Noise complaints

In college, noise complaints were the bane of every party's existence. One noise complaint and campus police would come investigate. Warning lights would be flashed on an off. Red solo cups abandoned recklessly by the underaged. Pyramid formations suddenly became rectangles or a zigzag. Glass bottles hidden in old laundry. The only thing you couldn't hide were the 50 people packed in a 2 person dorm room.

These days I find myself wishing I could pick up a phone and call those police. Actual noise laws have the following benefits:

1. Stops the neighbors from singing offkey karaoke at 6am.
2. May stop your host sister's 6am alarm from going off at 5am.
3. Preventing surround sound weddings (4 simultaneously in a circle around your house).
4. No more need to worry that walking past the speakers will burst your eardrums.
5. Funeral music from three doors down will not make you want to rip your hair out.
6. No more groups of drunk men banging on a drum and singing in chorus at 3 AM. (outside your house)
7. The Wat outside will not be blasting dance music into your room until midnight on Monday and Tuesday nights (my bedtime is around 8pm).

Right now, I'm sitting in my room with my earplugs in. The difference between now and before the earplugs is that now it sounds like someone closed a door on the crazy rager going on next to me, but it's not enough to keep my bed from shaking.

oh life...

Some interesting things happened to me today...

1. Apparently today and tomorrow are very good days to get married. Weddings in Cambodia are typically 2-3 day affairs where they blast music ALL day to let everyone know what’s up. So, this morning, and by morning I mean 4am when the stars are still fully visible in the sky, 3 weddings started up. They were each in a different direction from my house so in effect I had weddings in surround sound.
2. Puppies do not like Khmer wedding music. At about the same time the music started the 3 puppies at my house started howling like mad. They made their sad puppy cries all morning starting at 4am. My mom thought it was because they were too infested with lice. Which leads to the next interesting thing...
3. Spraying puppies with RAID. I was standing outside my house and I saw my mom poking at a puppy. I squat down for a better view and she begins to explain to me how the puppies have too much lice and she decided to deal with it by spraying the puppy with Raid. In this country, dogs are not really pets. You may have one that you feed the leftover rice to and these are the puppies of that dog. So, there are pretty much no vet services, no flea control, no doggy baths, etc. The puppy that was sprayed with Raid had handfuls of dead dog lice falling out of its fur. Before the pesticide spray the dog was white and black. Now it was white, black, with brown spots. Unfortunately, I think the Raid had some negative neurological side effects which should be expected when you spray a 5kg puppy and if you know how to read the label. But, my host parents do not because the label is written in Thai. By this afternoon the puppy had stopped having the shakes and seemed to be lice free.
4. Lately my Health Center keeps being invaded by chickens. I always thought that they were the neighbors chickens. One thing I learned in Cambodia is that chickens are not smart. For example, chickens will wander into rooms in the health center, forget how they got there, and get stuck in the room unable to find the door. This poses a problem when you are constantly trying to herd them out. This morning I asked the pharmacist where these chickens were coming from. Turns out they are the Health Center Director’s chickens and he’s raising them at the Health Center.
5. One of the three weddings is the wedding of the Health Center’s receptionist. I’m pretty friendly with the receptionist since she’s one most available to answer my general questions, she understands when I speak, we spend a lot of time waiting for patients together, and we’re about the same age. This wedding is also the reason I am not taking any vacation days for New Years. This morning I was chatting with the pharmacist again. Turns out the receptionist is getting remarried. As in, she got married 2 years ago, divorced, found a new guy, and is getting married again. When I heard this two thoughts popped into my head. The first was, “Oh, that’s what my host mom was trying to tell me this morning.” The second was, “Wow, that’s fast.” According to my host mom, her first wedding was arranged and they did not love each other. Also, the groom had to pay 3000 bucks as the bride price. This second wedding, the groom is not as handsome and he only paid 2000 bucks. 

