T'ngai tomabada (Typical day)
Trip Start
Jul 20, 2009
1
14
Trip End
Jul 24, 2011
Prey Veng, Cambodia
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
Since school started, the pace of life here in Prey Veng has picked up quite a bit and keeping a daily planner made necessary. Long gone are the days of afternoon siestas and leisurely coffees. Instead, I'm grading papers while shoveling down rice and stopping briefly for condensed-milk-ladened coffees to pick me up before my afternoon classes. Don't get me wrong, it's great really. I no longer have stretches of days at a time without students to teach or feelings of hopelessness after a lesson due to lack of direction with my lesson plans. It's been a radical but pleasant change. A typical (yet not so typical) day:
Yesterday I woke up at 5:30, took a cold shower (it's cool here at the moment; yes, our definitions of cold are different now), dressed in my teaching skirt and collared shirt and then rode my bike to the pork and rice stall around the corner. The stall is my favorite in town, only a few makeshift tables and chairs in a dusty patch of dirt in front of a traditional wooden house but this inconspicuous stall is special. Three generations of women cook and serve up delicious heaping bowls of rice with thinly sliced chunks of pork neatly splayed out on top of diced chives which add a bit of color. As I doused my bowl with soy sauce and chili paste, the yay (grandmother) came and sat next to me, her shaved head covered by a checkered krama (scarf) and red lines stained at the corners of her mouth down to her chin from chewing betel nuts. She stroked my arm and informed me for maybe the twentieth time since I first met her that her granddaughters rice is “number one” in Prey Veng. I smiled and told her that's why I keep coming back knowing that she can't hear me and wondering how well she can even see me from the blue circles that encompass her black eyes. Her granddaughter, 11 months pregnant, came over from where she was hacking at the chunks of pork with a giant meat cleaver, repeated what I had said quite loudly to her yay and accepted my money (about 50 cents) with a big grin. She calls me by my first name now which means something here, only friends and people that know me well do. Soon there will be another generation to this family (I hope it's a girl) though they most likely won't carry on the family business. The family seems to be doing well enough (might be their advertising since the yay tells everyone it's number one) and several family members have already set off to Phnom Penh to study.
A little before 7 with a belly full of rice, I cycled to the RTTC, not too far from the stall. I entered the gates into the dusty school grounds and glanced towards the flagpole. There was a crowd of blue-collared shirts which meant my year one students would be late to their first class. Typical. I wondered if the director was talking to them about the Water Festival stampede in Phnom Penh and hoped that none of the RTTC students were injured or killed (there weren't but a student from the PTTC was). All of my students were understandably melancholy all four hours of classes, an unfortunate reason to learn new words such as tragedy, disaster and mourning (November 25th will forever be known as a national day of mourning). At 11 I set off to the market, about a 10 minute bike ride towards to the river. It's the same every time, the fruit ladies being the most aggressive yell out different fruits that they remember me buying last time. I went straight for the mangoes, already in season and sweet as candy. The fruit lady shoved the largest mangoes at me, pouted when I settled on two small ones then “misread” the scale as she tried to charge me for a whole kilo. Typical of the fruit ladies but we always laugh together while they feign ignorance after I ask them to weigh it again. After strolling the veg and sweets section I emerge from the market with an assortment of vegetables, a slab of tofu, a small bag of coconut cakes and feet covered in mud.
As I parked my bike in the back of the house after arriving home, I heard the unmistakeable jingle of Ching-Ching running to the door. Ironically named, not purposely, for the sound of her anklets, the youngest grandchild can sense me coming from a mile away and has taken to following me around the house. She's only 1 ½ but no longer looks at me suspiciously. Now she smiles at me and holds up her hands for me to pick her up. The jingling was constant as she followed me around the kitchen as I boiled rice, fried tofu and ginger and sliced up a mango. I ate lunch alone in my room as I graded papers since it's the only time I can be alone during the day and get any work done (my friends and host family pity me, eating alone is very “un-Khmer”). At 2, I rode my bike to a coffee shop on the riverfront and ordered a coffee with globs of condensed milk settled at the bottom of the glass. After a year of living here, the moto and rickshaw drivers lined up by the water's edge recognize me and no longer stare or make comments. Now we stare out at the water together and chat about the weather, every once in a while a new guy asks what I'm doing here and the others answer for me telling him where I work and that I speak Khmer very well (not true but flattered). I sipped my coffee keeping an eye on the time then hopped on my bike again to ride back to the RTTC to work in the office. While entering the gates a young boy on his bike yelled out to me “Teach me English! Come back! TEACH ME NOW!” I laughed and yelled “NO!”, pedaling faster towards the office with the boy on my tail. A year ago I would have stopped and ummed and awwed to him, trying to explain why I couldn't but now “no” seems like enough, especially when a kid is chasing me on a bike. He caught up with me at the office and yelled “WHY? Teach me NOW! I love you!” Yeah, could be here for ten years and there would still be one-sided conversations like that.
