lindsayliveshere.org

Syrupy coffee, jar of sugar.

Quiet street, quiet morning

You are a stranger here

It’s Tuesday; no wait — Monday; no, yes, Tuesday, and last Tuesday was sick day, but now mango bread pudding with chai spices and the French press coffee on the porch at Java, and the way your sunburn just fades to gold, make all of this purr like a moto should. You are planning for Kep and Rabbit Island; you are remembering gerunds; teaching and learning words that trip onto new tongues. What’s the word for “oops” in Khmer? “Ah-ya!” Ah. You know, those fake Ray Bans that everyone has? Everyone is all of us, wondering if two dollars is too many for too much. Meeting new puppies in old bookstores, abetting their theft of Salinger covers between tiny teeth as they bolt for the door.

Law homework on a Monday morning

This morning I helped C. and S. with their homework. This started simply enough, with their bright cheery smiles and a hand motion to join them upstairs. They cracked open the thick green book, though, and that’s when I remembered they’re studying International Law. In English. So, I read passage after passage of dense, jargon-filled text to help them answer four questions about international custom, treaties, general principles of law, and, somewhere in there, the Hague and Geneva and something about fisheries. Holy goodness. I forget sometimes about how difficult their studies are. I teach English from a very rudimentary ESL book, and we talk about “window shopping in Hong Kong” and “What’s happening between Agrippine and her mother in this cartoon”. (Yes, Agrippine is not my first choice of a character’s name either….)

They study at Royal University of Law & Economics, which has this to say about its history. I remembered why it’s so important to study law here, despite the challenge:

 

From 1975 to 1981, the Faculty of Law and Economics was closed, during and after the Pol Pot regime. During those years almost all legal professionals were killed or fled the country. Law books were destroyed. At the end of Pol Pot regime, only six licensed members of the legal profession remained alive in Cambodia. The former campus of the Faculty of Law was reopened in 1982 as the Administrative and Judicial School. The main purpose of this School was to train the new government officials who were responsible for Administration and Judicial duties (in service or on the job training). The training was organized to assist the socialist authorities after the liberation from the genocidal regime of Pol Pot and to respond to its urgent needs. Three different programs were developed subsequently: a five-month program, then a two- month program and a two-year program. Because the majority of the legal professionals had been killed, there were no teachers available, so a five-month program and overall curriculum were organized by Vietnamese experts and were taught through interpreters. Some of the first group of graduates were selected to be the teachers and assistant teachers for next courses. These newly created teachers began teaching the two-year program. The five-month training program was discontinued in 1989.

Snippets

– This morning in the dorm lounge I watched Hellboy dubbed in Khmer and subtitled in English.

–A girl said to me today: “I think you are polite and lovely… and attractive, too.” This is totally common. They tell me every day how pretty I am. I have never been so flattered on the constant.

–One girl had been given a worksheet for her English class (at the university) that was on her level linguistically but conceptually far below her intellect. Basically, it was a drawing of a children’s party in a classroom and it asked her to describe  the picture. It’d be in a third-grade workbook in the US. In her paragraph of “what’s happening in this picture” she managed to work in how children’s rights are important and parents and community members must work together to support their education.

–Sometimes my bag is like the Room of Requirement. I’d been pining for a tweezers (haven’t found one here) and then one tumbled out of a pocket of my napsack today — packed for a long-ago trip.

Who Stepped on My Watermelon?

Every day there’s a fruit break of some sort. Someone buys a bag of fruit from somewhere (market trip, passing seller, etc.) and an insta-picnic begins. One girl grabs ceramic bowls, another the (very large) cleaver, another gets chairs, someone starts to slice or peel — speedy, clockwork-like, and the gossip and relaxation begins, a thirty-minute respite from a hardworking day. I’ve tried a bunch of new fruits. Brown grape-sized spheres with husks, peel to reveal a jelly-like fruit surrounding a pit, slick the fruit off with your tongue. Fuzzy brown seed pods filled with sweet tamarind paste. Something that looked like a bit of chopped-off cactus. I always have to ask for operating instructions from one of the girls, who is always super-amused that I need help with something so simple.

Today, though. Today was watermelon. And I know how to eat watermelon. “Do they have this watermelon in the U.S.?” one asked. “Oh yes,” I said. “In the summer. Only for a few months a year.”