Getting used to each other

Recently, I was talking to someone and they asked me "Who got used to the other first? You or your host family?" (not exact wording). I replied, " I think we're still getting used to each other." It was weird because part of me was hesitant to admit that. I've been here for almost a year and a half and I should be use to it by now, right? I should just understand how everything works and be one with the culture. Part of our bi-annual report to Peace Corps includes a question that asks us to self-rate ourselves on how integrated we are. I think the options are: Not integrated, Somewhat integrated, Integrated, and very integrated. I think most people are not really sure what that means. I think maybe you can tell the difference between someone that is NOT integrated at all and someone that is VERY integrated, but other than that it's a totally subjective measurement. And yet, I feel guilty admitting that, after 1.5 years, I am not an expert on Khmer language and culture.

I still do strange American things that make my host family raise their eyebrows at me and they still do weird Cambodian things that I then blog about. For example, today I was sitting in my room on the comp and I smelled/heard someone spray painting something. It was really close to my window, which I thought was strange because it wouldn't be somewhere you could put a bike or car or something. So, I looked out my window and my host brother was spray painting his jeans black. I guess that's the secret to keeping your black jeans from fading in the Cambodian sun. A few hours later I went to a Health Center meeting that was supposed to start at 1:30pm. At around 3 pm one of the commune chiefs shows up. At about 3:30 pm, 3 village health volunteers stroll in yelling really loudly about why they were late in the middle of the meeting. They saw nothing wrong with it and the only person that did anything about it was my midwife. She 'shushed' them really loudly from the other side of the room.

I've learned a lot in the last 1.5 years, but certainly not an entire culture.

Are you a feminist?

So, my official COS date is August 3^rd!!! That means that August 3^rd is the first day that I am ‘allowed’ to go back home to America and the last date of my service here in Cambodia. My exact plans for what follows August 3^rd is up in the air, but I hope to end up in India or Nepal somewhere around there. A lot of this is dependent on other factors like med school interviews, potential jobs (if that’s at all possible), and friends/family. But, it’s good to finally know a date.

Recently, I was on facebook and one of my friends had posted on her status “I’m not a feminist, but...” What followed was an article about women in the work world and how in some cases they are making more money than men. This is a very general summary of the article and should not be taken as evidence of anything. What struck me was not the article, but the fact that my friend  felt that she needed to preface posting it with “I’m not a feminist”. My response to her was “‘You’re not a feminist? What does that mean?”

Until maybe my Junior year of college I had no idea that the term “feminist” had negative connotations. To me, feminism is defined by each person. I think that if you generally believe in the ability of women to make choices for themselves then you are a feminist. You don’t have to believe that all women need to work or that women shouldn’t wear bras. You just need to believe in women. You just need to believe that a woman can make the choice to raise kids or run for president and that they have the ability to do either or both. It really does not seem like a radical idea to me. When I first heard that people were scared to be associated with the word feminist my first reaction was “Why?”

Why are people afraid to be a feminist? Coming to a Cambodia has brought feminism to another level for me. The wall between male and female gender roles here is so solid that it might as well be made of steel. Every day I see women come into the health center with their children. They finally found time outside of harvesting rice, cooking, cleaning, and any other work that needs to be done to bring their child to the health center. Very rarely do men come with their children or wives to the health center. In my host family, the boys get to go play soccer, school, see Siem Reap, but the girls stay at home. They go to school and they study, but they need to make the rice first. Every morning all the women in my host family pick up a broom to sweep and every night they do all the dishes. I don’t think I have ever seen one of the boys do their dishes and I’m not sure they know how. I’ve seen families where the eldest son got to go to school and becomes a nurse, the youngest son gets to go to Siem Reap for high school, but the middle daughter stopped going to school after grade 8 and stays at home to cook. These gender roles don’t just force people into certain jobs or livelihoods, but they affect behavior. Generalizing about girls in Cambodia, I would say that a lot of them are scared. They never get permission to leave the house or stay out past dark so they rationalize it into a fear. This fear self-perpetuates and keeps them at home and in turn creates parents afraid to let their daughters out of the house.  If you lived in Cambodia, would you be a feminist?

