A Year In The Life

I am not Pablo Neruda

2010-03-20T20:59:00.000-07:00

Rode like an arrow through the dark Phnom Penh night to alight stuck fast in my favorite bar in the expat quarter. When you can go out on a Saturday, it becomes a responsibility. It is my favorite bar simply because my friend Piseth works there--a tall Cambodian guy with a feline but whiskerless smile who claims to be able to down 10 Angkors without getting drunk. Not that I've ever seen him back this claim, but somehow I believe him. I sat down to some Western music (American Pie, I kid you not), and I had a glass of Angkor (my country, my beer) and some salty peanuts and talked forever in pidgin Khmer and English about how someday we'll both go to Svay Rieng, his province, and see Vietnam or the border and the waterfalls and learn the secret of eternal life in the beating kernel of the heart of the jungle. He's exactly the kind of friend you want to have as a bartender, because he's seen just about everything and everyone, and likes it anyways.

Beyond that...

It is mango season. I teach during the day and I sleep or go out at night and somehow the rhythms of my existence, the joy and the misery and the homesickness and the quiet love cycle back and forth like the sun and the moon. No matter how we struggle, there is little we can do to change what we think or who we are. We change, but not, I think, through our own volition. I was watching the stars appear one by one in the night, the other day, on the balcony of my French friend, Gonz. They were unveiled like Bedouin eyes glittering in the deepening blue, and it occurred to me then, as the streetlights came on and the palm trees wavered into shadow, that the meaning of life perhaps isn't happiness after all. For their seems to me to be in this world two main sources of happiness--that which comes from outside of us, from the taste of mangoes and the shade of the night and the four headed demon with eyes like a fawn we call love--and that which comes from inside of us, which is the Buddhist release from worldly suffering, the submission in the end to life and all its vicissitudes, the happiness which comes from internal resolution, from a peace that does not let the world and all its suffering inside of it.

If finding happiness outside of yourself is the meaning of life, it would seem to me to be a very limited meaning, indeed, for happiness is just one of the thousand emotions or so that life can evoke--agony, joy, misery, desperation, sadness, profound melancholy, embarrassment, lukewarm hope...and why, indeed, should we choose happiness over all the colors of the rainbow?Yes, it feels good, but certainly there is something in the throes of desperation, in the backbreaking agony or the anxiety like the vacuum of space which also feels good, and which stretches the spine of the spirit into something truly profound. In all emotions there is truth and life. Why pick one as a purpose over another?

As for the happiness whose secret name is peace that comes from inside of you, there is something in this happiness that is a sort of death, for in order to maintain it, you must accept life to the point where the struggle ceases, and all becomes one in the circle of eternity. When you have achieved this happiness you are apart from the dirt of the streets and the howls of the unclean, and the wild joy of those who know that someday, they, too, will fall. You are removed from the howling ecstagony which is the beating essence of life. This, to me, seems a sort of death. And there is something in me which refuses to accept that the purpose of life could ever be a death, on any level. We are not here in order to dull ourselves to being here.

Ode to Sunday Afternoon

2010-03-14T04:43:00.000-07:00

The sunlight falls like honey from a spoon
And stills the day with flecks of ancient dust.
How sweet is life on Sunday afternoon!

I’ll put on coffee, play some desert tune—
Come sit beside me, put it all away.
The honey falls like sunlight from the spoon.

Across the street the men in the saloon
Are watching, waiting, counting cars that pass.
How slow they come on Sunday afternoon!

So sip your coffee, let the music croon.
It yearns towards the dying of the light.
The voice is thick as honey from a spoon.

And just don't say the sky is now maroon.
Or how the blade of night will still the day.
For sweet is life on Sunday afternoon.

But you will say you must be going soon,
The moon has beckoned to the waiting night.
The dark is thin as water from a spoon.
How sweet is life on Sunday afternoon.

And as the evening falls...

2010-02-22T02:48:00.000-08:00

My weekend

2010-02-14T01:41:00.000-08:00

Tired of the Senate's barren brawl, the motos and the noise and the smoke of Phnom Penh, the relentless and metal pulse of humanity, I digressed a ways from my discourse with humanity and sought the ancient in the countryside of Cambodia.

This is to say that I took a day off from school, and left Phnom Penh by bus on Friday afternoon to go visit one of the more remote corners of the country--Kirirom National Park, north of the Cardamom mountains. I went with the other volunteer who arrived three weeks ago--Marie, a 20 year old Danish girl who, like me, is taking time off before going to the university. We arrived at the bus station an hour early, and I got us bus tickets from Capitol Tour Company, which has a 1:20 bus from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville. We would be getting off somewhere along the way, at a village called Treng Trayeung. We were the only foreigners on the bus--but somehow I was able to communicate our destination. The ride was supposed to be about two hours long, but the bus broke down about an hour after it left Phnom Penh, and we had to wait for another to be sent (so we bought ice cream from a passing moto-ice-cream-truck, and waited by the side of the road next to some shacks selling fresh sausage).

The countryside this time of year is painfully dry, as there hasn't been rain or precipitation since early November. The palm trees still are green, though, and the smell of smoke and drying leaves is everywhere in the clear air. We rode the bus as the moors turned grey around us, and stopped at dusk at a quiet village surrounding the road to the national park. Our moto driver greeted us there (Raksmey had told him in advance we were coming), and we got onto the back of his motorcycle and set off on a red, bumpy road towards a rise of tree-covered hills, fading as the night grew thick and smoky around us. The night in Phnom Penh is thin like bad water, and makes your head buzz as it pools blackly around the streetlights. The night in the s'rok srai, though, is still a real night, bounding out of the forest with a brushy tail held high, and curling around the world like a Cambodia cat. Cicadas were humming in the mango trees, and frogs and geckoes were howling in the dry jungle. As we curved onto a smaller, even bumpier road, the stars began to come out, and on the horizon we could see strange yellow lights. When we passed closer to them, we realized that they were forest fires.

There's something eerie about a forest fire in the night, in the jungle, in such a lonely and deserted corner of the earth. The blaze colors the smoke yellow, and the palm trees are strange flickering things, almost dancing in the light. There is no one watching the fire, no one trying to extinguish it or control it. It just burns through the mango groves, and the banana palms, and through the dry dry grass. It is a glowing eye in the night for the hungry jungle.

And we passed through this, and somehow or another the road bent towards the mountains and carried us through a lonely village where the houses squatted on their stilts cackling like old witch-chickens, and then farther, through an ornate gate shaped like a pagoda roof, and finally to a...restaurant. Lit with bare fluorescent bulbs, surrounded by thick palm trees. We got off, and went to sit down at a table in a small pavilion. Presently, we were brought rice, and vegetables, and potatoes, wrapped in dry palm leaves. We were hungry, and therefore it was delicious. All around us, the jungle smelled like rotting leaves and drying grass, and there was something in me that bloomed with the smells of things that grow and live. I saw flashing before my eyes a childhood that I thought I had left forever, and memories of the earth I've known and had somehow forgotten. I can't recall ever feeling better...healthier...than I did on that night.

