Swearing In and Moving to Site

It is official! I am a bonified, certified, qualified (?) Peace Corps Volunteer! Yesterday, the 59 Peace Corps Trainees who have made it through training swore in as official volunteers. The Minister of Health was there, as was the Chargé d’affaires of the U.S. Embassy.  Along with one other trainee, I gave a speech in Khmai, and with four other trainees, sang the national anthems of Cambodia and the U.S.. I was honored to be involved in both accounts, and despite my nerves, was really happy to do it.

With my new site mates! Brandon and Diana. And Sam On, who took us on our site visits, and decided to jump in the picture.

TRAING! Training village friends for life. :)

It was sad to leave our families in Traing. I was handling the whole thing pretty well until the day before we left, at lunch. My sister and I were talking about how much we would miss each other and she said she would miss knowing that I am in the room next to hers when we’re sleeping. Here is where, as you may imagine, I lose it. Crying into my banana (not pretty), as Srayingin awkwardly tries to soothe me but is obviously uncomfortable with the whole thing… In hindsight it’s pretty funny.

My first Khmai family: pa-own baroh (younger brother), bong serai (older sister who I am the closest to), bong baroh muy (one of my older brothers- there are three), mai (mom), bong serai bee (second older sister), and boc (dad: he was really worried about his shorts being in the picture, so kindly disregard those), and finally, Ot Dam (the three year old terror that I bonded with approximately twice, usually over food).

After we’d packed our things and said goodbye to our families, we traveled to our provincial town by roma (the moto with the wagon attached to it), and then took buses to Phnom Penh.

So close!

Before swearing in, we had a few days to kill in the capital. One of the days, we did a scavenger hunt around Phnom Penh. We had two hours to run around, trying to find and take pictures of things like “the mangiest dog in Phnom Penh,” “someone eating a fertilized duck egg,” and “a giant pile of hair.”

                            "creepiest looking mannequin"                       Best Engrish shirt found in the wild

                                                                                                                                         “I like sky and you make me smile!”

Monkeys and an elephant roaming around Independence Park

Despite our best efforts, my team and I failed in returning to the Peace Corps office on time, and so were usurped by another group who apparently chose timeliness over funtimeliness. We had a great time though, and found our way around parts of Phnom Penh we’d not yet explored.

Friday afternoon, groups of us went out on field trips to visit NGOs in the area. I went to visit the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (Chambres Extraordinaires au sein des Tribunaux Cambodgiens): where the leaders of the Khmer rouge are currently indicted, awaiting trial. The leaders are now in their seventies, which may prompt you to ask why it took so long to get a proper court set up to trial them. Basically, the Cambodian government wanted an all-Cambodian court, but didn’t have the funds to support it, and outside governments refused to help unless they could be involved in the trials. So after much back and forth, the court has now been set up, with outside input, and is now investigating the first leader. The necessity of these trials is a much debated topic in Cambodia, one that volunteers are advised to steer clear of as we are discouraged from talking about politics. But regardless of one’s stance on the issue, the situation is pretty interesting. If you want to read more about the trials, here’s a link: www.eccc.gov.kh

We had ample time to mix work with play, so a group of friends and I went and saw Harry Potter 7.5, most of us for the second time. In the U.S., if a movie is particularly good, we’ll clap at the end, but mostly we keep our comments to ourselves or at least limit them to our neighbors. Not the case in Cambodia. People freely narrate the majority of the movie, loudly, for all to hear. “He fell!” “Where are they going?!” “He’s dead.” At one point during the movie, there’s a scene in which Snape’s a young kid, laying in the grass with Lily Potter (some of you will remember this), and daisies start to bloom. At this point a Khmai man in the audience yells out “PONGTEA!” which translates, “EGG!” Of course, my friends and I lost it, yelled over to him “OUGHT PONGTEA TDE!” (“That’s not an egg!”) and continued to whisper “Pongtea” to each other at opportune moments throughout the rest of the movie. It was great.

Out and about in Phnom Penh.

What the true meaning of this is, I may never know.

So now I am at site, and I don’t really know what to do with myself. My school is currently flooded- there was four feet of water in all of the classrooms last week and still remains some, so we’re starting school late. Today, we had an all-staff meeting, during which my school director gave us a pep talk that included the advice “prepare lesson plans.” Then he asked us to go clean the classrooms. So I wandered over with the other teachers to peer into the classrooms at the inch of so of standing water mingling with various wrappers and tissues and sludge. I asked one of the English teachers what we were supposed to do and he chuckled and said, “I don’t know! On Monday, the students will clean.” This is the same teacher that, when I asked about how he handles cheating in the classroom (a notorious problem in Cambodia), he responded, “Oh, it is very difficult! Very difficult!” and left it at that. Luckily, there is one teacher with whom I already get along famously. His English is great, and he’s already taken it upon himself to be my Khmai teacher, and even wants to teach me to read and write. “You will take the small sticks, and then, you will build a nest” he told to me yesterday over coffee. I like his philosophy.

Beyond that, not too much has happened yet. My host mom makes a mean vegetable stir-fry, and still thinks everything I do is hilarious. I’ve finished one book and started another, and, despite how comfy my bed is, and how nice it is to lay in front of my fan for hours on end, am looking forward to more active days to come. Totally unrelated but I want to share anyway; here is a memorable quote from the latest book I read:

“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in here’ –he tapped his forehead- ‘and you’re alright” –Bozo, in Down and Out in Paris and London

More soon!