Maybe the term feminism is too limiting. Maybe part of the reason why people don’t want to associate with it is because it neglects men and some people picture “man haters” when they hear the term. Maybe I should call it anti-gender rolism to appeal to the masses. I guess sometimes people use "gender eqaulity" or anti "gender disparity", but what does that really mean? Mutual understanding between men and women, good communication, is crucial to subverting gender roles. Women alone may be able to start change, but to have worldwide sustainable change the other 50% of the population also needs to buy in. Men are also trapped by gender roles,  “oppressing is oppressive to those who oppress as well as those they oppress” , trapped in the cycle perpetuated by those in power (Frye 1983). If everyone feels oppressed by oppression then why don’t we stop? Because those oppressing still have an advantage they don’t want to give up. Over the course of a number of months I did a big project involving a girls club. As a large part of my work I ended up having many formal and casual conversations with people in my community about the girls club, gender, and related topics. Eventually I realized that many Cambodians, especially men, either don’t consciously see the gender roles in their society or they don’t see it as a problem.

I had a number of people ask me why I only had a girls club and not also a boys club. To me it was obvious and it was also obvious to the two male PCVs I worked with. With limited time and funds why would I choose to create a boys club when all of Cambodia is pretty much a boys club? However, to Cambodians it wasn’t so obvious. The purpose of the club was to teach girls the skills they would not learn at school: self-confidence, team work, leadership, career seeking, project planning, advocacy, anatomy, sexual health, etc. Many of these skills are taught to boys. 

“Women and disabled individuals are encouraged to apply” was a statement printed at the bottom of a job advertisement. Someone reading that in America might not think much about it. It’s a pretty standard statement that we see a lot. Someone in Cambodia once told me that he had no hope of getting the job because they would hire women first. Interestingly, he did not include disabled people in his lament. I asked him how many women and how many disabled people he saw working at this company. His answer was 2 and 0. Out of the 6 staff members 2 were women.  He ended up making it to the final round of hiring and they chose another man over him. One day I asked someone why are there no female english teachers at our school. His answer was because the female teachers all get chosen to work at NGOs or school in Siem Reap (which are larger and pay more). He felt there was unfair selection because they mostly got to work there. I don’t think he realized that of all the men that graduate every year only a handful of women do and that handful  probably had to be first in their class for their entire lives in order to work in Siem Reap.

Hearing people that think that these gender roles are a way of life and that nothing needs to be changed is almost more frustrating than seeing the gender roles themselves. Women are too scared to change, men don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, and nobody communicates with each other. So when someone says “I’m not a feminist” I ask “Why not?” What are you scared of?

A Cambodian Water Festival Story

Water Festival is a three day holiday at the beginning of November. Usually, Cambodian hold boat races very similar to the dragonboat races we have in other countries. This year I decided to stay home for the holiday since I had just gotten back from China. My host family had big plans to go visit the “Cambodian Cultural Village” which is just outside of Siem Reap city.

Recently, my host father had bought a new used car. It was a Toyota Camry (typical for Cambodia) and he did not know how to drive. Over the past month he’s learned how to drive and taught my host brother how to drive too. I still remember the first time he took the car out for a test drive and the car never made it back that day. Turns out, my dad drove it into a water filled ditch. For our trip to the cultural village my teenage host brother drove. It was 5 of us in the car including my host mom who kept telling him to turn down the radio. The rest of my host family, aunts, uncles, cousins, went in a big SUV that they apparently have on lease.

Things were going well. We left the house around 2pm and wanted to arrive around 3pm. This is pretty good timing for Cambodia. Half-way to the village we had to stop in Pouk market to buy roast chicken for the picnic dinner later. In order to save time, our car picked up my host grandfather and drove him to the dentist in Pouk. I think they expected the visit to take a few minutes, but it took almost an hour. All of us sat in the open waiting room reading dentist chair catalogues and watching a Chinese soap opera that was dubbed in khmer.

