9.27.08
It has been an eventful and uneventful past couple of days. I say this because, while there is a very important holiday right now, the holiday makes things basically stop around here. Training is almost over, and things have calmed down to a point where we have all begun to wonder about how slow our lives will be at site…and how many books we will read in our tremendously clean room with our freshly scrubbed skin still gleaming.
But that will be a blog that I will write when I am bored to the point of tears within my first three months on “lockdown” at site. As per Peace Corps policy, we aren’t allowed to leave our provinces for the first three months, which is a little hard given the holidays, though understandable because they don’t want us to run away and never become acclimated to our new home.
Anyway…the current holiday: Pchum Ben. This means something along the line
s of gathering for making balls of rice. It is a 15 day holiday that culminates with a big 3 day party (which is next week). But there is lots of fun to be had before that. For example, 2 days out of the past week, I was up at 3:30 in the morning, enjoying the predawn dark and traveling to a nearby wat for something called ba bai bun, or throwing rice balls. Allow me to explain. This is a holiday that is devoted to your ancestors, so in order to feed the ancestors that are stuck as spirits and help them to get to a better life, you give them some food to eat and some prayers that can assist them in moving on. You of course have to go to the wat, and hope that your ancestors find you there so that they can partake of the food that you give them (because if they aren’t your family or in your mind, they can’t eat the rice), and the only time that they are allowed to leave the spirit world is right before dawn, hence the time.
So here I am, rubbing the sleep from my eyes as I go with my brother and sisters to the wat in the dark with some of their friends that I don’t know and a friend of my sister’s who, despite the lack of relation to the family, eats and sleeps and showers in the house often. We make it to the wat and go into the eating room, which has its own shrine and lots of space, grab a few things and begin rolling rice balls and distribut
ing sugar cane and candy into bowls. We light some incense and all the people get up and walk to the temple where the little god houses are set up…and then…we throw the little rice balls, or the sugar or candy or water, on, to, or around each of the 8 altars as we walk around in a circle 2 or 3 times. And then we leave and go back to bed. Well, we left after we visited the weird elk-like thing at that particular wat…one of the many things that I have yet to figure out about this place (the elk is wearing enough fur to survive an Iowan winter).
I’m not sure that anyone gives food to their ancestors every one of the fifteen days – maybe every other day at most, but I have gone once with my family and once with another family. The second time I watched the sun come up and was stunned by the beauty of the palm trees silhouetted on the deep blue, then purple, then deep red and orange and all shades sky. The four of us that went mutually decided that Cambodia has better sunrises and sunsets. But…we haven’t seen anything else for over 2 months…
One day after class I came home to find the house in somewhat of a frenzy. We had to go to the wat. Everyone put on their best clothes, including a long Khmer skirt and a white shirt (the nice lacey ones of course), and we took tons of food to a wat that I hadn’t yet been to. We had a private little ceremony at the shrine in between the monk’s quarters where we offered all of this food and fanta and cash to the head monk of the wat and he prayed and threw water on us (it reminded me of the first day in kampong Tralach when they threw all of the water and flowers on us and we could barely contain our nervous laughter) and then supposedly ate some food and gave the rest back to us. We had this huge feast as the monk and a few nuns (who are the old ladies of the village, living at the wat with their shaved heads all in white) looked on with some degree of amusement about this foreigner that they had never seen before.
Another big event that strangely coincided with events at the wat was our Community Activity. It is like our teaching practicum except…well, you understand. My group decided to go to one of the local wats and hold a music teaching session – Matt in rhythm, Steph with the scale, Adrian with instrumentals, and me teaching a couple easy songs like Twinkle Twinkle Lit
tle Star and Row Row Row Your Boat. They sang the best they could, and did all the motions that I made up…granted they didn’t speak English at all. We culminated by singing all kinds of random American and Khmer songs and the kids smiled and loved it and went on to the next group’s project…food.
Food is always an interesting thing around here. Because it is the holiday season, there were tons of people at the wat already, and a few of the other volunteers made some spaghetti and bread and green beans that they gave to the children and then to the monks.
Scene: Around 10 in the morning, in the big eating room at the wat, which has a shrine to Buddha at the front and colorful paintings completely covering the walls. There are little flags of cloth strewn in lines throughout the room and straw mats on the ground. The room is full of people wearing white shirts and scarves, sitting a little haphazardly throughout the room on the mats, having already removed their shoes. An older man previously dragged us into the middle of the room and made us sit down near the front and we do, sitting with our feet to one sit as is proper etiquette. He gives us incense, which we pray with and then put just outside the room, and we listen to some prayers on the loud speaker whose sound quality makes me shiver in distaste. We are then given a dish of rice and they motion for us to stand up and go with the crowd (which we do) to put a spoonful of rice in each of 8 or 9 big tin urns that will go to the ancestors or to the monks or both. There are some things that I just haven’t figured out yet.
