Learning in the World at Large

The Beat Goes On, Never the Same

The younger kids who see me every day at Mith Samlanh now call me mak—mommy.  Sovanna told me with quiet pride that the kids who come to the center for long periods of time regard the staff who work with them the most as the loving parents the kids don’t have, and indeed call staff mommy and daddy.  It’s both searing and satisfying to be called mak by a child who lays his head on pavement at night.  The title gives me responsibility for the little souls growing up in droves and their troubles and joys, lest I be yet another neglectful, hurtful caregiver.  This new responsibility makes me weep when I let the circumstances sink in and my heart swell when I think maybe, just maybe, I am lifting a tired spirit.

On Monday at sunset I rode out to the orphanage after the rains, stopping my clearly urbanized mototup at the start of the dirt road and thoroughly enjoying picking my way across craters, through ponds, and dodging errant chicken carts.  As soon as I set my backpack down one little girl pointed out in horror the globs of mud on my Birkenstocks.  We proceeded to the giant washing tub behind the kitchen and set to work scrubbing until she was satisfied.  I grinned to myself when one of my most hyperactive young male students, Sophal, sashayed over and bent his head with focused intent at scraping off a stubborn chunk.

Barefoot and cheerful, I squatted right down with Sophal and his friends in yard to spend an hour making castles, birthday cakes, and animal sculptures in the wet sand with our fingers and sticks.  They taught me the Khmer words for each new creation—an doak, turtle, trdy, fish—and showed me how to extravagantly decorate with weeds and make patterns by slicing old string.  We sang “happy birthday” to everyone we made a cake for, and I made a “Baby Beluga” whale and taught them the first verse while we drew sea friends concentrically. 

Our knees tired and attention spans waned, so we started up a center-wide round of animal-walk races around the yard, our challenge the avoidance of the small lakes that gather from the rains.  We crab-walked and frog-leaped then fell on our faces as polar bears, finishing as dogs howling at the dark sky.  The electricity went out as our games ended and the little kids were scared as night in the yard crept further in.  Four of the older girls, Sreyleak their leader, got up and knelt in front of where our group sat nestled and crisscrossed together.  They made prayer-hands in the dim shadows and started singing Khmer songs, smiling encouragingly at each scrunched-up small face.  I loved hearing their voices wander over strange syllables and tonal shades, telling a story I could very nearly understand.

The next day in intermediate class I encountered the difficulty native Khmer speakers have with the “f” and “r” sounds, going around to the students individually as they practiced English script writing “fork” and having them say the word to me.  Most had a “puh” sound come out instead of “fuh,” a few articulated an irrational but well-intentioned “thh-ss.”   “R” is inevitably pronounced as a “w.”  I decided to give interactive learning my best shot and demonstrated sticking my top teeth firmly on by bottom lip and decisively flipping lip out from teeth while blowing out air—“fuh!”  After a chapping number of minutes all had conquered “fuh” but two students with empty youthful gums who could at least perform impressive whistles with the action.   Next was “rrr.”  I had the class point one finger down and lower it as they said “forrrrrk,” the downward motion mimicking our voices descending with the “r” sound.  It was surprisingly successful—one student, Phasal, approached me while everyone was practicing and said, “rrrreally!” with the same finger action and a beaming face.

At Mith Samlanh I have started the managerial task of delegating jobs for the video project, a blood pressure-raising task if there ever was one as I give up direct supervision and the control of having my hands in every part of the process.  Thoum is now responsible for the sign-up sheet collected from TC classes and directing taping during morning and afternoon break times, cameras, name records, time limits, and all.  Ratana from the Culture Team is in charge of communications between the teachers, kids, Mith Samlanh staff, and me, and facilitating meetings for brainstorming and review.  Sovanna handles all other outlying details, from telling me when batteries need charging to badgering IT staff about video rating capacities.

Ratana’s role has taught me the importance of making personal connections in the workplace—someone is much more likely to help you out and give a little extra that could make all the difference if they like you and therefore believe in what you’re doing.  My efforts in demonstrating unmistakable respect for Ratana, having constructive conversations where his views are appreciated and valuable, and taking the time to stop, bow, and joke a little have transformed the amount of assistance I receive from the Culture Team.  It has gone from “sorry, much too busy, wish we could help more,” to “I organized a sign-up in all the TC classes for you and a meeting with the kids after Water Festival to discuss what topics they would like to do next and what help making videos they need.”  Ratana’s help is priceless—know-how of the system (and generally how to get things done in Cambodia!) and the connections and sway to start multiple Domino effects for the project.

