Christmas in AV

The fact that it's nearly Valentine's Day shouldn't stop me from posting a few Christmas party photos, should it? I apologize, I had video clips from the Christmas celebration as well, but in a later mad rush to take photos elsewhere these got deleted to make more room in the camera. So at the bottom there are a few clips of some of our Child Development Program kids introducing themselves. Kids like these can be sponsored on a monthly basis, providing funds for the salary of staff members who work with the kid's families, facilitate financial saving groups that increase the well-being and resources of the whole community, lead Bible clubs, and provide supplemental education classes.

Recap on the Christmas party: this was not an FH sponsored event, but was a joint project put on by three local churches for the community as a whole. Many FH staff were involved in the preparations and goings on, and all staff attended the event as a staff Christmas celebration. About 500-600 people total were in attendance for the performances, a Cambodian speaker, sack lunch, and baptism. Included are several pictures of traditional Cambodian dancing performances, a Cambodian-style Christmas pageant, and guests at the party.

By Request

A blog post is long overdue, and so, by request: another day in the life of Katie. Sorry, this isn't a specific day, because really, my days aren't that exciting. But the below will give you a pretty good idea of what my days usually look like. And hopefully the internet will cooperate to let me tag a few pictures on at the end. Without further ado, the typical day:

6:00 am--alarm on my cell phone goes off. Drag myself up soon after, untuck the mosquito net from around my mattress and twist it up into a knot to keep it out of the way for the day. Proceed to get ready and eat breakfast.

7:25ish am--lock up and climb on the moto to head to the office.

7:30 am--devotions begin for all staff. We open in prayer, sing three songs in Khmer, read a chapter in the Bible (currently we are wrapping up the book of Luke), staff share their comments/questions/insights from the chapter, share prayer requests, pray all together, the end.

8:15-8:30 am--get to work. For me, I find a spot at a table in the main room at the office (where we have just had devotions), plug my laptop in, and check e-mail. From now until lunch I work on whatever my current tasks are--lately, I have been formatting some documents for HR, editing some donor reports in English, making travel and accomodation arrangements for a guest who shows up next week, and installing antivirus and web filter programs on staff computers. I also spend about an hour each day doing some language study, have a few meetings each week, and get asked for help several times during the day: "how do I add paper to the printer? what's this word in English? my computer is doing this ___________," etc. So, I also spend time looking up IT solutions online, when the internet is working. Somewhere during the morning I usually succumb to the call of nature and brave the office bathroom--no light, no TP, no toilet seat, wet everywhere....

12:00 noon--pack up and head to lunch. If it is my turn to cook at the house (my Swiss housemate and I take turns) I head to the market for veggies and eggs or "fresh" meat...somedays we also cook dry beans. Head home, put rice on to cook, chop and stir fry everything, eat up--usually around 1:00. Clean up and relax for a little bit.

2:00 pm--back to the office, more of the morning.

5:00 pm--pack up again and head home to whatever needs doing during the evening. Some of the exciting options are: getting gas or an oil change for my moto, going for a bike ride before it gets dark at 6 or 6:30, burning our trash, reading, looking at Internet news articles that I found during the day, watching a dvd, playing a few rounds of solitaire on the computer, taking a cold shower, petting the cat.

6:30 or 7:00 pm--heat up the lunch leftovers, which have been sitting on the stove and surprisingly do not make us sick, or make something simple for dinner. Clean up again and do whatever until bed.

10:00 or 10:30 pm--hit the sack. Our landlords downstairs and the rest of Anlong Veng have been asleep since 8:30 or 9:00.