Then S. began to tell her watermelon story. In Khmer. I had no idea what she was saying, but she spoke animatedly and was cracking up the half-dozen girls who were munching on watermelon chunks and slicing new ones with the cleaver. I wanted to know what the joke was. She didn’t want to tell me in English. I’m thinking, what kind of joke is she telling? What could possibly be so side-splittingly funny about watermelon?

Finally the other girls persuaded her to give it a try, even though she was nervous about her English. And here’s the gist of it:

She went to a relative’s farm and in the field she saw a little watermelon. It was so cute, and she wanted to eat it, but it was too young to eat right then. She didn’t want anyone else to find it, though! Someone might come along and pick her perfect watermelon! So she decided to hide it. She buried it in the ground and thought it would be ok there while it continued to grow. She wanted to save it for six days.

After six days she returned to the spot where her little watermelon was buried.

“But it was broken!” she said, laughing.

“A cow came along and stepped on it,” Marady explained. “The cow didn’t know.”

Their comic timing was so awesome that I, too, was just rolling on the floor over this watermelon debacle. And it made me realize a few things. 1) Humor can be pretty universal. 2) I have never, ever valued a watermelon so much that I tried to save it from all harm until it was fully grown. So maybe I should take better care to love things I’d consider ordinary. and 3) Maybe this is a self-help book in the making. You think you have it all figured out, you bury your watermelon for later… but then along comes a cow.

Coffee coffee buzz buzz

Icy coffee with sweetened condensed milk, with tiny plastic spoon and carrier. So portable!

Inadvertent Vocabulary Lessons

Phrases I’ve used and had to explain/teach:

–”Stressed out”

–”No wonder”

–”What are you up to?”

–”Sticking your tongue out”.

This last one was awesome because about five girls all started to stick their tongues out at me and say, “Sticking your tongue out! Sticking your tongue out!”

The power of changing expectations, or: How I learned to take a cold shower

I love long, hot showers. Decadent steamy showers, 20 or even 30 minutes long, with too much sudsy soap. I don’t think about all the energy wasted; the gas bill can go to hell. Showertime.

There is no hot water in this dorm.

The first day was impossible. I stood there with soap in my hand feeling shivery and miserable, then turned on the water, which was a sad trickly stream, and did some crazed half-in, half-out dance. After about thirty seconds, I bailed. On day two, small progress. I realized you can do a lot without the water actually on, and you can turn it on for rinsing purposes. So I conquered a tiny bit of shampooing in addition to the world’s fastest soap-up, and rinsed under the sad trickly stream of coldness.

Day three, though — a breakthrough. I finally asked one of the girls about a burning (ha) question. In each of the shower stalls, there’s what looks like a plastic saucepan hanging on a hook. I learned: The shower head is broken. Fill up the pan with water from the faucet-style tap in the stall and rinse that way.

The first pan of cold water that I sluiced over my head felt truly miserable. Same for the second and third. But by the fourth, I’d mastered a slow, less-panicky pouring motion, and it began to dawn on me that this was not a shower. In a good way. Yeah, I was naked and sudsing shampoo around in the vicinity of water. But I’d been thinking of this as “a cold shower” — aka, a terrible version of something I really like. Instead this more closely resembled (drum roll)….a swimming pool in tiny doses.

This discovery made me laugh — which probably sounded very strange to anyone else in the bathroom. But I feel cleaner than I have in days.

Impossible Things Over Breakfast

The day starts early, 6am at the latest. All the girls cook all the meals according to a rotating schedule. The breakfast cook of the day, still in her nightgown, stands over a hot wok while the electric rice cooker works its magic on the counter. This morning, breakfast was a chopped-up combo of soybeans and pork — sweet, spicy and smoky. Scoop rice into the bowl first, add meat. If a few people are eating at the same time, someone pulls out the straw mat, and all sit cross-legged on the floor with their bowls.

Every meal I’ve had so far brings a new conversation. This morning I learned that one girl is working on a new project to export Cambodia’s legendarily delicious green mangoes. I’m someone who’s usually pro-local food in the US, so this was a good eye-opener for me. She told me about how Cambodia’s wide network of farmer’s can’t standardize its production and distribution enough to become an exporter. Instead companies from Vietnam and Thailand come over the border, buy what they like and label them as their own for resale.