The biggest lessons I have learned thus far about getting things done in a totally polar workplace are flexibility, and never boxing myself into expectations for how I think things should, and will, be executed and turn out.  The process and end result is never what I originally expected, and I will be left in the dust if I don’t adapt.

Essentially every American expat in Phnom Penh turned up panting at the FCC yesterday early morning to watch the live election results come in—bonded together under banners proclaiming “Democrats Abroad in Cambodia” and “Got Hope?” with Obama’s profile beneath.  Ironically, not a single McCain supporter was present in this vast group of American working overseas… the rooms exploded in shouting and hugs and streamers when “Obama Elected President” flashed onto the CNN screen.  There was a sensation of massive relief and uplifting.  Someone gave a speech with a shaking voice about not having to talk to people here with apologies for our nation anymore, that maybe we could feel proud soon knowing good is being done. 

There was silence during Obama’s speech as almost all the upturned faces ran with tears.  It’s a different experience seeing your president elected from a foreign country, especially a president who stands for so much internationally.  I could picture the people who have said to me, “He has dark skin like me…I think he might care….maybe the USA will help us again,” and realize what this mere new face for America stands to achieve.  My hand was shaken and my shoulder clapped as a very young voter now somehow politically respected by what the American youth have demonstrated, that we are an effective force and that yes, we care.

A roaring gale hit the city at 6:30 last night, flooding the streets to ankle-level, pounding thunder, raking lightning, and eddies of thick rain drops in open spaces.  The calm and normality with which I treated this storm triggered me to start realizing how much has become ordinary to me here, things I would have turned around in my mind for hours just a month ago.  I could tell when the storm was coming and just covered up with my plastic poncho while I kept walking home, making sure my baguette and laptop were properly covered up.  An enormous cockroach scooted towards me on the tile floor while I was doing lunges at the gym, and I sighed, squished it with my shoe, and continued on.  I joked around with a waiter who knows me as a local and ran out to hold an umbrella for me, asking if he was going to charge one dollar for his kindness.  Carrying a big coconut like a baby under my poncho while fighting through the deluge running down my steps and watching the electricity flicker was only cooling for my ankles and a reason to cross my fingers for the lights to stay on until I went to sleep.  The Phnom Penh chaos is now almost an addiction, a reliable source of adrenaline and humankind.

Saigon is not in the 60's anymore

I took the six-hour bus ride to Ho Chi Minh City (still called Saigon by most locals in Asia) last Thursday, pressing my face against the glass as stilted wooden houses and endless plains of paddies that signal Southeast Asian countryside began to appear.  I drank in the wonderful green, light rice paddies stretching into darkened, gnarled tree groves and clusters of giant palm trees quietly curving their tufts to the sky.  Longboats with a single cone-hatted farmer slid along the transport canals in the paddies, almost platforms in their small wooden depth.  Foot-wide dirt paths with perhaps a bicyclist or ancient motorbike on them led to stilted open-air houses, the lucky ones shading their height beneath a tree and the unlucky homes as stark in the sunny fields as a single streak of black against white.  I watched as a herding boy waded through a pond by the road on the back of one of his huge horned cows, heading towards four poles with a blanket suspended between them and a hammock hanging beneath the shadow.  The provinces appear an idyllic place of fresh vegetables and peaceful, wandering days, until you recall the crushing facts of disrupting, destabilizing poverty that rural people face.  Making that recollection that startled me out of my reverie was gloomy, comparing the serenity and directed life of honest work clearly filled with family to the grit, squalor, and loneliness in Phnom Penh, an unavoidable life because of starvation, sickness, or any of the other low-class killers in rural areas. 

I came to Vietnam to visit friends of mine who I met during their education training in Phnom Penh who now teach in Saigon.  It was a magnificent beginning to my “couch-surfing” career, an introduction to the beauty of being injected into a community and experiencing travel through the eyes of an established local.  I saw things I never would have glanced at twice, took risks I wouldn’t dare alone, experienced a higher enjoyment and appreciation of the surrealness in these places as I shared them with fellow eyes and thoughts.

There was a palpable difference between Saigon and Phnom Penh that struck me as soon as we crossed into the city.  Saigon is like how Bangkok would be ten years ago if Thailand had been colonized by the French—a steaming, rushing metropolis with plenty of shiny metal skyscrapers and clean, unbroken sidewalks, as opposed to the dust and squat tin buildings of Phnom Penh.  No garbage or in-your-face poverty, few desperately hawking taxi drivers and shaky begging hands.  The only abject scene of destitution I witnessed was my first night in Saigon, a flicker of movement by the wall of a building that ended up being a young woman naked from the waist down, facing the wall as she squatted over a newspaper and emptied her bowels. 