And that's that! On the weekends, switch office time to laundry time and house cleaning on Saturday, and church and helping with the kid's Sunday School/English class on Sunday. I know you all now wish that your lives were as exciting as mine :)

A few pictures to spice things up: a few of the guests in our bathroom this past week, and some shots of Preah Vihear, an ancient temple about 100km east of Anlong Veng. It lies directly along the Cambodian-Thai border, and while it is under Cambodian sovereignty, the temple area is disputed between both countries (hence the soldiers, weapons, and bunkers). There are occasional firefights and skirmishes here, sometimes leading people to evacuate the border regions out of fear that more intense fighting will break out--the chances of this are pretty small, though. Preah Vihear is a matter of cultural Cambodian pride. For more info, check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preah_Vihear_Temple .

Prolean Village

This morning I tagged along with some of our Cambodian staff as they headed to the village where they work. The majority of FH Cambodia staff are called Community Facilitators--these are the staff who actually work with leaders and families in the villages around Anlong Veng. Each Community Facilitator focuses on walking with their village through one main skill or tool or focus: health and sanitation, agriculture, child development, or financial savings groups. Being Thursday, today is the day of the week that most of our child development staff have kid's club type programs in the villages. As part of my role here will be to assist these child development staff with their teaching techniqes, I try to tag along when they go to work with the kids to see what's already happening, what's going well, and where we'll be able to improve.

So--I headed out this morning with three of the staff on my team, Kunthea, Sovannary, and Thiera (the first is female, the second two are male). The four of us took two motos and headed out in our rain ponchos, as the after affects of Typhoon Ketsana, which caused so many problems in the Phillipines, were still giving us plenty of rain. Our goal was Prolean village, a widespread community about ten kilometers out with around 100 homes. We turned off of the main, paved road, and onto a more typical dirt road. As it is the rainy season, mud and puddles (or lakes...) and potholes are a matter of course, but after a few days of steady rain things get soggier than normal. Such was the case today after the Ketsana rains. We made it pretty close to the community before we pulled up on some pretty impressive flooding covering the road. There were several people taking advantage of this new water source close to their homes: a man washing his motorbike, a lady doing laundry, a whole herd of kids floating and splashing around. They made sure we knew the water was too deep to make it through on the moto without drowing out our spark plugs, so--we turned around to try a different road.

Luckily, because Prolean is so spread out, there are various roads to get there. One of these roads heads out through rice fields before emptying out onto a wide, flat, long stretch of gravel--Anlong Veng's very own landing strip for small planes. In fact, the Khmer word for "airport" is where Prolean village gets it's name.

We didn't take the road through the runway today, but the road we took did get us to the community just fine, albeit with mud-splashed legs. We stopped at the house where the weekly kid's club is held and washed up by scooping rainwater out of the large cement cisterns that are common here. Normally, schools in the Anlong Veng district have Thursdays off, sometimes holding classes on Saturdays instead, which makes Thursday the day of choice for our staff to run their kid's programs. Today, though, class was in session, so we ended up waiting for a bit for some of the students to finish up at school and head our way. Keep in mind that rural Cambodian schools have a lot of room for growth--most school days last for three hours or less, with teachers working either part-time or teaching two seperate groups of students in the morning and afternoon. The kids we saw today had already been to school and walked or biked the 10km back to Prolean in time to show up at our class around 9:30.

This lack of quality education is one reason our staff host kid's clubs--part of the material they present is basic language and math skills to supplement what the kids are able to pick up in formal school. The programs also feature some basic English teaching, songs, games, health and sanitation education (handwashing, teethbrushing, etc.), and, where village chiefs are open to it, Bible stories and prayer. Today's class focused on "a,b,c,d" and "door, apple, pig, dog". That along with a song or two and a stealing-places-from-each-other-in-a-circle game wrapped things up--while we have some amazing children's staff, as you can imagine there is plenty of room for growth in our kid's programs as well...

After today's class wrapped up, I went with one of the staff to visit a widow in the community. My guess is she is in her forties, with two children, the younger of which is about 10 or 11. A widow for ten years, she has been sick since this spring with some sort of abdominal ailment that leaves her looking like she is six or seven months pregnant. Treatment options are expensive, so we'll see what happens. We prayed with her and hopped back on the bike to head back to Anlong Veng for lunch. This afternoon it's back at the office, editing some English reports for our leadership staff and attempting to download a new antivirus program that I'll be installing on all the staff computers. With a little time out for some overdue blogging :) I apologize for the lack of pictures this time!