When we finally got to the “Cambodian Cultural Village” none of the adults wanted to go in. They were all outraged that the “village” raised the price from 4 dollars to 5 dollars because of the holiday (this is the price for Cambodians). Then my host mom kept saying how we arrived too late and there’s not enough time to see everything. We spent about another 30 min in the parking lot discussing this matter. Then we all got in the car and made a pit stop at a Wat. Everyone in my car was just confused at this point and not sure why we were stopping here, but I took some pictures of my little cousins and we all waited for something to happen. Somehow there was a signal for everyone to get back in the cars and so we did.

The next stop was Road 60, a carnival type place outside of Siem Reap City. It was built as a joint venture between Cambodians and a Korean company so you’ll see a lot of Cambodians and bus loads of Korean tourists. I’ve been here many a time, but this was definitely the lamest trip yet. We got there and sat down to eat dinner. This was a pretty good dinner. Lots of roasted meat and rice which I enjoy. Typically, after you eat we go ride on the “roller coasters” which consists of a rusty ferris wheel and a big wheel thing that goes back and forth, similar to those pirate ship rides in America. This time we went shopping. Road 60 is a long road that has vendors on both sides. People will drive through on their motos and just stop on the side if they see something they want to buy. I ended up following a bunch of teenagers around and all they bought were stuffed animals to give as birthday presents for an upcoming bday party we were all invited to. The kids had been talking about the ferris wheel for days because it’s the scariest ride they will ever be on (and the logistics of riding a large rusted wheel in Cambodia is pretty scary), but the teenagers would have none of it. By the time they had finished buying stuffed animals it was time to get back in the cars and go home.

When we finally arrived home I was exhausted from doing nothing and all I wanted was to go to bed. My host sister really wanted me to stay up until midnight to go to the Wat. I’m really glad I didn’t because the next day I asked her, “ Was the Wat fun last night?” She replied, “No, I was too tired.”

In between China and crashing into an ox cart I spent a wonderful weekend at this nice hotel called the sofitel because Kurt's grandparents were in town! I was pretty nervous about it even in China, but it was a wonderful weekend in the end. To start off, I biked there and the weather was pretty nice for the ride. It felt really good to not be trapped in some plane, train, bus or taxi. Felt good to flex my muscles again. I showed up at the hotel and asked where I could park my bike, but the security guard, good naturedly, told me I had gone in the EXIT and that I had to leave the driveway and go about 50 meters down the road to the Entrance. I was shocked. Never before I had I experienced such enforcement of rules in Cambodia. This is a country where driving down the road on the wrong side of the highway is perfectly acceptable. This is the country where you can dry your rice on both sides of the road, turning it into a single lane, and not even feel bad about yourself. This is the country where you ride your moto and hold your helmet instead of wearing it and no one thinks that's strange or oddly flaunting the law. So, I begrudgingly turned around, got plenty of oil on the back of my right leg which happens all the time, and went searching for the entrance.

Once I made it in the IN part of the driveway things went smoothly. I took a shower in the nicest shower I've seen in a long long time. The shower was actually enclosed in glass versus being completely open and always getting the toilet paper wet. And then I met Kurt's grandparents. And everything was good. Normally, I get really nervous meeting people that are older than me, whether they're 5 years older or 20 years, but I felt really at ease and I really enjoyed meeting them. Also, the breakfast buffet and the bacon helped my nerves a lot. The sofitel also had a huge pool and it smelled really nice all the time. Also, a PS2. Yes, I still kick ass at Capcom vs. Marvel.

One day, Kurt and I went with his grandparents to see Banteay Srei. I was so so grateful that his grandparents paid to have us driven there. Originally, I had planned on biking there, but it was a lot harder to find and a lot farther away than I thought. Also, while beautiful, the temple itself is fairly small and so I don't think it's worth a bike ride unless you do a picnic lunch or something after.