We ate, and went back to the quiet village, where a house on stilts was waiting to swallow us whole. Before surrendering to the sweet maw of sleep, we lay outside beneath the stars and watched as the Milky Way-- p'kai yeeum neung go-al, which, to the Khmers, is the furrow in the sky made by the heavenly cow dragging its plow through the stars--plodded into the night. Above us were Orion and the Pleiades--the chicken star, p'kai moan, in Khmer. We told each other the old stories--Danish legends and Greek myths, and watched as the stars grew impossibly bright around us. We could see from horizon to horizon.

And this is one of those moments--now, watching the alien stars, under the menacing shadow of our witch-stilt-house, in a jungle that not one of you could ever find on a map--where you sit back on your haunches and you say to yourself quietly, My god, little girl. Who would ever have thought that life would bring you here?

It's the most deeply joyous thing that I have ever said to myself.

And afterwards we climb the creaky wooden stairs, and into a room studded with geckoes where the starlight still falls through the cracks in the walls like milk, and we curl up under the mosquito net and we go to sleep. Marie informs me the next morning, as we rise to a warm sun and the sound of women bathing (they keep the water basin beneath our house), that I talk in my sleep. In Khmer.

“You kept saying ahwkun. And suo s’dai. And something about a chicken or something—moan is the word for chicken, right? Those must have been interesting dreams.”

Does that mean I’ve learned the language?

In the morning, we returned on the red road to the restaurant. The village was far more innocent by daylight—the huts were made of palm leaves and looked only mildly like witch-chickens. They seemed more creations of the forest than the people who lived there. Quite probably, they just arose spontaneously one day from the jungle. Or they’ve always been there. There were tired white cows resting in palm groves, and motos parked in the shade beneath the houses. People were cooking rice over open fires, and scruffy puppies frisked with half-naked children. You could, by the way, still buy Coca-Cola by the side of the road. We didn’t.

“Look, Marie!” I said, as we ate a breakfast of bananas and French bread dipped in coffee.

“What is it?”

“We’ve gone outside of Lonely Planet.” I said, thumbing through my filthy (yes, it’s filthy now) guidebook.

“What?”

“There’s no section on Kirirom. Or this village. Or this waterfall. The closest we’ve got is the Cardamom Mountains, which are a few hundred kilometers away and swarming with tigers.”

You know you’re living on the edge, I think, when you’ve managed to make it out of Lonely Planet. As Mr. T would say, Bloody awesome!

At the next table, there was another group of travelers—about eleven foreigners, about our age, who spoke American English. We asked them who what where why how (you get good at that when you live abroad).

“Oh, we’re all between the ages of 18 and 20. We’re taking a gap year—do you know what that is?”

Of course we did.

“We’re doing this program—traveling up the Mekong River together. Our group leader is over there. We’ll end in Shanghai, China.”

We decided to hike up to the waterfall in the morning, and asked them if they’d like to come with us. They were busy, though (“We have quiet time, and then we’ll study some Khmer.”), so we set off on our own, on a quiet dirt road curving out closer to the mountains. We walked among browning rice fields and a through jungle, and then into a dry bamboo forest on the side of the mountain. The way up passed by a shrine to the forest spirits—almost abandoned now, save for a few sticks of incense in a ceramic vase, surrounded by runes of scattered ash. We reached the waterfall at perhaps 10 in the morning, and climbed up beneath it and sat beneath the flow and laughed because the map is frayed and torn in this part of the world, and you can see the stars through it. We wandered, afterwards, through the silent forest, up a trail which led to a bat cave. It was cool, there, and bore a distinct pungency of guano--a very harsh, fertile smell which isn't altogether unpleasant. The bats shrieked at our arrival. They are not disturbed much. This forest had a strange duality to it--on the one hand, there were people living nearby--people farming rice and feeding their oxen, people who were born here and might possibly die here. It wasn't nearly as far away from civilization as I usually get on my hiking trips. And yet, despite its inhabitants, despite the old tired women sitting by the side of the trail selling beer and coca-cola to passing Khmer tourists, it was more thoroughly off of the map than anywhere I've ever been. It was no destination, just a waterfall in a forest. Just another silent corner of the earth.

When we came back, lunch was waiting for us, and the cook sat and joked around at our table. She likes me, because I can speak in Khmer, and merrily served us some rice and chicken and vegetables while chatting about the waterfall. The other students had already eaten lunch, and were reclining in their hammocks, writing in their journals. After lunch, I got up, helped the cook with the dishes (they all found this hilarious, but it's actually a good way to relate to people, and moseyed on back to Marie). Walking back, we ran into some of the other students writing in their journals under a tree (the non-hammock types).

And now, of course, for one of the most satisfying conversations of my entire gap year.

"Hey, what did you guys do this morning?"

"Ah, we went up and we saw the waterfall. It was awesome...what did you do?"

"Oh, we studied Khmer with our guide."

"So what are you doing this afternoon?"

"Oh...well, we're going to go over program goals and discuss group expectations. We might go for a nature walk, later on. Up to the waterfall, perhaps. What are you going to do?"

"We're going to borrow Mr. T's motorcycle and see how far we can ride it into those mountains over there."

"Aaaahh. I see."

Marie, the Danish volunteer, tried to be diplomatic. "We might stop in one of these villages for a beer later on. Wanna join us?"

There was a pause.

"I think drinking is definitely not within the group expectations."

"Well, a coke, then..."

Another one broke in. "Motorcycles are definitely not allowed, either."

The group leader: "We really need to go over...behavioral expectations, anywise."

They seemed strangely leery about talking to us after that one. We may not be the sort of people your parents warned you about, but we're certainly the sort that sets your group leader on edge. It was a very....satisfying feeling, actually.

So, yes, we did borrow Mr. T's moto. Marie already knew how to drive a moto! It wasn't that dangerous! And we set off, then, on the red road into the great vast countryside. Marie did know how to drive a moto, but gears sort of confused her, so the first few kilometers were punctuated with sudden lurches as the cycle bucked from first to second to third to TOP GEAR. The road slid past houses on stilts with tired, dusty palm trees, and small villages like driftwood abandoned in the dunes of nowhere, leftover from a high tide that had passed years ago.

We ran out of gas on a stretch of road between a mountain and another mountain. The motorcycle gave a guttural whimper and putted to a halt, and we were utterly alone under a vast sky.

