Busy Life

9-17-08
Phnom Penh is an interesting city, full of busy people, obnoxious tuk-tuk and moto drivers, and lots of euro-americana. (Note…as I write this, I am safe in my compound watching two dogs stare each other down from either side of an old bicycle). Battambang, a city between my provincial town and Phnom Penh, is close to the size and interest of Phnom Penh, though, and is much closer and much calmer. We visited the night before our travels to Phnom Penh because it is easier to get from there to PP then from our own town. Busses run “every half hour” from each place (and I put that in quotes because our 7:30 bus left Battambang at about 8:15). However, Battambang has lovely American food, including ice cream sundaes, and life is good there.

It is a long trip. From my site to Sisophon, 1 ½ to 2 hours, to Battambang, 1 hour, from Battambang to Phnom Penh…5 or 6 hours. I don’t think that I will be going to Phnom Penh very often. For this time, it was worth it. We went to the American ambassador’s “big, gorgeous house” (because that’s how Peace Corps phrased it) and had some delicious hamburgers and spring rolls with sweet chili sauce. And then…swimming. A week prior to this visit, we received a mass text that said that we would be swimming and I was so thrilled that I jumped up and down and scared my family half to death. I was extremely excited, though, and swam away the warm Cambodian evening with th other volunteers.

The following day was full of entertainment as well. We went on a Phnom Penh scavenger hunt and, as a province, took pictures that continue to make me smile. We were challenged to put a huge salmon down our pants, take a picture with the KFC colonel, meet the local elephant, and return with a sampling spoon from a local ice cream parlor. We did all of these things, and more, including posing outside the local “Playaz club,” getting an autograph from a pharmacist who speaks very limited English, and making it back before 4:00 (which reminded a few of us of ANTM go-sees). We also discovered one of the country’s stop signs…where no one stops. It may or may not be effective.

Let me take a quick break from this part of the story and shout out a huge thank you to everyone who sends the amazingly expensive packages to their sons and daughters in Cambodia. I say this because I have had the privilege of sharing some lovely sweets from Matt’s mom, Dan’s parents, and Will’s mom, as well as some books from Katie’s folks and a soccer ball from the other Katie’s folks. In the event that any of you read these few words…I want you to know…that we love you all and it is so exciting to receive something in the mail after the Peace Corps land rover rolls up to house.

But something a little less happy…Me, along with a few people from the new Banteay Meanchay and Siem Reap provinces went to visit Toul Sleng, the genocide museum at the former Khmer Rouge prison. It was beyond words. Most of the time that I was there, I was thinking about what it was like when there were people there. Before it was a prison, it was a primary school…children roamed the halls and played in the huge courtyard. But then it was turned into this horrific place, where rape and torture and pain and suffering were the kindest words that could be used to describe the place. Right now there are houses on every side of the high fence tangled with barbed wire – were they there then? Did people try to nap as they listened to the sounds of a whip across the flesh of their teacher, their doctor, their friend, their neighbor? There are gorgeous flowers in the courtyard…did the prisoners see them as they were led to be murdered for nothing?

It is so painful to think about what happened in this country to allow this. It was more powerful to look at the pictures displayed so carefully within the walls of the prison: pictures of torture and despair, pictures of every single prisoner who was killed, pictures of their lives cut so short. One of the last things that we saw before we left the museum was a map of the country showing all of the killing fields and the mass graves that have been found. Every town that I know has one – each training village, every site in my new province, and basically every place that I have seen in the country. It’s inescapablely infused into the world that I now live in. And I am beginning to see the results…just before I left Phnom Penh I saw a foreigner with a young Khmer girl and had no doubt what the relationship was. More people beg me for money than I can possibly accommodate…and my white skin automatically creates assumptions that I have more than I make. I see bribing as a part of daily life. Ignorance here is bliss, though…excessively unrealistic.

But life here is nice. When I got back to my training village, I took a cold bucket shower, ate my favorite meal of fried potatoes and onions, took off the top sheet from my obviously-a-mouse-has-been-here bed, removed the moldy pillowcase, and closed my window because the wasps from the nest 3 feet from my window were too curious to leave me be, and slept better than I had all week. There is something about home, even if it isn’t quite the same.