Oh, and it was halloween that weekend too! I was a werepanda, half panda half human. Kurt was a rice farmer. Then halfway through the night it just got too hot to wear my panda hat so I put it on my belt and became a panda hunter and kurt was just kurt.

It's always interesting to stay in such a nice place because my house 30 km away is a totally different world. I had the same feeling when I walked into the US Embassy a few months ago. There are all these small recreations of the western affluent world in Cambodia and really it doesn't seem fair, but at the same time luxury is something I've, personally, wanted my entire life. If you polled most rural Cambodians, I bet a lot of them would tell you that they want the giant 3 or 4 story house. They want a car. They want a job that pays a lot of money. They want the new tv. They want all these things too and they probably want it more than middle class Americans or the people that already have them. They want it more because they can't have it. To them it's always a dream.

That's the way it was growing up. Having an apartment of my own in Manhattan. Being able to take taxi cabs instead of the subway. Having nice clothes, a respectable high paying job. It's all part of a dream that a lot of people have and that's not a bad thing. It's just ironic that the people that have this dream and that eventually attain it might be the ones least concerned with helping others. You spend your whole life struggling and trying to reach something. To get there you have to devote 100% of yourself and once you get there you try as hard as you can to forget how much you had to struggle in the past. It's a new life now. It's hard to keep in mind how many people probably had to be self-less in order to help you make it. Parents, friends, anonymous scholarship donors, not so anonymous scholarship donors, library volunteers, free tutoring, free music lessons after school, art programs. I worked hard to make it to college and graduate and I have the potential to have a luxurious life style, but I didn't do it alone. It took a lot of people that wanted to help others to help me make it here even if they didn't realize they were helping me. It seems odd to me now, how badly I wanted something that I don't really need. And yea, honestly, part of me still wants it. Especially food wise. I would still love to just be able to walk into any restaurant and order anything I want off the menu. But, I think I'm more willing to be flexible now. It's not an all or nothing. As long as I can keep others in mind and actively work toward helping them then I think, once in a while, I can indulge in something for me.

Sort of reminds me of something I studied for a small bit in college. I think for a class, Maine Social Research, we read an article about a woman on welfare and the article was attached with comments. The comments were just filled with people saying how this woman on welfare shouldn't own a dog. Pretty much blaming her continued poverty on the dog. But, I would ask others how long could you live a sparse lifestyle with ONLY the things you need for survival? People blame the poor for owning tvs or buying a new couch, but it's hard to live life when all you do is work, eat, and sleep. What's the point of living if you can't even have a dog? We're people, not robots.

The crash 11022011

Before I get to a post about my wonderful weekend, I want to post about what happened to me yesterday afternoon. Yesterday, I left Siem Reap City on my bike around 3pm and things progressed as usual. I even stopped by Travis’ site to pick up his passport. There were no rain clouds in sight. It was just me, the asphalt, and the sky. The road was almost completely empty and I was really picking up the pace when I noticed that somehow my brake wire was out of place and my back brake was not working. No big deal. I stop, move the wire back in place, and keep going thinking that a major accident was just avoided. Wrong. About ten minutes later and only 5km away from site I look up and BAM I crash straight on into some inanimate object. I crash so hard that the object and I keep going a few feet before we both stop and then I fall really hard on my right side.

Apparently, I had not been watching the road well enough and I crashed into a parked ox cart. This thing is pretty big. It’s made to hook up to two cows or oxen and it already had a pile of hay on it size of me. At first I just lay their sort of dazed and then my right leg started hurting a lot. I picked myself up and just cursed my own stupidity. For a few seconds I thought I could just get back up on my bike and keep going. I’m a pretty small person with a very small and light bike. I didn’t even think I dented the cart which is made from heavy wood. Apparently, I broke it in two separate locations. One from the force of direct impact and the other from inadvertently pushing the cart a few feet when it’s ‘brake’ was still in place. I also slowly realized that my right thigh was pretty swollen and I would never make it the 5k back to site. At that time I was just really alone and sort of just stood their crying and in pain. The farmer came back and obviously he was angry, but he was actually the one that called someone to come pick me up. I learned later that my host dad had passed me on the highway, but at that point I was sitting on the ground and he thought I was just trying to fix my bike or take a break. He didn’t want to stop because he was a man and I was a female and somehow that’s inappropriate. It was sort of crazy how even though it was hard for me to walk only women could help me and no males ever even came close to touching me the entire time.