This is the part where I flagged down a passing motorist and convinced him to take me to buy gas (which is sold on the side of the road in old Pepsi bottles). I returned with 2 litres, filled up our tank, and we set off again, through the jungle and the old rice fields, past mountains and burning (yes, still burning) mango groves, and villages with tired houses and the same cigarette stands which must never sell anything to anyone except the truly lost people of earth. We finally came to an intersection where a few women sold mangoes with salt and chili, and we crossed a rickety bridge to a place, further on, which sold coffee.

There is something eternal about a coffee shop like that, with a pile of jackfruit on the dirty floor and the sunlight creaking through cracks in the weathered boards. The glasses were the same as they are all over Cambodia--glass and dusty. The air was thick with solitude, and with eternity trapped in the honey of the afternoon, in the dust which will outlast everything we build on this planet. We let time pass by us, then, having our coffee black and icy, watching men playing volleyball in the middle of nowhere beneath the dusty palm trees.

We left, then, and rode a motorcycle into great vast country. The rest of this story is perhaps best told with pictures--they will be uploaded soon. There is no poetic ending to this one, just the feeling of renewal that comes from good earth and wide skies, and the frayed corners of the map where you can feel all that had a hold on you falling through the cracks. We are all humans, and all alone in the vast places on earth, but it says something beautiful that we've learned to appreciate the living world around us.

Not to freak you out, but...

2010-02-14T01:15:00.001-08:00

I really think I have a protein deficiency. I know that we get alarmist about this sort of thing...but...

A. My hair started breaking and falling out. I had to take about five inches off. It hasn't really grown at all during my time here, so it now barely brushes my shoulders.

B. I have a lot less energy than I used to, both physically and mentally. This could be just that I don't eat breakfast, but...

C. I used to have yogurt for breakfast, peanut butter and jelly for lunch, and some sort of tofu/egg/meat kind of thing for dinner. Protein three times per day! Now, however--well, I have a handful or so of All Bran for breakfast, rice and vegetables and sometimes a bit of meat for lunch, and the same for dinner.

I'm not sure what to do about this, except try to eat more protein. The problem is that it gets expensive to go out for hamburgers or whatever around here, and I can't cook tofu or meat by myself in my apartment, because I have no pots or pans. I suppose I could buy dishes, but what would I do with them when I left? Also--the meat at the market is left out for the flies. On big, open, wooden blocks. Still bloody, too! I know my landlady buys it, and so I do end up eating it, but I trust her to buy meat that is good, as she feeds it to her children, too. If I bought it, though...well, I'm not sure I could tell what meat I could buy safely and what I couldn't. Tofu is less of a challenge, but it still isn't sanitary. It's also pretty expensive.

My friend Serge did mention to me that beans are a good source of protein, mind you. And there are those around here. So I can start eating more beans, and hopefully that will do me good. Anywise, how's that for a volunteer-English-teacher-in-a-third-world-country kind of dilemma? And to think I used to worry about getting an 89% on a history test! Yeek and curses.

A Villanelle

2010-02-14T01:13:00.000-08:00

The ancient one won’t tell me what is right.

But says that what is left will soon be gone.

And all that lives on earth awaits the night.

I rise at dawn and stir the coals to light.

And bank the fire when the day is done.

The ancient ones won’t tell me what is right.

And you rise as the sky breaks into light.

And reap your thorns all day beneath the sun.

So we that love on earth await the night.

The children scream with fever all the night,

And without water, nothing can be done.

The ancient one won’t tell me what is right.

When we were young you did not wait for night,

But lay beside me, laughing at the sun.

The ancients couldn’t tell us what was right.

And now the earth is cracked beneath the sun,

We wait for rain, but rains still have not come.

The ancient ones can’t tell us what is right.

And all that lives on earth awaits the night.

Happy Valentine's Day!

2010-02-14T00:53:00.000-08:00

Each leaf, they say, is different.

But every leaf is made to catch the sun.

Each day, they say, is heaven-sent.

We fall the same when every day is done.

Each child, they say, is different.

But every child must live beneath the sun.

Each life, we say, is heaven-sent.

But every life is dust when it is done.

Each man, they say, is different.

They’re made the same when every day is done.

Each night, they say, is heaven sent,

But every night will die beneath the sun.

And you, I think, are different.

But any you could really be the one.

Our love, perhaps, is different.

But nothing changes when the day is done.

And if we say that this is heaven-sent,

You’ll find that heaven, too, can be undone.

On Empathy.

2010-01-30T00:06:00.000-08:00

Tired, perhaps, I took the wrong road (they’re all so twisted around here) and I walked into your infinity. It was dark there, at first, but I walked through the darkness because it was exactly the liquid of your eyes, which I have penetrated before. It wasn’t much different from mine—the way the road curved away like the spine of the man called destiny, bumpy with the bony vertebrae of fate. I didn’t mean to, but I walked down it for a while. And oh! what I saw, love. Oh, what I saw.

I do not know if I am dying or living here, in this land away from time and winter. I am playing on a flat terrain which stretches smooth like glass and ice as far as I can see and I have no way of knowing if it is sinking beneath me. I live in a world without reference frames. I do not know, friends, if I am falling. I do not know if I am better or worse, if I have gone dumb and mute and blind or if somehow, plunging through this, I have found the bottom and am destined for clarity. I once thought that wisdom was having no regrets. Now I believe that regret is necessary to wisdom as a beating heart. Pain is not always to be avoided.

I really am trying to write to you. I hope you know that. It isn't that I have forgotten you. It's more that I've forgotten me, and how I used to talk to you--all of you. I'm scared, to be honest, of saying the wrong thing. I don't know how to talk anymore. I don't want to frighten you away. I start writing a post and I meander on and get lost--the weather is nice, yes, but that's hardly relevant, and I'm eating a mango and I'm sure I could write something interesting about the mangos here, or the market smells, but that has nothing to do with what I am feeling or the spirits that are moving me to move my hands and send these words across an ocean.

I have become more and more conscious of the truth as I write, over here, and so it has started taking me longer to say what must be said. I will begin to flick out a sentence, but then I will catch myself. This is not really the truth. I wrote that because it was convenient; because the words fit together nicely and seemed to be something like what I should be thinking right now. I am never honestly thinking what I should be thinking, though. It is like having a mob of clothing salesmen in your mind, toothily offering you nice little tops that are particularly stylish this season. They're especially urgent about it because you're naked. You don't want clothing, though, you want to peel your skin off.

It used to be that words ran in me like a river, flowing out of my skin without need of conscious translation, but maybe the truth is that I have been lost, somewhere in an eddy that I never saw coming, and now there are times when the words aren't there anymore. And if I had time, perhaps I could make the words come back again, but it would be such a long, long process, because the words lie inside of me and it's all I can do to keep a hold of myself, I'm changing so fast.

Well, but, that's no excuse.

