Susan Cain TED talk

Being an introvert myself and having had to learn how to adapt to a world that seeks to create extroverts, I really appreciate this TED talk and wanted to share:

http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html

I'm sweating, how are you?

Hellooooo! First of all, I want to say THANK YOU for all of your donations! I left my charger in Phnom Penh a week ago, and have been without my computer and the internet for a week, so imagine my surprise at checking my PC Projects page and finding that over $1200 has already been donated to my project! I cannot adequately express to you my gratitude for this… Your support means so much, and literally makes this project possible. Thank you.

Since the last time I updated, I went to Phnom Penh for St. Patrick’s Day, to celebrate with fellow volunteers (and, of course, partake in drinking some festively green beer in honor of the occasion). I got back on Monday, and found that there was no school for the entire week because the 12th graders had their national exams. Why the entire school had to close down so that just the 12th graders could take their exams beats me… But I wasted no time in pursuing other ventures- I rode my bike to my friend Diana’s site, about 38k from me, to help her with her World Map Project, so I could get a better idea of how mine will go. Hers is actually the first other volunteer’s home I’ve visited, and it was so nice to see how another volunteer’s “home dynamic” is other than mine. Diana’s is very different- her family is a lot more chatty than mine for one, and also quite a bit younger. Her sister knows a little English, which, for more reasons than one, Diana and I both found wildly entertaining…

So visiting Diana’s site occupied a day and a half of my free time… But that still left the entire end of the week, and this whole week, which I have today learned is also free from teaching. Wow! I may go crazy. As it turns out, since it is so close to Khmer New Year (actually not that close- it starts on April 13 and lasts, technically, for only three days), the students have simply stopped coming to school. I somehow was not aware of this (I'm usually not notified of these sorts of things until they're already happening so I guess it's typical), and showed up to school this morning in my sampot only to be greeted by the few teachers who were hanging around for no other reason than to get out of the house for a couple of hours. Sigh.

In other news, it’s HOT. Like really hot. Like, so hot that even Khmer are uncomfortable. Back when I first got to site and was a whiny baby about the weather—back when it was a balmy 85 degrees and that was too much for me—I remember complaining to my mom in the late afternoon, “k’dow naa!” (it’s SOOOOO hot!) Now it seems so silly to me that I could have wasted those words’ meaning on such pleasantries. As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m up to three bucket baths a day now, and those are what I use to mark time. Bucket bath one is simply taken out of habit- it's how I start my day. It's even still kind of nippy at this time. Number two is by far the most needed. It’s 2 or 3 in the afternoon and I’ve been writhing around in my bed, trying, and likely failing, to read, trying, and likely failing, not to notice the sweat dripping down my back and down my arms from my armpits (gross, I know.) Bucket bath number three marks the end of a long, hard battle. It is at the same time a kind of victory over the day, and the calm before the storm that will come tomorrow. Do me a favor next time you’re in an overly air-conditioned mall or grocery store, ok? Just go ahead and bottle some of that up to send over to me. :)

dinner I made for my family- couscous with potatoes, onions, green peppers, black eyed peas, and tomatoes. Yes, we ate it with ketchup.

Diana's students drawing the grid for the World Map Project

cow

somehow Angkor tastes better when it’s green.

Library Development Project

Alright folks, so here's the deal. I am embarking upon my first "real" Peace Corps project... What does this mean, exactly? It means I am trying to raise enough money so that I can renovate the now termite-infested, cluttered, and generally abandoned library at my school into a working, functional, and useful resource... I will soon post pictures so you get the full extent of how naive I am.

However, regardless of my naiveté, I'm going to try my damnedest to make this work. And for that to happen, I need your help. How? you ask. By donating money that I don't have. You can do this here, at the Peace Corps website:

https://www.peacecorps.gov/index.cfm?shell=donate.contribute.projDetail&projdesc=303-025

As you can see, the goal is lofty: $2050. My intention is to be able to start this project by May and to finish in August. We will see how that actually pans out, but that is the plan... Please, please tell your friends, your co-workers, family- whoever. Any amount is GREATLY appreciated. You can donate by name, or anonymously if you prefer.

Thank you very much, and I am excited to keep you updated on the progress of this project!

One World

Last Friday, twelve of my regular students from my after-school English club and I met to work on an art project. The project is called “One World” and the way it works is that my students produce 25 pieces of artwork to send off to this organization who then sends it off to a group of students from somewhere else in the world, and in return, we will receive 25 pieces of artwork from another student group from somewhere around the world. I told the students they could invite their friends, which I feared would end up meaning the whole school, but it ended up working out with 23 students altogether.

We met up at the school around 3, when they were finished with class, and set up the materials. A few of them pulled out notebook paper, not realizing that I’d brought nice cardstock for them to use. They started up with some hesitation, just sort of looking at the paper and looking up at me for instruction. Go for it! I told them vaguely. I told them they could draw anything- something they’ve seen in real life or something that’s just in their heads. They timidly put their pencils to the page: a sun here, a TV there… A couple of students would barely get a shape onto the page before rushing to the front of the room to show me and get my approval. It’s great! I told them. Don’t be afraid to use more color… and see how there’s still a lot of space on the page? You can use that too…

After more timid lines and safe subject matter, they started to get more daring. Angry Bird made an appearance, as did Winnie the Pooh. Some students started drawing more elaborate scenes of rice fields with palm and coconut trees, cows and water buffalo lowing in the background. One of my students drew a horse that blew me away with its accuracy.