They Say That All Mammals Can Swim in a Pinch…

Tuesday night we had an interesting occurrence during dinner. Let me set the scene. In Cambodia, we are not too far north of the equator; thus, the sun rises and sets right around 6:00 am and pm, give or take a little. Coming home after a bike ride a little after 6:00, it was already very much dusk. By 7:00, when we had gotten around to eating dinner, it was fully dark. With no moon at the moment, a rain-cloudy sky, and no streetlights, it was pitch black. But, no worries, the electricity was working, so we and our meal were tucked away in the kitchen under the flourescent bulb, . Outside, we could hear the light rain falling, some frogs croaking away, an occasional car or moto passing by, and the cat that has been meowing away most nights lately. This is what we heard next:
Cat: “Meeoowww! Meeooww!”
Us conversing: “ Man, what is that cat’s deal?”
Cat: “Meeooww!” (pause…)
On the roof: (thump…scratch, scratch, slide, slide, scratch-scratch-scratch!!....SPLASH!)
Us: “Did the cat just fall in the water tank??”
From the water tank: “MEEOOWWWWW!!” (swim, swim)
Us: “Guess we need to go get the cat out of the water tank.”

And so, we grabbed a flash light and my battery-powered lantern and headed out into the night. Municipal running water is unheard of in rural Cambodia; people draw water from wells or holding ponds or catch rain water in giant pots. Occasionally, people have various types of water tanks or cisterns. Our house has a large, open tank built like an extra room on the backside of the house. About eight feet tall, it collects rain water and holds it for our use.
So, we tramped through the wet grass and mud, around to the back of the house. I climbed up the ladder that allows access to the water tank (which, despite the precarious looking angle—see the picture—was actually quite steady). I peered over the edge, and—yep, there it was, a cat treading water. Unfortunately, the water level in the tank was a good four feet below the top of the tank--too low for me to just reach in and grab the cat, meaning that we needed to move on to plan B. Fresh out of any lifeguard/man-overboard equipment, my roommate had the idea that we could stick something wooden into the water for the cat to grab onto.

Fast forward a little bit—my electric lantern decided to shut off, the cat keeps swimming and crying for help, my roommate uses her little flashlight to find a big muddy plank among the discarded items in the grass, and a few minutes later: I find myself perched on the ladder, in the pitch black, in the rain, with plank in hand and a sodden feline clinging to the other end. Once the cat got on board, I expected it to run right up the new ramp we had just provided it with, but the cat had other ideas. So, thanks to leverage, I got to heft the cat up to the side of the tank. Tired from all the swimming and like most Cambodian cats, scared of people (even ones who just pulled it out of a tank of water), it crouched there for awhile. We headed back inside, duty done, and the cat cleared out sometime after, hopefully no worse for the wear. Poor thing! So our, our tank has been cat-free since then.
Bottom picture: The tank and the plank

Photos

Coming up with blog topics is not always the easiest thing in the world for my tired brain, so--here's a few things to look at instead of a lot of writing! These are just a few shots of some of the things I see on a regular basis in Anlong Veng. Starting from top to bottom, these are:
1. Rainy day view of our back yard. Luckily, the front yard doesn't get so muddy. But--we do get to pick our way through the back to throw out any food scraps, and after the rain stops, to hang our laundry up to dry.
2. One of the kids from a village munching on some freshly-cut sugar cane. If you've never tried it, you first work to peel off the rough outer skin, and then gnaw off a bite from the center. It's wet and sweet and full of fibers, so you chew on it for awhile to get the juice out and then spit out the leftover fibers. Sugar cane is sold by vendors as one of the many street-food options, either cut into bite-size, ready-to-eat chunks, or pressed into juice.
3. Lots of ducks and chickens running around the villages! (Along with plenty of other animals) The mothers waddle around with their broods, ranging in age from baby bird to elementary to teenagers--they are rather interesting looking in the middle stages. Here a mother duck has drawn in her ducklings away from some threat.
4. Vaccine time--I never did figure out what disease they were vaccinating against, but we arrived in a village one day at the same time as this doctor, and got to watch the process.
5. The local wats (Buddhist temples) send various processions along the streets once a week or so. Here you can see a local-style tractor, one of a parade of four or five making it's way through town complete with Buddha statue, monk, and loudspeaker.