After the secretary shooed him away, I set to work at my desk to lesson plan. My desk is in the same office as the director and deputy director. I'm sure that they want me there more for show than working but I'm happy to have a place where my students can come to talk to me and ask questions. Around 5, after planning a few lessons I packed up and set off back home. The sun was setting to the point where it signals the end of the day but seems to burn hotter than it does at noon. Despite this, I put in my earbuds and walked down to the riverfront. Past the newspaper stand to pick up my copy of the Cambodian Daily, through the backstreets of the brothels near the riverfront, in front of the pagoda where the monks chant in their English classes, past the gang of naked kids who will never tire of saying hello and which I never tire of waving back, along the riverbank which stinks strongly of fish (it's fish-sauce-making-season at the moment), and down to the row of large trees where pairs and groups of young people gather to chat and flirt (one of the only places they can meet without having to be chaperoned). I sat under a large tree away from a pair of teenagers, their flip-flops kicked out in front of them, the girl laughing wildly and playfully hitting the arm of the boy next to her. As the sun began to sink into the receding waters of the river (soon to be a lake, later to be a sea of green rice fields) Samnang, one of my brightest students in my year two class sat beside me. Relieved that it wasn't the usual monk who has recently taken to following me down to the river to practice his English, I removed my earbuds and chatted with him until all traces of gray were removed from the sky and replaced by a moon the color of monk's robes. Samnang, true to Cambodian gentility, walked with me towards the safety of the lights over the nearby park, away from the so called “gangsters” that roam the riverside at night (teenage punks is a more appropriate way of describing them). Along the row of houses, families had set out an assortment of bottles of water, candles, incense and bananas as an offering to the ghosts of the victims of the stampede. Samnang couldn't offer an explanation or chose not to, didn't matter as we both understood and walked silently until we reached the park.
Nearing my house, Srey Mom, a friend from the youth center, rode up behind me on her bike and broke the solemnity of the moment. “Oiee Chrissy! You are very fat today!”. Typical, “Okay” I replied. “Really, you get fatter everyday!”. Okay, not too typical, “Thanks, you too!”. “What did you eat, it looks like....”, “Yeah, you have a goodnight too Srey Mom!” I replied as I put my earbuds back in, not taking too much offense as she didn't mean it to be, it's part of Khmer culture and her way of joking (and I'll get her back next time I see her snacking by the riverside). My host parents were sitting on the front porch when I walked in the gate, watching their offering of incense slowly burn on their front curb. After heating up leftovers from lunch and retreating to my room to eat and watch a DVD on my computer, I started to notice the strange sounds coming from outside. I've gotten so used to the constant karaoke music and howling dogs in the evenings that I didn't even notice when the drumming started. What sounded like people banging on pots and pans began to crescendo to a wild rhythm coming from all directions around the house. The dogs howled even more than usual, sounding as confused and startled as I was. Before I even picked up my phone to call someone I received a message from Srey Mom, “Do u hear sound that they are hitting? To throw the evil or ghost spirit go a way from house. We have awful thing, Khmer people do like this.” I remembered she's Christian and probably doesn't agree with this tradition though I'm sure she believes in ghosts the same as most Khmer people. The banging didn't last long. Within half an hour I could hear it faintly in the distance from the surrounding villages, fading and retreating as I imagined the ghosts were, moving on to the next village and out of our thoughts and conversations. Next week they'll be even further, 347 ghosts with no one avenging their deaths; no one taking responsibility or being held accountable. Such a tragedy.
Comments
Wonderfully written, Chrissy. I felt transported with each sentence. Thanks for your blog! Cindy