Ok. Putting on some Paul Simon, now. I still love to listen to Graceland, even when I I can only do it through these cheap and rather fuzzy Cambodian headphones. Each of us, I believe, has a road to that deepest place inside herself which is the origin of her spark and her humanity. This, perhaps, is part of mine.

Speaking of roads...When I took a motodob back from Kbal Spean in Siem Reap, the asphalt was shrouded with yellow smoke from burning palm trees. Houses squatted beside the road on skinny skinny legs like tired old chickens. The blood of Cambodia--its buses and pulsing cities and people who know steel--has yet to truly permeate the flesh of the country. These dwellings are ancient, stagnating in an air grown thick with history, in a jungle that saw the first apes walk upright millions of years ago, and hasn't seen much since. The rice fields are wet and emerald. The people sit beneath the houses in the evening, and they watch the road. Actually, this is perhaps the number one most popular pastime in Cambodia. Ankuil laygn! the people will say to you as you pass them on the road. Sit down--play. These people have lived in the countryside near Siem Reap for all of their lives. They spend every evening--almost every evening of that eternity--sitting beneath a house that can barely shield them from the rain, watching the road as the sun sets over the palm trees. In Phnom Penh, too, this is how people spend their time (only they sit on their balconies, see, or beside roadside restaurants. Everywhere I go, I am invited to sit down and play a while. Sit down and watch the road, that is. Sit down and watch this world go by. When I first came here, I was surprised and disturbed that the people never seem to talk about anything serious. No philosophy, no politics, no science, no meaning of this big crazy and almost irrelevant (oh, Michael, I didn't mean that) universe. They just talk about the coffee, and the weather, and who is dating whom and that one foreigner who just walked by (hahah, can you believe she's actually wearing that?!), and the possibility of having chicken for dinner. But I've lived here for longer, now, and that no longer disturbs me. It should--it really should. But humanity is different, here, than it is in the United States.

Alright, well. Sit down, all. Let's watch this road for a while. No chicken for dinner, I'm sorry. (I will be going for Chinese). Do you know what it is to watch the same road, every day, for what might well be all of your life? I don't. But I would like to, almost. When you are young, you play beneath the dusty houses--jumping in the irrigation ditches, bothering the slow white flyridden cows, running for all you're worth through the ancient gridded paths among the rice fields. The old ones sit beneath their houses, and they watch the road, and they tell you stories when your body is still enough to listen. You are conscious of the other children, and the cold of the water. You are conscious of your heartbeat.

And the years go on as the days do, and the bicycles go by and so do the cows, and so do the motos, and so do the people. You're fifteen, now, and your humanity has hit your bloodstream like a needle dropping onto a record. You no longer believe the ghost stories. You notice the sunset with a painful clarity because you're in love (or, heck, maybe you're not. But I was fifteen once, too.) And you've fallen in love with someone from the village next to yours, and you watch the road and watch the bicycles and the motos and the cows pass one by one into eternity, and you think at last about someone sitting beside you to watch eternity (even though you're still new at it), watching it hour by hour and person by person, evening by evening as your days on earth end. You are conscious of the ache of the pulse in your throat. You are conscious of euphoria. You are conscious that this evening is beautiful. The motos go by, and so do the bicycles.

And so you get married and your husband moves to live with your family and you live together and somehow bring home enough money to have rice on the table three times every day. You're miserable, sometimes, and sometimes you are happy. And you have children and they grow older and the days grow older, too, and so do your parents. You watch the road, now, and you see almost the same sunset repeat itself day after day after day as they fall like raindrops from the eaves of the drying-out world. The earth is packed beneath your feet.

And the sun rises and you walk into the fields. And you work beneath the cracked and bleeding sun as it pulses down on you, down across the back of this thirsty earth. And the day is over and you return by following the thread in your heart, through the fields and to the houses, and you meet your neighbors and your family and you sit and you watch the road. The evening is the best part of the day. And you grow older and the road is still there. And one day you will stop working in the rice fields. And one day your children will have children, too. And you will sit in the evenings, beside the road, and you will tell the children the ghost stories your grandmother told you, and you will tell them true stories, too, laughing at yourself because you're finally old enough to have them.

And the road will still be there, running past you straight into the heart of time, going past you faster and faster. There will be a day, perhaps you realize that the road you're watching is actually the truest story you know.

I have a lot of true stories for you, but the truest one I know now is of the rhythm of humanity, and though there is far far more to that story than I could ever comprehend, the heartbeat of it hasn't escaped me. There was a time when all I could see of my future is Harvard--and that was the only future I needed to see. But this year has taken me away from that, more than I can say. We are defined to a great degree by the people around us, no? And no one around me understands what Harvard is, to me and to the people in my country. I don't want to explain it to them, either. I'm trying to learn more humility, after all. (Yes, I'm not good with the humility. And I certainly need a lot of it. But I am trying, ok?) What I am to the people in Cambodia is a young woman. There is only one future here for any young woman. And, because they’re fond of me, the people here I've met would earnestly like that future to be in Cambodia, with beautiful children and with one of their nice black-eyed Khmer men. Day after day in the fields. Day after day watching the sun rise and the sun set.

The men here do have nice black eyes. I’m not going to elope with any of them.

But do you see, then, that I’m losing my identity here? I’m not defined anymore by my future or what I am doing towards it. My heart has changed. Somehow or another, somewhere back there, I stepped off of the road, and now I’m watching it. Or, as Marcus would put it, I’m a human being, now, not a human doing. I live that I may live again tomorrow. The moto of my life swerved out of the path and came to a stop somewhere in these past months, and here I am. Sitting by the side of this road. Thinking the slow thoughts of this ancient jungle. Watching the world get thicker around me, feeling it like the sweat on my back. It rests heavily on you, here, (the world does) but the heaviness is only in your bones. You don’t realize it until you try to get up and walk away. When I look at these houses, now, I cannot help but ask myself what life is inside of them.

Don’t misread me. I’m not about to get romantic ideas about moving here, and living forever in these jilted flooded fields. I’m not Khmer, no matter how much I like to think I am.

But I’m not an alien, anymore. My tongue is good enough now that, when I walk up to someone on the street and ask them a question, they do not speak to me any more slowly than they would if I had brown skin and black eyes. I live here. I eat the same food that my friends do. I can bite shellfish and wash my clothes with lye, and when I eat my mangos I crave chili to go with them. I think in Khmer, now, almost as often as in English. And—I don’t know how to put this—I don’t feel foreign, anymore. I’m just another little girl pedaling her bicycle to work in this filthy and crowded city. Just another mouth to be fed. Just another soul to be saved. I get the joke, now, more often than not. It’s painful and funny, all at once. It always is. But we’ve all eaten today, so we’re not complaining. The more I’m here, the more I want to sink into it. Who am I, to say that I am too good for this life? Who am I to say that I am more than human, to claim that there are things more important in life than living it? It would be unutterably arrogant of me to say that I could imagine living my entire life as one of these people. I’m not that brave, nor that perceptive. But I am, with every atom of my being, trying to understand these people, to feel what it is to slip into their skin, to let them under mine. We are no different. I see no reason why I should not be able to comprehend the life they live. Even if it means a future without the university, one with hardly more in it than children. It is not something that I will ever truly understand. But who would I be if I didn’t try to understand, to empathize, to imagine and possess--just for an instant--their future?

