able to do things like video-chat with my favorite people at a mutually convenient hour -- something that was difficult to do previously since most of my friends & family are 14 hours away, and though local internet cafe advertises 7am to 9pm, the reality's a bit more limited.

I went to visit Kizuna Internet, the local Online reseller, where the sweet young guy walked me through all the details in Khmer-nglish while his mother and sister undertook a friendly interrogation about the purpose and the probable duration of my sojourn here in Kampong Cham. A week later, I was back in the office handing over a couple of crisp Jeffersons (in exchange for a receipt and a bag of those good-quality rambutans). Two days after that, Kizuna boy and his moto trailed me and my bicycle back up to the apartment where he efficiently clipped the telephone wire to attach the DSL line and configured my modem all within the lunch hour.


My Family DSL package, compliments of the Online company entitles me to unlimited hi-speed access from 7pm to 7am on weekdays and all weekend. Surprise surprise, I've noticed myself slowly start to mold my schedule around the new presence in my life. Each night around 7, I plug in my router, and first start up the iTunes downloads for the night -- an episode of Grey's Anatomy (don't judge), 3 new Ted Talks, NPR's Most Emailed Stories, and some foodie podcasts. Then it's straight to Gmail, then to Blogger, then on to the tasklist I've compiled for the evening, which looks something like this:

-- respond to all emails
-- post new blog post + pix
-- upload new fbook pix
-- get picture of urban cambodian school, CD-rom, and "rural Cambodia" (creative commons)
-- research green school architecture
-- look into Global Giving commission for KAPE
-- d/l examples of good local NGO websites for Channa
-- add new reviews to goodreads

My internet tasklist is a new invention of mine that came of having to ration my online time when hitting up the local internet shop in the old pre-DSL-at-home days. And as much as I love the new flexibility of having internet in my house, I'm happy I spent those first 5 months without because it helped me to internalize some things that I only halfway intuited before:

1) The internet's a tool -- amazing for some tasks, of negative value for others. (Think: distraction, distorted perception of the world)
2) Internet use, like a lot of things, is subject to diminishing rate of return.
3) Growing up with the internet really has changed the way I think and work, in many very good ways and in some that seem not so good.

The first two ideas are pretty straightforward and not so controversial (unless of course you find yourself in a certain cult of tech-worshippers). The last also seems obvious at face-value, but it was the most surprising for me when I actually started considering just how much information access affects the way I personally think and work. For example...

3a) Easy access to data all-the-time, any-time means that I tend to undervalue the importance of actually filing facts away in my mind. This includes both personal facts -- what day is my best friend's birthday? check Facebook! -- and general trivia. This second lacuna is constantly brought to my attention here in Cambodia; for example, when a group of high school students asked me questions like -- How deep is the Grand Canyon? What year was the Statue of Liberty built? What percentage of people in your country live in urban areas? I find my fingers itching to reach out to a keyboard and perform a simple search. And it simply baffles them when I shrug helplessly and more than a little ashamedly and admit that I just don't know.

I think this is the same condition that makes it so rare for any of us these days to memorize or recite poetry, or to remember famous quotes. Why remember when Google can remember for you? When the internet is for all intents and purposes, a repository of facts that plugs in to your brain, your brain itself can dedicate itself to being something less like an encyclopedia and more like a supremely complex computer that takes random facts and (in the best cases) fits them together into something new.

What (if anything) do we lose in this relationship, though? There seems to be something hollow about this kind of mind -- one's put in mind of these competing images: a giant pulsing cerebrum hooked up to an IV drip of information versus a glowing green brain sprouting from the ground, an organic product nurtured by sun and soil and all that other nice stuff.

3b) An obsession with what's been done means learning from what's coming before, but also possibly relying too much on past models and dampening innovation. With every new idea I have -- a business idea, an opinion of a book, a philosophy -- I find myself compelled to find out what other people have done and what other people think. This has a couple of effects. First it reduces the number of times I have to "reinvent the wheel," which seems more efficient (e.g. finding a checklist on how to perform an energy audit to "green a school" means that I don't have to make one myself). But it also happens to reduce the number of times I have to "reinvent the wheel," which often makes for a superficial understanding of the wheel in question (e.g. energy use at schools) and also might make me lazy and likely to settle for what's out there rather than innovate.

3c) Related to 3b, a depressing (and I believe, incorrect) feeling that everything worthwhile in the world has been done already and it's a lost cause trying to have a new idea AND the conflicting feeling that the world is full of so many opportunities that it is impossible to choose which one to pursue (check out Barry Schwartz's Paradox of Choice, or the recent NY Times article "The Benefits of Closing a Few Doors")

Raja Grows Up -- a Photoessay

Baby Raja in the drawer at the FCC, the morning after rescue in May

Momma Mayumi feeding Raja with the syringe back in Kampong Cham

Looking less than gleeful post bath

Her baby nose is peeling

Getting her scratch on

Raja meets pappa Jaime for the first time

Still an alien cat

Playing it cool on the balcony

Getting more love from Les Frenchies

Sitting pretty on the bed spread

Chowing down

Kitty's growing up

She's looking downright purty...