Just as a background note, students in Cambodia don’t often get the opportunity to exercise creativity, which is why this project was met with such hesitation and timidness. Any sort of creative activity carried out in the classroom has rigid guidelines and instruction, so having this much freedom was intimidating to the students… at first. It was motivating to see how, in such a short period of time, those walls came down and they were able to produce some really great, original works, totally by themselves. It fed my tiny seed of hope (that easily withers away if not fed regularly) that there may be hope yet for the next generation of Khmer to learn how to think more critically and creatively than the current.

What's making me happy this week

MANGOES! From now until the end of April I shall be in a velvety fever dream from a combination of the excessive heat, and living on a diet consisting primarily of these juicy fruits. I may be sweating out of every pore and up to three showers a day, but I like to think mango season coinciding with the hottest months in Cambodia is Mother Nature's way of saying "I'm sorry."

Time Travel and the Peace Corps

I read a volunteer blog the other day that described the experience of seeing 2012 through the lens of your country of service. Here, there are few to none of the “advances” we in the U.S. and other developed nations view as indicative of the times, and yet, it is inarguably 2012. For inhabitants of these countries, the year is still chugging along, even without the latest technologies. Eventually, it will even be 2013, and these places will likely still be without much of what we in the modern world consider indispensable to our daily living.

So imagine for a minute how strange it is to have the ability to jump between "the modern world" and the "developing," then, because that's what it's like to go from my village to Phnom Penh. In my village, I live without clean running water or modern plumbing, my only means of transportation is my bike, and while there are some in my village who own cars and many who own motos, it’s not uncommon to see villagers use a horse and buggy to get around. Wireless internet is unheard of, and developments like tablets and interfaces, still a very long way off.

Now Phnom Penh: abundant running water, reliable electricity, wireless Internet available in almost every hotel and guesthouse, streets packed with high-end cars… It’s hard to reconcile that the “modern world” as I know it—as most of you know it—is only 60K away from my small, developing village, and that for many in my community, they will never know it.

A friend and I were talking recently about our first impressions of Phnom Penh… I remember being shocked at how dirty it was, although I tried to convince myself I wasn’t (heh), and generally just kind of feeling overwhelmed by it all- how crowded it was, how noisy, etc. The closest I’d ever come to visiting a “developing country” was when I visited Taiwan on a study abroad trip throughout East Asia in college, and of course this was nowhere near the immersion experience I’m getting now.

After being here for seven months, going to Phnom Penh is not only "sensory overload" but also a puzzling experience for my sense of time. We volunteers talk about this phenomenon we like to call “Peace Corps Time.” When I'm at site, living with the locals and doing what they do (this can be as riveting as sitting at the kitchen table and watching traffic pass for hours), time does this funny thing: it stops. Days can feel like eternities, and only at the end of them, or at the end of a week, do I find myself saying “Whoa, where’d the time go?” It’s a very strange thing indeed. So when I go to Phnom Penh, and I’m back on “normal time” it’s even stranger. Days go by as I vaguely recall they do back in the states, and since I’m usually enjoying them immensely being reunited with friends, talking, laughing, eating and drinking to my heart’s content, I wish they would pass a little more like typical “Peace Corps Time” and let me savor them a little longer…

There is a lot more I could say about Phnom Penh- which for me, at this point in my Peace Corps service in which I am evidently not so choosy, represents modernity- in contrast to my village, but for fear of becoming pedantic, I’ll wrap this up. I do want to mention one small observation: it’s striking to me how much people smile in my village- genuinely smile- and how rare an occurrence this is in Phnom Penh, comparatively. I’m not trying to initiate a dialogue on the “evils of modernity” versus the “quaint, un-touched simplicity of village life”—fear not—it’s just something I've noticed, and probably has more to do with the annoying “Lady! You want moto baaiii?” which is called around every street corner in Phnom Penh and never fails to put a scowl on my own face, than much else.

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This past week I was in Phnom Penh for a “technical in-service training” (IST) with Peace Corps. This IST was mainly about grant writing (more on that soon), and, extra-curricularly, about catching up with friends. This part is always extremely rewarding for me. I've been lucky in that I've made some true friends here, and don't take for granted the times we're able to spend together and be really understood. This is definitely something I took for granted in the states, and being deprived of the ability to easily communicate at site I appreciate it all the more now on the rare occasion I am able to. I was supposed to return to site on Sunday, but the bus decided not to go to Prey Veng that day (ha), so I happily returned to the hotel with other friends whose busses had abandoned them too, and had an extra day of rest. :)

Now I am back and site and trying once again to readjust to my life here. I should mention that my family is doing a lot better since things came undone last week… They are making the necessary changes to the house already—my dad has already installed a new metal door in the back of the house—and is currently pricing the new brick wall that will go up to partition the house from the lawn. They’re remaining optimistic and doing their best to move on with things the best they know how. I appreciate your words of encouragement and sympathy through e-mails and comments, and have passed them on to my family. Hope you are all happy, healthy, and well!

This is an old picture. I came home from Phnom Penh and I swear he’s doubled in size!

my new favorite place to go walking…