Even across cultural borders. Like brother-sister relationships, and how the older sibling ALWAYS has the upper hand (you hear, Patrick?). After dinner today, my little sister asked if someone could go with her to our aunt’s house to get some medicine. My little sister has been battling a cold lately and my aunt is a [...]
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(Did I mention I’m going to a wedding in Thailand in October? My best friend’s cousin is getting married and somehow I lucked into not only getting to go but getting to help with various preparations—like keeping track of vendor expenses and locking down exchange rate prices—and being the on-site coordinator and manning the guestbook/photo [...]
A few days ago, we had some guests over at our house. First impression: as they pulled up to the front of our house in their gigantic SUV, they ran over my dog’s food bowl. Now she eats off the floor. Second impression: my host ma comes running out helping them open the door while [...]
Right now I’m sitting in the Kuala Lumpur international airport (using their free wifi. Get on that, SFO. Get on that, LAX.) on a 6 hour layover before I fly to Chengdu. Some observations about the Kuala Lumpur airport: 1. At the McDonald’s (where else did you think I would eat, silly? I haven’t seen [...]
About two weeks ago, we had our mid-service training. With this training included a mid-service physical, and in this physical included a step on the ole friendly scale. Now, I have been really good during service, much better than in the States. Even when it’s so hot I’ve considered bathing in the murky green feces-filled [...]
As mango season has officially come to a close, so has my mango observation project. The verdict on the best-tasting mango Cambodia has to offer? Hands down, Chinese Glass. It turns out there’s a reason people pay nearly thrice the normal amount of money for a kilo of these mangos. They are not only deliciously, [...]
My youngest host sister and I have a pretty close relationship. For starters, she’s the most patient family member when explaining things to me and engaging me in conversation (probably because, as the youngest, she doesn’t have to rein in the cows every afternoon or feed the pigs or do the laundry or wash the [...]
There is nothing more attractive than a guy who has his life in order. Well, let me clarify. While I know it’s pretty much impossible for anyone to have their life completely in order (let’s face it, I’m in the Peace Corps avoiding real-world responsibility), it’s good to have a goal in mind—however fuzzy that [...]
In Cambodia, mangos are only in season for about three months: March, April, and May. I’ve been anticipating mango season since the day I got here, both because previous Peace Corps Volunteers have spoken extensively on the sheer volume and deliciousness of mangos in-season, and also because mangos are in my top 6 favorite fruits. [...]
A lot of people think that Peace Corps is filled with world-changing activities like saving HIV+ babies or building schools every day, but my days are more or less the same, and, when it comes down to it, pretty boring. My friend Elaina in Benin (who is my 2012 application twin) wrote about a day [...]
This week, something dawned on me, something that I should have known for a long time: my family is not exactly middle class. A fellow PCV, who has been editing my essays, has repeatedly pointed out instances where I talk about things in my past that don’t make me seem quite so middle class at [...]
After being here for approximately 7.5 months, I’ve made some observations regarding the Khmer male gender and the perceived pros and cons of being in a relationship with one. (Disclaimer: this does not mean I am dating a host country national, by any means. Stop making pointless inferences.) Pros He can scale coconut/palm/mango/whatever trees like [...]
There are times when I think about how I’ve been here for 7 months and wonder why it’s gone so slowly–I feel like I’ve been here forever! These are the times (usually) when I spend too much time on Facebook and am reminded of the fabulous American lives of my friends, filled to the brim [...]
I’m in Phnom Penh on medical again. I developed a stye-like infection in two places on my lower left eyelid, and it just kept getting progressively more swollen and painful so I came in today to get it checked out. Joanne looked at it and decided to take me to an ophthamologist. He takes two [...]
Today I brought in a bunch of magazines to share with my students. These magazines are the bottom-of-the-barrel selection I found in the Peace Corps volunteer lounge, so we had such gems as Harper’s Bazaar, Essence (a magazine that is geared towards African-American women), and Men’s Health. __________ While flipping through Bazaar, several of my [...]
Happy Lunar New Year, everyone! Xin nian kuai le, gong xi fa cai–all that jazz. I’ve had basically the entire week off: school had exams this week so I didn’t go teach, and then the health center was closed from Wednesday to Friday because of the festivities. Lunar New Year is celebrated here much like [...]
Oh hey guys. That is a picture of the current state of my legs. …and my arms… …and my stomach. In the interest of making sure you don’t have nightmares, I’ll refrain from posting pictures of my face and chest. Conclusion: I’m allergic. REALLY allergic. To what, I don’t know. Yet. It may be the [...]