Little Miss Muffet

Well, we don't sit on tuffets and we sure haven't had any curds and whey, but we do have a nice big spider that lives by the ceiling in our kitchen. We leave him there to eat all the smaller bugs for us. Sorry for the flash glare on his giant head....Anyways, note the smaller spider on the left. The smaller spider's body is about a third of an inch across, so you can do the math to figure out the size of the big guy. Don't know if this particular spider is edible or not, but there are plenty of other tarantulas around that get hunted from their holes in the forest, fried up, and eaten as travel snacks. Or if you prefer, there are also crickets, termites, and big beetles available. I have not yet indulged. And do not plan to.

Anlong Veng Once Again--A Few Observations

Chickens really do cross the road, and the cows really do come home. No flying pigs, though—they prefer to ride on motorbikes. The rain is good for everyone: it keeps the farmer’s rice crops from drying out, and keeps the rest of us from sweating for awhile. The frogs come out in the rain as well. One came into our house. He was tiny and I nearly missed him. It was a bigger storm than usual, with thunder and lighting, and wind that had me moving through the house to close the windows. The power had gone out as well, so I was putting buckets out to catch the rain by flashlight. I noticed a little pebble on the floor, and then—hop! That was the frog. I tried herding him to hop towards the open door, but he headed for the shadows by the bikes instead. And that was the last I saw of him. I hope for his sake he hopped his way back outside eventually.

We like the rain, too, because it fills ups the water reservoir built onto the back of our house. This is where our running water comes from. Occasionally, if it is very full, we have water at the kitchen sink. As the water level drops, we lose running water at the tap where we wash our clothes, and lower still, from the bathroom. At this point all our water needs to be brought into the house, drawn from the lowest tap of all, directly from the water tank out back. And if all else fails, we take out buckets to the well a few houses down the street. Or better, put them out to catch the rain as it falls.

If you as a pale and obvious foreigner head out and about, the children shout “Hello!” to you from their homes and bicycles. Sometimes this is friendly, sometimes their mothers surreptitiously encourage it, and sometimes it’s disrespectful. The adults tend to limit themselves to over-the-shoulder peeks and stares, although some of them are eager to have a conversation. Sometimes our next-door-neighbor landlords like to peer through our windows, just in case we’re up to something interesting.

I have the same conversation over and over each time I meet new people in the villages where we work. In descending order of popularity, here are the questions everyone wants answered about yours truly: “What country are you from? How long have you been in Cambodia? Are you married yet? Do you want to marry a foreigner or a Khmer? How old are you? How many times a day do you eat rice in America? Why are your legs so fat?” This is accompanied by much shy giggling, admiration of my white skin, and abject shock that it's possible to survive eating bread everyday and rice only a few times a month.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in not just another culture but a time warp as well. As mentioned above, we get buckets of water from the well. There are chickens in our yard. Oxcarts regularly drive by on the road. Most nights I end up doing things by lantern light, albeit an electric lantern. We wash our clothes by hand, hang them on the line to dry. Our food is stored in a cupboard, not a refrigerator. There are dirt roads, outhouses, and a lack of sidewalks everywhere. And of course, there are all those cows heading home—not sure if they count as part of the time warp, but they’ve got to count as something. ;)