So here I am, then, sitting in a hammock under a tired old squatting house, feet red with dirt, watching the smoke rise from a fire burning in the palm trees a few feet away. Watching the chickens scratch in the dirt, and the motos speed by, hungry for the horizon. Feeling the earth beneath my feet, too, and watching the red stain spread across the green, green fields. We humans are not as conscious as we think we are. We are creatures of our hunger, of the weather and a biological need which has nothing to do with will. We are rational when we are lucid enough and well-fed enough and awake enough to be rational. Consciousness is something that varies, and it is not always present within us. But I think we’re most conscious when we’re watching the road. We’re most human in those moments when we look at the earth around us and see that it’s beautiful. It’s only life, after all, just a single beat in a rhythm we cannot ever hope to understand. But there’s something in every one of us that thinks that it is beautiful, these moments when the sun is going down, when the world is arching its back towards the night, when the child moon is holding the breath that when released will puff the dandelion seeds across the sky to make the stars. There is something in every man and woman that makes them forget about the tightness in their stomach and the arms of their sweetheart and the hunger of their children for just an instant, here as the world wavers on the brink of darkness. There is something in all of us that makes us look up. This I call humanity. It is the same whether you or on the road or beside it. I am convinced that it is what redeems us.

And what it means to be human here is often worlds away from what it meant to be human in the time when I knew all of you. But, watching the road now, I think I will still be able to step back on it. Sometime or another I will leave this village, and exchange the ancient for the horizon. But it will be a different traveler who steps on the road this spring. I won’t be afraid to stop and ask for water in the ancient places. I won’t be afraid to sit for a while at the end of the day, when the sun goes down, and to be conscious that the world is beautiful. I will not be afraid to believe that everyone on earth is kin to me. Yes, everyone. The scope of humanity is beyond words--did you know that?

I will strive to be human. I will not be afraid to be human.

I am only human.

Here I Am (yes, it's me)

2010-01-29T23:22:00.000-08:00

some say that the rain is a lover or a cat or a man all in grey with a long hooded cloak or a bird with eyes of lightning and wings of shadow and some say that it pounds and some say that it pours but I say that it with its eyes of grey white peering in through the window it is just the world’s way of saying it’s alright, darling. no one is awake today.

Morning coffee.

2009-12-12T01:37:00.000-08:00

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

If you choose—and some mornings I do—to get a glass of coffee in Phnom Penh, then you will start slowly. It’s a city which is misty in the mornings, and you won’t be inclined to walk fast. Simply you will weave your way down the street, dodging motos and cars and people in a sort of ghostly dance, letting the light slowly crawly under your skin. You will begin to smell living flesh of the city—which, to your barely conscious mind, will be elemental—waste and sweat and smoke and two million lives. If the welders have begun their days’ work, your eyes will be chafed open by the blinding white sparks shooting out into the street. If not, you’ll still feel the heat of the open flame as thousands of fires are kindled (in tin shacks, behind tattered gates, beneath the woks on the street), anticipating the heat of the day. But we’re not there yet. Coffee first. It’s easy to find—just dodge into a restaurant on the side of the street—no, not a café—a Khmer restaurant. They’re open to the street—like a garage, really, on the side of the road, and inevitably studded with plastic lawn chairs and greasy tables with equally plastic (and very scorched) tablecloths. There will be a stove and dishes of very unidentifiable food near the front. A few napkins and bottles of chili will be at your table. Sit down. The going price for coffee in this city—if you get it like the Khmer do—is 1500 riels, or about 35 cents. The proprietor will dodge out from behind the stove when she sees you come—that is, she’ll dodge out after she’s finished dishing up a rice and egg and bean and soup concoction to the customer before you. You will smile and ask for kaphe tukdako t’kaa. She will nod and ask you if you want it to go. You don’t want it to go, unless you like drinking coffee out of a plastic baggie. Stay. Inhale. Smell the smoke, the garlic, the fermented fish, the pulse of Khmer cuisine. This is morning coffee.

When it comes, it will be served in a medium-sized glass heaped with ice. This is how the Khmer drink their coffee. Towards the bottom, it will be the color of nougat, and towards the top it will be black. The white color is from the sweetened condensed milk. The black is the coffee. Some people mix their coffee thoroughly before they drink it. I do not. Firstly, I quite like the slow way that the coffee marbles with the milk around the ice slush as I drink it. Secondly, I find that about three quarters of a glass of cold, black coffee followed by a shot of sweetened condensed milk is far more effective at waking me up than a cold latte. Just sayin’. So. Drink the coffee first. Slowly, let it pull you awake.

The smoke is rising from the barrels of soup over the hot coals. Follow it upwards. Look at your glass and see how the pale sunlight is hitting the ice. Hear the city coming alive, the mist lifting, the sounds of the motos in the street and the shouts of children, the crowing of the roosters and the cawing of the Khmer language.

See your veins slowly dilate under your skin with the nourishment. Feel the caffeine as it makes you fall in love all over again. Oh, the dirty restaurant! Oh, the sunlight hitting the dust motes! Oh, the flies! (a whole thundercloud of them, hovering over the bananas for sale next door) Oh, the smells—now truly alive—the chicken coops, the frying cockroaches (delicious smell, actually), the garlic and the flowers and the sewage and the rotting coconuts! Another sip, this one slightly sweeter. This is Kampuchea. Oh Kampuchea! I think I love you, with your flowers and your flies and hot hot sun and dogs copulating nonchalantly next to the dumpling stands which serve chicken-egg bao fresh at 5:30 AM and your bats flying over the lotus flowers in the canal and your rubbish and the goats on your rubbish and your naked children and your children in school uniforms singing as they go past on their bicycles and your oversweetened coffee which is mostly ice anywise. See what you do to me? See? Am I like this because of you or because of the coffee? I don’t know Kampuchea, but I love you. Ah! And here is the sweetened condensed milk! Had we but world enough, and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime…but we must go off to school, so we will pursue our morning coffee relentlessly until, at last, it surrenders its last thick dream of paradise lurking behind an ice cube. And then, with a regretful satisfaction, we eat the ice cube, too…and it’s another day.

Crunch crunch and off to school you go.

Your children are not your children.

