I climbed the steep steps at the ANDC old center last week in my bare feet, following the yelping horde of girls up to the open-air roof where they excitedly fanned out in a circle and one by one demonstrated the dance moves they were practicing for the party on Friday. Sreyneat was downright shivering with anticipation to show me her newest skill, a crouching spin with one leg held out above the ground. She collapsed in her characteristic fits of giggles on the tile floor after she had made a few revolutions, then quickly jumped up and organized the girls into lines to teach me everyone’s favorite Khmer dance done at each and every party held in Cambodia—it’s so famous that even foreigners can sing the song it accompanies. The steps were simple, walking back and forth with some hip-swinging and toe-touching, but I loved finally grasping the Khmer hand motions. As in most SE Asian dances, bending the hands and fingers eerily backwards using only your muscle strength to achieve the hyperextension is heavily emphasized, and then the waving and turning of the hands symbolically is added. The girls and house mommies fell into gales of laughter at my mix-ups and the lack of flexibility in my digits, although they kept singing gamely and telling me to mouth along like I knew the words, too.
Before it was time to eat rice the younger girls scrambled onto my lap tiredly and asked me, “You sing, please.” I looked around the scene I found myself in, appreciating the fullness of what it had taken and what it meant to be looking out over the rooftops, cooking smoke, dirt roads, and soccer games in another country in the accepting arms of its people. With this grandeur in mind I sang “I caught a little baby bumblebee…” and did the calming face massage they do during shivasina in a yoga class on each of the girls (a trick that the kids have not let slip past unasked for.)
A series of events happened next that made me think about how far I have come in becoming close to the local people and how wonderful—simply fulfilling—that closeness is, providing a reason for all the questioning and sadness that goes with achieving it. After eating rice I went up to the house mommy with my hands together and hands bowed to properly thank her in Khmer for the meal, something the chaotic nature of dinnertime for a house full of kids usually prevents. I said “Akun, mak” (“Thank you, mommy”) and she came up to me, took my face in her hands, and said in English, “Beautiful girl.” I learned later that the girls have been working on teaching her English and that she had practiced saying this since the week before.
I left blinking tears from my eyes, and realizing that Narit who usually drives me home was nowhere to be found. I started walking up the dark road, alert for the cavernous holes marked by palm branches and cloth tied on sticks in the dirt, when the cook with whom I share Narit’s motorbike ride grabbed my arm out of nowhere and shrieked, “Aiiii!” and hustled me into a well-lit family store. The movement inside the store stopped for a few long seconds until I put my hands together and bowed respectfully as I had done for the house mommy. Then the mother set a plastic chair behind me, the auntie started shuffling through the television channels to find one in English, and the father went to the store’s cooler and found a bottle of water which he handed to me, a big gift considering it would have cost me the same as half a meal in the area. Everyone smiled as I showed my appreciation for the television by making big reactions to the CNN stories and swatted playfully at the pet poultry squawking about.
I then met my first Christian missionary in Cambodia, a young man from Prey Veng province, who launched into an argument of why I should spread the good news teaching at ANDC, when who but Narit should pull up—with three boards about twenty feet long bouncing underneath him and off the back of his motorbike. The cook took one look at the potential situation and gave him a stare. He returned a few minutes later board-free and I put on my helmet, bobbed in bows of thanks to the family as I climbed onto the bike, and went off into the night with my legs swinging. I have realized the significance the gesture of giving someone else a part of your food or drink holds, so when Narit stopped for gas I handed my bottle of water to the cook in thanks for her pulling me inside the store, who eyed it gratefully and drained the bottle. The universe reciprocated in a brilliantly karmic way when we pulled up at my apartment gate and the land family, gnawing away on sugarcane stalks, handed me one and scooted over so I could squat down and suck on the sticky fibers with them. I tried to imagine this series of events happening in the US, and couldn’t, which shook me a little but drove in further my appreciation for being if only for a time part of the normality of these events.