Somehow we make it to the back corner of the room where we can dish out the food that was previously made by the other group of people. There are 12 perfectly portioned meals of spaghetti and
sauce, with green beans and bread on three separate trays and Tara takes one, and Deidre takes one, and I take one. By now the 12 monks of the wat are all sitting in a long row perpendicular to Buddha, all in their various shades of orange robes, with the head monk the closest to the shrine. Side note: in previous visits to this wat, the head monk has been very nice and constantly pleased to see us it seems. So…the three of us with our big trays walk up towards the monks and do our best to offer it to them without breaking any major rules. Fortunately all of the older men want to help and do their best to motion to us what to do (though we still sort of bumble about and maybe or maybe not successfully giving the food to them). The plates are taken from the trays and placed with all of the other Khmer food (and there was tons of it) as an offering to the monks here. Prayers were said by the head monk as we all sat together in the very front row and the ladies behind us tried to distract us and talk to us as they like to do, and then the monks dug into their feast.
I hope that this is an imaginable scenario: One plate of American food that is deliciously western amid tons of Khmer food – three white girls in the front row watching and trying to figure out which monk will try the food first – young monks right in front of us that are a little unsure of the integrity of our dishes…
The head monk sampled the dish first. We noticed and gossiped together about it as we continued to watch. Then another couple of older monks (and by older I mean maybe mid 20s) also tried a bit…even to the point of going back for seconds… The courage trickled down the line and soon the monks in front of us we looking at each other as they sampled the dish at the same time. We heard later through some translation that the monks did in fact enjoy the spaghetti, though I think the fact that many of them ate more than one bite of it is perhaps a testament to the joy that they found in eating it, but it is possible that we will never know. We hope they will continue to talk about it, because we certainly did as we ate the food that they didn’t and shared with all in the room…but…why wouldn’t you, as a monk, talk about the barangs that brought the only spaghetti to the wat this holiday? By the way, the monks ate their prized bowls of spaghetti with two spoons.
It has been an eventful and uneventful past couple of days. I say this because, while there is a very important holiday right now, the holiday makes things basically stop around here. Training is almost over, and things have calmed down to a point where we have all begun to wonder about how slow our lives will be at site…and how many books we will read in our tremendously clean room with our freshly scrubbed skin still gleaming.
But that will be a blog that I will write when I am bored to the point of tears within my first three months on “lockdown” at site. As per Peace Corps policy, we aren’t allowed to leave our provinces for the first three months, which is a little hard given the holidays, though understandable because they don’t want us to run away and never become acclimated to our new home.
Anyway…the current holiday: Pchum Ben. This means something along the line
s of gathering for making balls of rice. It is a 15 day holiday that culminates with a big 3 day party (which is next week). But there is lots of fun to be had before that. For example, 2 days out of the past week, I was up at 3:30 in the morning, enjoying the predawn dark and traveling to a nearby wat for something called ba bai bun, or throwing rice balls. Allow me to explain. This is a holiday that is devoted to your ancestors, so in order to feed the ancestors that are stuck as spirits and help them to get to a better life, you give them some food to eat and some prayers that can assist them in moving on. You of course have to go to the wat, and hope that your ancestors find you there so that they can partake of the food that you give them (because if they aren’t your family or in your mind, they can’t eat the rice), and the only time that they are allowed to leave the spirit world is right before dawn, hence the time.So here I am, rubbing the sleep from my eyes as I go with my brother and sisters to the wat in the dark with some of their friends that I don’t know and a friend of my sister’s who, despite the lack of relation to the family, eats and sleeps and showers in the house often. We make it to the wat and go into the eating room, which has its own shrine and lots of space, grab a few things and begin rolling rice balls and distribut
ing sugar cane and candy into bowls. We light some incense and all the people get up and walk to the temple where the little god houses are set up…and then…we throw the little rice balls, or the sugar or candy or water, on, to, or around each of the 8 altars as we walk around in a circle 2 or 3 times. And then we leave and go back to bed. Well, we left after we visited the weird elk-like thing at that particular wat…one of the many things that I have yet to figure out about this place (the elk is wearing enough fur to survive an Iowan winter).I’m not sure that anyone gives food to their ancestors every one of the fifteen days – maybe every other day at most, but I have gone once with my family and once with another family. The second time I watched the sun come up and was stunned by the beauty of the palm trees silhouetted on the deep blue, then purple, then deep red and orange and all shades sky. The four of us that went mutually decided that Cambodia has better sunrises and sunsets. But…we haven’t seen anything else for over 2 months…
One day after class I came home to find the house in somewhat of a frenzy. We had to go to the wat. Everyone put on their best clothes, including a long Khmer skirt and a white shirt (the nice lacey ones of course), and we took tons of food to a wat that I hadn’t yet been to. We had a private little ceremony at the shrine in between the monk’s quarters where we offered all of this food and fanta and cash to the head monk of the wat and he prayed and threw water on us (it reminded me of the first day in kampong Tralach when they threw all of the water and flowers on us and we could barely contain our nervous laughter) and then supposedly ate some food and gave the rest back to us. We had this huge feast as the monk and a few nuns (who are the old ladies of the village, living at the wat with their shaved heads all in white) looked on with some degree of amusement about this foreigner that they had never seen before.