2009-12-10T03:16:00.000-08:00

They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but are not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and
He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
So he loves also the bow that is stable.

--Kahlil Gibran

Here, then, those who have come with me this far, is the story of what happens when you peel the lotus petals away from the center. Here is the beating heart of violence and desperation that is this country. Here is where I have been found and lost.

At 5 in the genocide museum of Toul Sleng, the palms unfurl their hands and the air falls gold like honey, and I think then, that this school which first taught the future, and which second taught death, and which now teaches the past is becoming itself a casualty of the future. The flowers kiss the ground like prayers and the children run through the graves as the sun goes down. Only the earth has the courage to rebuild this blighted ground. The rooms of death, the agonies of some twenty thousand men and women, have been left untouched. Who could touch them? What sentence could there be?

I walked through the museum, room by room. I touched the walls and leaned against them. I knelt by the beds of the tortured. I do not believe that I should or can remove myself from their people. I did not take pictures. I stood and I reached a hand through the violence of history. Like Michelangelo’s Adam to God, I sought to touch the finger of these people who would never know tomorrow, and thus to understand.

But how can I? But what sentence can there be, Duch? The beds were still there. The rooms were simple—the tiled linoleum of a high school. Four walls. A barred window. And a bed still strewn with bullets, or torture instruments. In some rooms were pictures of the corpses, or of the men being tortured. I wept. I put my hands on the walls and tried to imagine their palms there. In sixty days one touches every atom of a space that size. These rooms are still saturated with blood and sweat, with the humanity that was tortured out of every one of them. These rooms are tainted with agony. It is something that can never leave them.

Yet the sun still set through the palm trees. The evening was the color of the persimmons they sell at the market here. I went and picked up flowers that had fallen from the trees, and, one by one, I put them on the bed of the tortured, where a few dried flowers rested already. What else could I do?

And then I went through the cells, one by one. I tried to see all of them. There were so many—and now, of course, you see the tragedy. After the first thousand, they begin to become numbers. I touched the bricks, the spaces (god! So small!), the doors with holes in them like eyes. Out of the eyes of the homes of the dead poured the light of evening through the unshuttered windows. I rested my head on some of them. I talked to them. I recited poetry. “Your children come through you, but not from you. Their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow—which you cannot visit, not even in dreams.” What children did you want to have? Where do their souls dwell, now?

And then, of course, came the building with the pictures. There were four rooms, each filled with aisles of glass cases, each glass case having a hundred or so pictures. The Toul Sleng genocide museum was not built by the kind of people who make museums in the West. No explanations are offered—no words are thrown across the void. Simply there are the faces, all in black and white, none smiling. What could I do? I had nothing to read, nothing to support my heart against their agonies. I walked through each glass case. I looked at every picture. I met their eyes. And I asked them, as the eyes became an awful rhythm…questions perhaps I would ask myself.

Whose name was written on your heart as you died? Which of you is Colonel Aureliano Buendía? Which one of you would be my student, now? Which of you would be Savoeun, or Raksmey, or Virak?

And—strangers—if I were to die, would it be with your names on my heart? I can see you, even now—one by one by one facing infinity, with not even the hope of children.

I am your child. I thought. Oh, I don't know why I thought that. But I did.

I walked then, to the next building. I saw the skulls—nameless, in display cases. There were brief notes beside each one of them, like the notes of a coroner. Blunt trauma to the occipital lobe, or, A bullet entered the left frontal lobe and exited through the right cheek. Nothing more. They were the goldish brown color of old bones. Next to them was an altar surrounded by 1000 paper cranes, covered with incense. And, on the walls around them, the most truly awful paintings. I’ll spare you the description. Suffice to say that an artist, to save his life, agreed to paint pictures of the work of the guards at Toul Sleng. The thing that surprised me was that, through it all, the artist seemed to retain some sense of aesthetic beauty. There were rays of sunlight filtering through the painted windows.

I came to this place because I saw the trial of the man who watched as these 20000 people were killed. His name was Duch, and the name of this place was S21. The poem which precedes this section was read in his defense by a man named Francois Roux, who was his lawyer.

Talking with a friend earlier this evening, I was asked--quite relevantly--how could one possibly defend this man? There is much about the trial I cannot say. The political situation here is very disturbing. But here--I will try.

Once upon a time, there was a man named Kaing Guek Eav. He was born in the Kampong Thom province around 1942, where he grew up to become, briefly, a math teacher. In other times, perhaps, the story would end here--in a village with a pretty girl and year after year of poor peasant students as life goes on. But this is the 20th century, and the seed of violence had fallen even in this land of waters. The Khmer Rouge insurgency began in Cambodia began around 1968--a group of young radicals, hot with the ideals of communism, slowly overthrew a government that was still slick from the womb, having only shaken off the French about 14 years prior. And here this math teacher gets entangled with history. Taking on the alias "Duch", he became in charge of security of the Communist Party north of Phnom Penh. And then, as the Khmer Rouge took over the country in 1975, his role got far more sinister. Duch was--let's not mince our words, here--the leader and ranking commander of S-21, also known as Toul Sleng, a high school which became the torture and interrogation center of the Khmer Rouge regime. Under his watch, more than 20,000 were killed after being pushed past the place where humanity breaks down. A good many were children.

After the regime fell (with the help of the Vietnamese and the current prime minister, Hun Sen), Duch disappeared into obscurity again. He converted to Christianity, as did many of the former Khmer Rouge, and he went back to teaching. We can only image what went on inside of him during those years. In 1999, though, his true identity came to be known by journalists, and he was subsequently arrested. He was held for quite a while, and finally it was decided that he should be put on trial, as a part of the process of reconciliation that is coming slowly--so, so slowly--to this torn nation. I, then, had the good fortune to be allowed to attend the second-to-last day of his trial--the day of the final statements of the defense.

The Khmer Rouge trials are conducted by a special tribunal, made up of both Cambodian and international judges and lawyers. This is necessary, as the corruption in the nation is such that a purely Cambodian court could not give the victims of the regime the reconciliation they need. Even still, the trials proceed on fragile ground. The Cambodian government would far prefer that they didn't happen at all. As is, only the major figures of the horror are being tried. If the trials proceeded further than this, they would begin to implicate people who are currently part of the government. But this is immaterial to Duch's trial. No one has any doubts as to who he is, or what he did.

So, then, how could we possibly defend this man? The arguments of Mr. Francois Roux, which I heard translated to English as I sat transfixed in that hot, silent audience were not any attempt to justify the deaths, nor the actions of Duch. They were, instead, entirely concerned with the human heart. Francois Roux has defended genocide cases before--as well as some of the men implicated with the terrorist attacks of September 11th. This was to be his last trial--and what I saw were the last words, the last arguments of the trial--the last he would ever speak, then, as a lawyer. Before he began the argument, he dedicated his words to his grandchildren, and to the young women of the world who want to be lawyers.