A few days later I helped the kids in their classes make Christmas ornaments for their sponsors in the US. I grinned to see the care and detail each one put into their cardboard presents, but the greatest moment for me was seeing Sokha’s. She is one of the most gifted and hard-working older students at ANDC, and her ornament had the old, extraordinarily ornate Khmer script on it. I asked her teacher if all the kids learned this script in Khmer school, and he shook his head, saying that Sokha had taught herself the script on top of all her usual homework. I couldn’t help my jaw dropping as I turned to look at Sokha, wishing I could box up her lessons and ethics take them with me home to show to kids her age in class. I also helped a little boy write his name in English on his ornament, because it was his first day at the center—that morning he had taken his first shower in months.
A team of Australian doctors was at ANDC that evening to continue their routine check-ups of all the kids. I was lucky enough to be allowed to stay and observe, and I was fascinated by the methods, manners, and revised standards used in this instance of Western medicine applied to the developing world. Lice and skin checks for afflictions like scabies came first, and over half the kids seemed to have at least a few live nits found on their scalps. Most of the skin ailments were for cuts or toenails that became infected from the general dirtiness and inability to keep them dry and clean. Several students had heart murmurs found, which the head doctor dismissed as, “Not serious enough to do anything but monitor—they seem happy.” I couldn’t help but picture the process that would have happened if this diagnosis for a child had happened in the US. Never would the prescription of simply monitoring be tolerated. Almost every kid was in a need of serious dental care, all with black and yellow spots on their teeth and often missing adult ones from decay. A few of the kids even had craters where an entire tooth had rotted away.
The only tools the doctors used were stethoscopes, flashlights, a thermometer, and their hands—to check for fever in third world countries, one doctor said, it is useful to train yourself to detect small differences in the temperature of skin using just the two backs of your hands. Many of the kids had cold symptoms that worried the doctors, but all agreed that not much could be done with the constant exposure to pollution, grit, and more germs. One, however, had to be taken in for an x-ray and was diagnosed with a burnt lung. Another girl whose overly thin limbs had been worrying the staff for awhile was found to have a serious case of worms, which explained her skeletal body but distended belly.
The hardest ailments for me to hear explained were those that carried over from the kids’ pasts. One, ANDC’s star dancer, has odd swelling and markings on the front of his chest where his lungs are. He can’t feel pain from it anymore, but it is leftover from severe trauma caused by a disease like tuberculosis. Many of the kids have huge scars, some lumpy and disfiguring, on places like their backs and necks. A couple of the sustained injuries were marked down as likely caused by the child being dropped as an infant by a negligent caregiver. When I left the center that night, later than I ever have before, the older girls ran up and gave me a little bouquet of red flowers they had picked, before they waved me out the gate shouting, “good luck for you!”
The dance party on Friday, a proper Cambodian and ANDC send-off to the teaching volunteer Jennifer, was a fitting crown to the week. Everyone crowded onto wooden benches at tables for a special dinner of no-utensils, face-in-plate fare. We wrapped rice sheets in lettuce leaves with cucumbers and herbs, spooning a peanut sauce in the middle and dipping the whole thing in thin Khmer sauce. The kids were as excited as Christmas Day, bounding and yelling and eating until their hands and mouths were covered in peanuts and leaves. They asked for picture after picture, with new poses and expressions each time, and showing off their specially selected outfits and hairdos. The whole outside compound at the new center was strung out in lights, with karaoke music playing carefree of neighbors, since noise control only means letting your neighborhood in on the fun, too.
I could have danced all the night with the kids, jamming away jumping and swinging, jiving, and even finally getting in the line for Khmer dancing they had gotten me ready for. I liked the feeling of letting go, laughing only because I felt good and holding hands and kicking my feet up with a goofy kid made me smile. Sreyneat danced with me all night, and even shared her celebration dessert oranges with me, not accepting refusal to the point where she stuck a slice in my mouth to make me stop protesting. The director’s husband told me that she was one of the first kids who had come to the center, and had been painfully shy and reserved—then he said, “Look at her now,” and I did, seeing her ablaze with energy and showing her friends how to do disco hands. I drove away in a tuk tuk crushed with volunteers with the best sort of simple satisfaction at being tired from a good time and at seeing well-deserving others have fun.
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