A few funny and noteworthy things have happened in “English Club” this week. I’m still hesitant to call it that, because of my harboring secret ambitions that it’s still going to turn into the Reproductive Health class that I so want to teach. However, as evidenced from our past 5 meetings, it is clearly an [...]
Guess what the above picture is? Kind of looks like the supple breast of a petite woman, no? Guess again. It’s my growing-its-own-brain bug bite. This guy was responsible for the 101, 102 degree fever in the middle of the night that led to the aforementioned ice baths. Also the culprit behind my body aches, [...]
I remember the times I would secretly giggle to myself whenever other volunteers would be complaining of yet another gastrointestinal ailment. I would thank my mom for her hardly-ever-gastrointestinally-sick genes but at the same time knock on wood because Cambodia is hard as it is without having to use the bathroom every half an hour. [...]
My supposed “Reproductive Health” class took a turn for the amusing today. (I still don’t know how I’m going to try to work Reproductive Health into this. It is much too mixed of an audience for me to even fathom bringing up taboo subjects right now). Since starting it, I’ve been looking for “warm up” [...]
This past weekend was my first weekend at site in a long time. At first I was kind of intimidated at the vast expanse of time and nothingness that lay ahead of me (especially because it was a three-day weekend due to 1/7 being Victory over Genocide Day), but eventually I filled my schedule with [...]
Every Chinese-American kid is familiar with the old adage from our parents: “When I was your age, I didn’t have ______ (various items can be inserted here: food, shoes, electricity, paper) so be grateful you do now. Work harder. No excuses for failure.” Other kids might be familiar with that too, but I wouldn’t know. [...]
My host mother is, if there was EVER any doubt in the world, no-contest, hands down amazing. (Real Mom: you’re amazing too, don’t worry.) She really goes above and beyond anything the Peace Corps stipulates that a host mother must do–for example, if we’re having bony fish (i.e. fish with a lot of bones) for dinner, [...]
A lot of my posts have been really negative lately, so I thought I’d write about the things that don’t make me want to go home. They’re not major enough to warrant their own entries, but no less important are they to my sanity and ability to keep living this Khmer life. My breakfast lady: [...]
This past week has been rough. Rough like having my Program Officer call me and end up bawling to her on the telephone because I feel useless, stupid, and unrespected (not disrespected; there’s a difference) at my site. Rough like breaking up with my boyfriend because I just can’t handle the stress of being here [...]
The 15th annual Angkor Wat Half Marathon happened a few days ago in Siem Reap. There were a few PCVs who ran it and finished, which is incredible in and of itself, but I would especially like to point out that Jane finished first amongst female PCVs despite only having 3 weeks of training. Fuck [...]
Call me ambitious, but I plan on finishing the second grade by the end of this year. I don’t plan on going all-out Billy Madison and inserting myself unceremoniously into Khmer classrooms filled with small children all about a fifth of my size, though. No, my approach is much more stealthy and silent. And before [...]
Peace Corps gave us Health volunteers all a bunch of posters outlining proper nutrition, foods rich in vitamin A, and ways to make the best weaning porridge when we all moved to site. I had forgotten all about them, but because I cleaned my living space yesterday, today was the first day I brought these [...]
Today was another community outreach day—this month we are focusing on delivering vitamin A supplements and Mebendazole (worm prevention) tablets to children over a year of age. Slated for the visit was Prey Thnong, a Muslim community about 3k or so from my village. I’ve been there once before and the babies all seem fatter, [...]
I like to think that my host parents are happily married. Sure, my Pa has his vices (who hasn’t heard him retching up a night of drinking in the wee hours of dawn?), but in the end, he provides for the family and is much more willing to help out around the house than other [...]
It was a rainy afternoon and we were the only two left at the health center. No one was around and he lit his last cigarette, taking a few deep drags. “Christine,” he says, pulling his chair next to mine and placing his hand on my knee. “I think you’re a great woman.” Just kidding. [...]
As mentioned in the previous post, in an attempt to fend off feeling stupid, I sat in on a high school chemistry lesson recently. The understanding (rare, something like that is, in this country) that washed over me as I watched the instructor go over simple stoichiometry made me sure that I wanted to do [...]