One of the strongest traits Saigon and Bangkok share is the magnificent presence of both modernism and urbanism with a preserved culture and local way of life.  It is entirely normal to walk down a street bursting with shops selling all marks of goods, with glass doors and popular music playing like any nice establishment, then sit down on a cracked lawn chair at a dirty-looking street stall drink a glass of iced Vietnamese coffee with all Saigonese natives.  The awkwardly reliant relationship between foreigners and locals that chafes me so painfully in Cambodia is nearly absent, probably on account of Vietnam’s booming economy—exaggerated in Saigon by its thriving capitalism.  A difference that struck me after a day was the absence of bowing with prayer-hands in greeting and thanks, a gesture of respect utterly engrained in Cambodia and Thailand and odd not to see in Saigon. 

The street food, beginning with the infamous pho noodle soup, is abundant and absurdly cheap in Vietnam.  I had great fun wandering the streets with my companions to search out the perfect sinh to’s (fruit shake with condensed milk) in flavors like avocado, Vietnamese sandwiches made from a mini-baguette and filled with chili sauce, meat, cucumbers, and a variety of other addendums, bready steamed dumpling with sauce in the middle and pinched at the top, sticky summer roll with a piece of sugar cane to chew inside, or plate of scrambled egg, cabbage, bean sprouts, tomatoes, and nugget-like noodles all mushed together in an omelet and dipped in salty hot sauce.  My favorite experimental dish was a giant crepe folded over and stuffed with ingredients like snails (strangely mouth-watering although slimy,) mushrooms, unidentified seasonal vegetables, and eggplant.  You slice and yank at the crepe communally with chopsticks, then quickly transfer whatever you manage to grab onto a piece of lettuce, and sprinkle various leafy herbs into the lettuce before rolling it up and dipping it in an orange-y peanut sauce. 

The friend I stayed with, Catie, introduced me to three former students of hers between the ages of 19 and 22 who enlighten her to all the stealthy nooks and crannies of Saigon.  These students, two girls and a boy, were nothing other than delightful—humorous, passionate, creative, moral, and above all friendly.  I reveled in the gift of spending hours exploring Saigon with them, hearing the real story of all the tourist attractions, letting them haggle at the market for Catie and I, sitting on little plastic chairs on the street as they talked about their goals for going to university and their futures, seeing the fruits of their hobbies like photography and drawing, goofing off in hats and sunglasses as our silly giggles bubbled over.  They are like family to one another, the best of friends, spending most of their days together, and somehow gladly welcoming Catie (and me for a too-short time) into their circle. 

Halloween in Vietnam was unavoidably bizarre.  People wandered the humid streets as Spiderman or mustached ladies—woe to Catie and me as we drove on her motorbike through a quieter area in our costumes, drawing incredulous guffaws as we passed.  When we were stopped at an intersection a girl on the motorbike next to us pointed to a colonial peeling school on the left corner and said—“Very haunted.  Ghosts who die there in the war.  Do not go there tonight!”  Definitely the most real haunted house I’d ever seen.  I experienced clubbing in a Socialist country, replete with armed and uniformed guards outside the decorated entrance and an enforced early closing time. But, the dancing was spirited, all-inclusive, and went nonstop for hours in everyone’s blissful holiday glee. 

Walking off dinner the next night, Catie and I and two friends happened past an outdoors martial arts academy.  Stopping to peer, we were beckoned through the flourished Chinese arch to take a seat and watch the ongoing advanced class.  The students, men and one steely-eyed woman, whirled, jumped, crouched, and kicked as they wielded numchucks flying around their bodies and heads with great speed and agility that they blindly caught in shocking positions.  The younger students walked about comparing their poufy black pants, red belts, and strapped slippers, showing off a few headstands and carefully copied moves in the process.  It was a show of remarkable athleticism and an exceptionally traditional sport to be invited to watch. 

I bounced back on the bus engrossed in the sunset and sorting my emotions and memories, another return to Phnom Penh with it feeling only slightly more like home.  But stepping off the bus, I snapped into an ease with the city and its cogs, giving advice to a lost-looking group of tourists and hiking off with my backpack in what I recognized as a non-threatening shower to get my fair price for a mototup to my apartment.  Being here has been rearranged in what is difficult and a breeze; not a single day is easy—but there is at least of spark of loveliness and hope now in every day that keeps the kindling burning beneath me, urging me further in and onwards through this webbed world we walk through.