In the times of the Hebrews, said Mr. Roux, it used to be a tradition, every year, to take a goat and to transfer to that goat all the evil of the tribe--the burden all the misdoings and hatreds of the previous twelve months. The goat would then be released into the desert, and the community would be relieved, collectively, of their evil. Hence the word "scapegoat". But that was then, of course. This is now. We, in the 21st century, cannot rid ourselves of evil so easily.

So how do we do it? This is truly a conversation of the 20th century. Never again, we said, after the Holocaust. Never again, after we truly began to learn of the horrors of Stalin. Never again, after Pol Pot. Bosnia. Never again. Rwanda. Never again. Darfur. Where does it stop?

Here, said Roux, comes the subject of reconciliation. How can we possibly move on? And it is reconciliation that is the most important thing, here. After all--tell me--what sentence can there possibly be for Duch? Can putting him away for 40 years (there is no death penalty in Cambodia) possibly repay back 20,000 lives? Will it help the victims? We are in a country where the media is controlled by the government, and where many of the Khmer Rouge are still in power. We are in a nation where the young people, frequently, just don't care that much that there was a genocide only a couple of decades ago. Is killing this man reconciliation? Can we move on from here?

Then, Mr. Roux diverged from the argument onto a different subject, one which I couldn't help but anticipate from my studies of psychology--namely, Milgram. For those of you who don't know, Stanely Milgram was an American psychologist whose most famous experiment concerns obedience to authority figures. You may read about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment.

The results of this experiment, I should add, came as a shock even to Milgram--in that more than 65% of the subject continued administering electric shocks to the "learner" even after he admitted to having a heart condition. In other words--people ordered to kill will, more often than not, kill. Oh, they'll be uncomfortable. But they'll do it.

It was at this point that the trial begun to get truly tense. Roux did not invoke Milgram lightly. Instead, he returned to the subject of reconciliation. The 20th century is one unprecedented, perhaps, in its exploration of the soul of humanity. It was in these hundred years that our species produced Hitler and Pol Pot, and the thousands who followed them. It was these hundred years that produced Freud and Milgram. It was these hundred years which produced genocide, and people to perpetrate it. I can't immediately think of anything more awful than genocide. I don't want to, either.

But--the truly awful thing it seems, is that we haven't been able to stop the genocide. After Cambodia came Bosnia. After Bosnia came Rwanda, And now we have Darfur.

Now, then. How do we stop the genocide? I cannot reproduce the rhetoric that led to this point, though I have it scribbled in my journal, somewhere. All I can say is that there was not a soul in the courtroom at that point who did not feel, some way or another, that Roux was looking directly at him. I'm sorry. Directly through him.

What have we learned from Milgram? If anything, we have learned that there is a capacity for evil in all of us which goes deeper than we ever willingly would have imagined. This evil comes under the guise of neglect, and of obedience. It is an evil that allows most people--men and women, ordinary, healthy, sane Americans, to agree to administer electric shocks continuously to an innocent man, per the orders of someone they do not even know. It is an evil that allows them to continue administering these shocks even after the man has ceased screaming.

Therefore--for what are we trying Duch? He refused to meet the eyes of the 12,800 people who passed through the agony that is Toul Sleng. He refused to look at them, and to see that they, too, were humans. He was afraid. He was a coward. He allowed his guards to kill children by smashing their skulls against trees. He strove ardently, I think, to win the approval of the people who commanded him--people who also casually commanded a genocide.

He was quite possibly perfectly ordinary.

And this, says Roux, is the crux of it all. We can write this man off as a monster. We can put him away for forty years. We can try to let his death in prison wash away some of the blood that already has soaked this land. And if we do, then it will happen again.

It is very comfortable--perhaps too comfortable--to think of Duch and his ilk as monsters. If we say that he is psychotic, or a sadist, or twisted beyond humanity, then we do not have to see him in us. Roux would have none of this. Duch was not the only person on trial, that day. I was, too. We all were. Our hearts were laid open. How do we know, really, that we would act differently in his circumstances? It's easy to think that we're better than that. But, tell me, if we're better than that--then why Milgram? And, more importantly, why has this happened again? Why is it still happening? Until we understand, what hope can there be for us?

And how can we understand if we do not see that this man is a human? Oh, friends, I was cold.

There were more arguments after this, more defenses of Duch's character. Again, I can't possibly reproduce all of them. The discussion of Duch's character wasn't as important to me, either. I was not in the courtroom to witness the tears that Roux had said he shed. I was thinking about humanity, about the men and women in the courtroom around me, about the victims and the shattered past of this nation. I was thinking, too, about the future of our planet. What kind of creatures are we?

Then--there is an old Buddhist proverb, says Roux. It is about a monk--an old teacher--and his disciples. Of course, it could just as well be an imam or a rabbi or a priest. But we'll continue.

The monk asks his students--"How can we tell when the night is finally giving way to dawn?"

One answers--"When we can see the light reflecting off of the mango leaves."

This is not the correct answer.

Another answers--"When the birds begin to sing in the forest."

This is not the correct answer.

The third answers--"When we can recognize our brother in the eyes of a stranger."

Of course. "Duch," says Roux, "You were a coward. You could not meet the eyes of your victims, and you were afraid to see that they, too, were your brothers. The eyes of those you did not wish to see will remain on you forever."

But what of us? Are we human? Is night turning into day? Can we look at this stranger, this monster, and see that he is our brother? Our future may well turn on this.

And then after that, Roux read to us a poem, his hope of reconciliation. In the end, our children are already in the house of tomorrow. The blood that was shed cannot hurt them. You have, I believe, already read this poem.

One last thing, then, said Roux. Duch is dead. His name is Kaing Guek Eav.

I was shaking. Oh, I do not know what to think. How could I? How could I possibly? I was moved beyond words by Mr. Roux. He echoes in my head, still, here where humanity is pressing me on all sides, here where I can already see the darker shadows of the future in the eyes of the children I teach. For it is truly the people of Cambodia who concern me, not Duch. I want reconciliation. I want the children I teach to grow with souls unscarred, and I want their parents to heal. This far outweighs my sympathy for Duch. So maybe I'm a bit of a monster. But--how do we move on? How does this nation reconcile? Believe me, it hasn't reconciled, yet. It is numb, and it is afraid. Will killing Duch help it? Will saving Duch help it? How can you expect me to know this? And how deeply must we examine our souls before they can be saved? If we look deeply into the eyes of this man--if we see ourselves within him--is there hope that the next time, he can be recognized and saved? To what degree is it even possible to understand this evil?