Another big event that strangely coincided with events at the wat was our Community Activity. It is like our teaching practicum except…well, you understand. My group decided to go to one of the local wats and hold a music teaching session – Matt in rhythm, Steph with the scale, Adrian with instrumentals, and me teaching a couple easy songs like Twinkle Twinkle Lit
tle Star and Row Row Row Your Boat. They sang the best they could, and did all the motions that I made up…granted they didn’t speak English at all. We culminated by singing all kinds of random American and Khmer songs and the kids smiled and loved it and went on to the next group’s project…food.Food is always an interesting thing around here. Because it is the holiday season, there were tons of people at the wat already, and a few of the other volunteers made some spaghetti and bread and green beans that they gave to the children and then to the monks.
Scene: Around 10 in the morning, in the big eating room at the wat, which has a shrine to Buddha at the front and colorful paintings completely covering the walls. There are little flags of cloth strewn in lines throughout the room and straw mats on the ground. The room is full of people wearing white shirts and scarves, sitting a little haphazardly throughout the room on the mats, having already removed their shoes. An older man previously dragged us into the middle of the room and made us sit down near the front and we do, sitting with our feet to one sit as is proper etiquette. He gives us incense, which we pray with and then put just outside the room, and we listen to some prayers on the loud speaker whose sound quality makes me shiver in distaste. We are then given a dish of rice and they motion for us to stand up and go with the crowd (which we do) to put a spoonful of rice in each of 8 or 9 big tin urns that will go to the ancestors or to the monks or both. There are some things that I just haven’t figured out yet.
Somehow we make it to the back corner of the room where we can dish out the food that was previously made by the other group of people. There are 12 perfectly portioned meals of spaghetti and
sauce, with green beans and bread on three separate trays and Tara takes one, and Deidre takes one, and I take one. By now the 12 monks of the wat are all sitting in a long row perpendicular to Buddha, all in their various shades of orange robes, with the head monk the closest to the shrine. Side note: in previous visits to this wat, the head monk has been very nice and constantly pleased to see us it seems. So…the three of us with our big trays walk up towards the monks and do our best to offer it to them without breaking any major rules. Fortunately all of the older men want to help and do their best to motion to us what to do (though we still sort of bumble about and maybe or maybe not successfully giving the food to them). The plates are taken from the trays and placed with all of the other Khmer food (and there was tons of it) as an offering to the monks here. Prayers were said by the head monk as we all sat together in the very front row and the ladies behind us tried to distract us and talk to us as they like to do, and then the monks dug into their feast.I hope that this is an imaginable scenario: One plate of American food that is deliciously western amid tons of Khmer food – three white girls in the front row watching and trying to figure out which monk will try the food first – young monks right in front of us that are a little unsure of the integrity of our dishes…
The head monk sampled the dish first. We noticed and gossiped together about it as we continued to watch. Then another couple of older monks (and by older I mean maybe mid 20s) also tried a bit…even to the point of going back for seconds… The courage trickled down the line and soon the monks in front of us we looking at each other as they sampled the dish at the same time. We heard later through some translation that the monks did in fact enjoy the spaghetti, though I think the fact that many of them ate more than one bite of it is perhaps a testament to the joy that they found in eating it, but it is possible that we will never know. We hope they will continue to talk about it, because we certainly did as we ate the food that they didn’t and shared with all in the room…but…why wouldn’t you, as a monk, talk about the barangs that brought the only spaghetti to the wat this holiday? By the way, the monks ate their prized bowls of spaghetti with two spoons.
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