She talked about looking at a map one day, of all the countries that export mangoes, and wondered, “Why not Cambodia?”

Later she wants to go back to her hometown and work with an old high school friend to start a new agricultural initiatives that would bring work to the area.

Next, coffee. A boiling teapot on the electric stove, a packet of Nescafe, a mug. In the slightly cool early morning, cross-legged on a straw mat with inspiration brewing, it was just about perfect.

Rooftops, Laundry

My friend Claire sent me a quote this morning:

“”Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends.
You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky — all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.”
— Cesare Pavese in “The Comfort of Strangers”

11:11, Make a Wish

There’s a line in Alice in Wonderland that goes, “Sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” That line is running through my head now, for a few reasons.

First: Yesterday I ate two inedible things before sundown. Not like, “This food is so weird I can’t eat it.” No, as in “Oh, you’re not supposed to eat that part?” Lychee have pits. Bone fish have, well, about a bajillion bones.

And more importantly: I am at an amazing place full of smart, sincere, energy-filled women who are working at lightning speed to not only earn their college degrees in things like economics, human rights law, international relations and other fancy subjects, but they’re also learning to be fluent in English. Ok, how can I describe this. I’ve met at least 15 of the 35 girls in the dorm. Here’s what I know so far. They wake up at 5:30am and study for the day’s lessons, go to school for at least five-six hours, come home around 5, have more classes at night in the dorm, study until midnight and then wake up and do it all over again.

Brief snippets of interactions so far:

-Kunthea cracks up if you pronounce her name wrong because you’re mistakenly calling her “baby duck”. She wants to work in international human rights law in order to help children and families. -A few of the girls could not believe I was 30 years old. As in, super-wide eyes, dropped jaws. Several exclaimed: “But you’re so YOUNG! You’re younger than US!”
-Yesterday Marady pointed to a big bouquet of bright tropical flowers, with a sweet scent. She asked, “What do you say for the smell of flowers? It’s not a delicious smell… that’s for food.” And I realized I had no idea if there was a special word for a good-smelling flower. It’s not delicious, it’s… it’s…
-I held up my cell phone to a girl, pointed to the time and said, “It’s 11:11, make a wish!” (Yes, I realize this is extremely dorky.) And she looked confused, so I explained the expression and she got SO excited, she said “Oh yes, make a wish!”; jumped back about 12 inches, squinched her eyes shut, clutched her notebook to her chest and wished for like 15 seconds.

Lessons from Day One

It’s been a long journey. Here’s a quickety-quick recap:

1) A valiant band of fantastico women never fails to save my ass. Exhibit A: College friend Claire ran into me at the coffee shop and gave the perfect, serendipitous pep talk about how, right before her round-the-world trip last year, she wondered: WHY AM I DOING THIS. I was similarly wigging out. Exhibit B: My sister Lisa helped pack my entire (entire) bedroom for the subletter while I packed my suitcase. Sister bonding. Exhibit C: Becca showed up to drive me to the airport with a bevy of drugstore purchases PLUS a camera she’d bought at Target THAT MORNING. PLUS a breakfast burrito.

2) Letting go is easy sometimes. In the car to the airport I immediately spilled a bunch of breakfast-burrito juice down my only sweatshirt and experienced a bizarre lack of caring about the situation.

3) Airline seating sometimes rocks. At the gate I spotted a woman who seemed to be a kindred spirit. For one, we were the same (tall) height. For another, we had pretty much the same glasses on. And she wore cute accessories, like a twisty, rust-metal ring that I was already coveting. But she looked tired. I was tired. We didn’t speak. Then, on the plane, I was shoving my messenger bag under the seat in front of me with the toe of my sneaker when I looked up to see…. her. She was sitting next to me. So she (Kendra) and I exchanged 5-minute autobiographies that morphed into 5-hour autobiographies, then watched movies and napped and ate bi bim bop from plastic containers with real silverware and little tubes of hot red pepper paste.

4) The airport in Seoul, Korea? Is awesome. Free wifi, pretty and clean, free luggage carts, good bookstore… and when you need to buy lady products from behind the counter at the pharmacy, you can just point.

5) It IS possible to get a ton of work done once you check into a hotel after a 20-hour journey because your body doesn’t realize that it’s 2am. Feels so afternoon-y!