The entire time this was happening I was thinking two things. The first was that my leg really really hurts but it’s not broken. The second was I want to settle things now with the cart. It’s broken and it’s going to be hard for him to get it home. He needs it to work everyday.  It was totally my fault. The first things I said to the farmer was  “Í’m Sorry. How much will it cost to fix it?” I might have been the one crying hysterically and in pain, but in the long run he might be the one that suffers. Instead of talking about it he calls someone he knows to come get me (though I later heard he might have been afraid of a fine since he had the "larger vehicle" illegally parked on the road). The moto man shows up and he says “Oh! Helen!” I’m still not sure who it was but he takes my bags and I get on the moto and we go straight to the health center. I get off the moto limping, but someone got there before me. It was an old grandma and she was bleeding from somewhere. She had just been in a moto accident and was clearly very hurt. Watching her try to walk up to the Health Center just really made me realize how lucky I am. Even in a moment where I feel so broken and vulnerable, I can still see that I am the privileged and lucky one. Even when I’m in Cambodia, hurt and confused there are still people all around me that are worse off.  People, literally, standing in front of me. And at that moment I felt bad. I felt so bad that I was taking attention away from this woman that clearly needed more help than me.

I see a lot of people come here, to Cambodia, and they get a lot of attention. It’s wonderful when your class looks up to you and adores you even though you may be a subpar english teacher. It’s wonderful when you can give away new bookbags and toys and everyone loves you. But do they ever feel bad that all this glitz and glamor is taking away from what really matters? They’re covering everything up with temporary smiles when the real problems are standing right in front of them.

Anyway, the breakfast lady escorted me  home with some pills (antibiotics for my bruises) and passed me off to my host mother who washed my legs for me. They were covered in motor oil from my bike. My aunt showed me a giant scar on her belly to tell me that she got over something much worse than what I have now. My grandmother sat with me to give me a pep talk about how I have to keep struggling to finish my two years here.  Then I got the opportunity to call my 24/7 on call personal nurse named Joanne. Who was wonderful as always.  After that I called my awesome boyfriend who is always there for me. In the middle of that call, I got visited by my Khmer tutor’s wife, her 4 year old son, and another girl. They brought me desert. At night my host mom iced my leg until I fell asleep. This morning the 8^th grader I live with bought me breakfast and set it up in my room for me. I used my medical knowledge to clean and bandage up some scratches with antibiotic cream. My host mom heated leaves over a candle and pressed them to my bruise to keep it from swelling. She even made this delicious lemongrass chicken soup that I love.

I am just so lucky. Lucky it wasn’t worse. Lucky people care for me. Lucky I went to school. Lucky I have resources. Lucky that the worst of times are still not that bad. The same accident could have happened to someone else and maybe they would have gotten an infection. Or no one had a moto to go pick them up. Or they had to go to work the next day and their leg may never heal. My life is cushioned so that when I fall, I land on a soft mattress. When others fall, it’s a different story.

When I started this blog I said that it’s about my life. Over the course of this past year I’ve come to realize more and more how much of our lives is taken up with realizing and observing things. Then we process these observations.  We start thinking about them and, in this case, you start thinking about things that are wrong or could be improved. Maybe we start complaining. Me writing this blog talking about all the problems in the world is a method of complaint. A complaint is a method of making a problem known. It’s the first step in reaching a solution, but I think that, more and more these days, no one is moving onto step two. Everyone is suddenly waking up and realizing all the problems in the world, but will we ever reach any solutions? Complaining is easy, but, sometimes, fixing things is so damn hard.