Now that I’ve been at site for a good while and soaked up nearly all there is to observe in the community, I’ve started to notice some gaping differences between life here and life in the States. The really obvious ones, though, are no fun to discuss, so here are the subtler ones that one [...]
Today was like any other day. It was late afternoon, and I was outside playing with our new puppy, who I’ve named Kobe (yes, like Bryant), even though she is a girl. The family is none the wiser and everyone who comes by now calls her Kobe in their cute Khmer accents (meaning they stress [...]
I’ve come to believe that anything is possible in Cambodia. And I don’t mean the “reach for the stars and you’ll land in the clouds” kind of inspirational “anything”. I mean anything as in: dengue, malaria, Japanese encephalitis, rabies, scabies, mites, mold, rats, and the list can go on. I mean anything really terrible that [...]
Once a month, my health center will pack up its needles, vaccines, the whole shebang and head out to one of the neighboring villages to deliver service, whether it’s a polio vaccine or the next injection of Depo-Provera. Usually we gather at a central location within the community, like the wat or the village chief’s [...]
Today’s lesson started out with this exchange: “Mr. Sophea, how do you say poop?” “Put?” “No, poop. Like if you go to the bathroom and you don’t pee…but you poop.” “Oh. You mean shit?” Yes, I meant shit. But, I told my tutor, Mr. Sophea, that in America, saying “shit” is very impolite. A more [...]
In honor of Pchum Ben festival this weekend, my host family decided to go on a trip. I’ve always been a fan of family trips because it meant that my parents would let my brother and I do whatever we wanted just so they could relax (e.g. the two cruises we went on where my [...]
This morning I went to the wat to read. I’ve been reading River Town by Peter Hessler, which is about his experiences as a PCV in China, Sichuan specifically. The Peace Corps China headquarters is in Chengdu, Sichuan, where my parents grew up, and reading about his life in my parents’ home province really makes [...]
There is a dish that my mother (in America. Hi Mom) makes that I’m extremely fond of back home, bittermelon stuffed with ground beef (pork maybe?). I don’t normally like bittermelon because it’s bitter as balls but the way Mom makes it renders the bittermelon a little bit less bitter and a lotta bit more [...]
The K4s had an option, when we were going through our site placement interviews, to state whether we wanted to be at a replacement site or not. Meaning, we could either replace a K2 that had left, or we could start afresh at a new site. Since the K4 Health Volunteers are the first of [...]
A few days ago, the K4 volunteers of Peace Corps Cambodia, through tearshed and a few watery goodbyes, finally made our momentous move into permanent site. You know, that place where we’re going to spend the next TWO YEARS. I like to tell myself that I already made a good first impression on my family [...]
Ever since I started college I became a devout watch-wearer. A lot of people like to use their cell phones as a time-telling device, but I’m a very instant-gratification kind of person and like to know within the second what time it is rather than having to wait the extra two seconds of pulling the [...]
A rite of passage with a certain anticipation built in, site visit is when bright-eyed and bushy-tailed PCTs visit what will be our permanent sites for the next two years. Anxiety and high and everyone is usually trying their best to love, not just like, their assigned situation as it’s where we will be working, [...]
After a long weekend of our day off in rainy Kampong Cham and an almost unnecessarily long seminar day, we were all pretty eager to get home to our families and resume the routine we’d so tentatively set up for ourselves. I, especially, was looking forward to being able to do my morning run and [...]
I’ve officially been in Cambodia for a month and this is just about the fourth time I’ve gotten internet so please understand that THAT is why I haven’t been posting very many updates (Mom). Also because I like to keep my updates interesting and well-written so a hurriedly banged out paragraph about how hot it [...]
There are about 50 of us trainees, divided up into three training districts: Chamkar Leu, Prey Chor, and Tboung Kmoum. I’m in Tboung Kmoum, and we’re about 14km from the provincial town (big city) of Kampong Cham. The others are a bit farther, I think Prey Chor is 20km away and Chamkar Leu is 30km. [...]
First things first: I am safely in Cambodia. It is hot, and I’ve pretty much resigned to permanent stickiness–a combination of humidity, sweat, and insect repellent. So far we’ve been keeping pretty busy with orientation and training, and it will only continue to get busier, especially after we move into our host families’ homes on [...]
Today was hard. Woke up early, had the last of Mom’s Home Cooking that I’ll eat for the next few years, drove through traffic to LAX, made it through security barely on time to board plane, sat down, watched plane take off– And then I bawled. For about 40 straight minutes. They were inconsolable, heaving [...]
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