The only way I can imagine helping this nation is opening a dialog about what happened--and somehow finding a way to reconcile the darkness in our own hearts with the horror of history. And the tragedy is that that won't happen, here. The media is controlled by the government, and people are largely too afraid to talk about politics. Many, I imagine, were also afraid to be seen at the trial. Certainly none showed emotion there. Like anyone else faced with these sorts of questions, all I can do is invoke that bright ghost of education. Which is, you know, about 0.3 (or 0.03? I forgot) percent of the budget, here. Where is hope? Where, Roux, is reconciliation? Where is the house of tomorrow?

When I left the Toul Sleng genocide museum, there were soft voices laughing as the men came into the yard of the old high school to play volleyball. The evening was practically night, then, and slowly the watchmen turned off the fluorescent lights behind me. There were a few children chasing each other in the cool grass, as the city shed the heat of the street. A young couple blew by on a motorcycle as I left the courtyard, laughing with each other. And the next day, of course, my children were waiting for me. And somehow or another they were smiling.

Hi, all.

2009-12-10T00:47:00.000-08:00

Now it's the dark quiet twilight of the soul, the time when the stars wheel above you and you can just barely taste the people who aren't quite there around you. So here it is--the blog entry or entries I'm supposed to produce. As if I could put this country into words. As if...well, I love you, all of you. So I'll do my best. There is much that I'm not posting---some that I don't have the time to post---some that it'd be too dangerous to post. So it goes.

I was so wary, then.

Ugly American—

Thinner than oxygen

Tough as a whore.

I said “You can lie to me…

I own what’s inside of me.

Nothing surprises me anymore…”

But the children and the flowers. But the goats who mount skyward atop mounds of rubbish, with all the nonchalance of miracle. But the bats and the sun rising.

So here, then, the long-awaited entry about my work. I am a volunteer at a school near the old rubbish dump of the PIO. I teach atop the refuse of a third-world city. Slowly, there is grass growing on it.

My students were made to work collecting rubbish to re-sell—usually by their parents. The PIO, my NGO (I be at dah NGO o’ dah PIO, yo?) pays the parents of the students the same amount they would earn collecting rubbish, puts these students in an orphanage, and sends them to school. The organization also teaches students (for free) from nearby poor families. (Cambodian public school requires the parents to pay for half of the child’s education.) So, from 7:30 to 4:30, I teach these children English, alongside the six Khmer teachers at the school. Together, we’re responsible for kindergarten through sixth grade, and about 300 students. Yes, that’s about 50 students per class. The classrooms in which I teach have walls that are only halfway there. The wind blows my old whiteboard in every direction when the rain is about to come, and the concrete floors become saturated with dust and leaves and bird droppings every day. It’s rather poetic. I like the butterflies. Occasionally the people doing their laundry next door come and peer through at me, heads wrapped in the krama, shaking their heads and laughing. Occasionally the goats do the same thing, except without the headscarves.

At any rate—I teach English in 6^th grade and 4^th grade—each about 3 hours a day, sometimes more. The 6^th grade shares a classroom with the 5^th grade, because both, before I came, were taught by the same teacher (and still are when the subject isn’t English). Therefore, as I gesture at my wind-tossed whiteboard every morning, Virak is generally doing the same thing about 10 feet away from me. It’s actually not that much of a problem—for me, at least. I’m a lot louder than Virak. My 6^th-graders are my favorite class. They’re nearly my age. There are about 13 of them--see, I'm lucky! Only 13! They're clever, too, and remind me a little bit of my Academic Decathlon team. They like to joke around with me, after class, and ask me about my home and my family. They love it when I speak in Khmer with them, too. My 4th-graders are more difficult--their teacher, before, I came, was a bit--"polite", as Virak puts it. They're used to running wild in the class--tilting over their desks, fighting in the classroom ("boxing", they say), throwing shoes at each other, torturing crickets, that sort of thing. I have to shout a great deal most of the time, and mostly in Khmer: "Sreymom!!! Ta niak kampong tweu a-way?! Siyu-peu rabok-niak neuv ai naaa? Seyha--somh ankuyl. ANKUYL, Chanroen!! Thank you!! S'dap Khn'yom!!" (Sreymom, what are you doing?! Where is your book? Seyha, please sit down. SIT DOWN, Chanroen!! Thank you. Listen to me!) So I shout at them, and they laugh, and sit down. In some classes, the teachers whack the students when they aren't listening. I cannot do this.

Instead, of course, I try to love them. Oh yes. What else can I do? If I yell at them, they will be quiet and they will listen to me--for about a minute, at least. And then they'll get distracted and go adorably try to kill each other or draw pictures or whatever else they do when I'm not looking. And then I'll yell at them again and they'll smile at me and sit up and try to behave for another minute--you see how it goes.

It gets harder and harder to write this. I came to this country thinking I was clad in light. I believed that I could teach these children English--and that somehow I could make their lives immeasurably better. I am a volunteer. A future Harvard undergrad. I thought I could give them the world.

I wrote this poem about a week ago.

You tried to teach them, then,

There where the flies swarmed like the hungry children when the foreigners brought chalky bread and apples at 11,

There where the sky opens to rain as a bride derobes to her new husband.

Where the rain opens you likewise.

You, wiping the sweat off of your brow like the burden of your pretentions—

You, the only one among you who loved the desert

You, there, amid the flowers and mosquitoes tried to give them what had been given you in the days when all you knew was cold air and straight lines and sunlight.

And you of the sweat build and you build and you struggle with the knot, and you try to push along the lines you’ve known all your life like the straight bolt of time through chaos but the lines curve inward

and into you,

And time goes around you and through you and all the lines are the veins of your body pointing to your heart and back in a circle that cannot break.

And it ends, and the vines and ants consume what you have built, and the children run blind into the sunlight.

You dry from them like the rain.

You are the only one who knows how you have been opened.

They are sightless and they laugh

You tried to tell them.

They are made of flowers.

You tried to teach them.

They are made of vision.

You cannot build in this ground.

These children are the blood of the infinite. They go to your heart and back again.

They go on the lines that you gave them.

They are not blood. They will keep going long after the heart is gone.

All you can do is let them breathe for you.

All you can do is hear their laughter.

They will be men and women when the sun rises again.

They will have more children of laughter and blood.

And the rain will fall and the flies will swarm and the sun will rise again.

They will have more children.

I teach English for 6 hours a day. Sometimes I think I don't teach anything. I can't just teach them what I want, you know. I must follow a curriculum set down by the NGO, and written out in a student book called Let's Go--English. The teacher's edition of the student book has all sorts of clever games you can play with all sorts of lovely additions to the student books--Student Cards!! Vocab Cards!! CDs, oh my!!

Of course we don't have the additions. Most students don't even have a book. And any clever teaching method I could try would be to no end. They would not pay attention long enough to follow my instructions. I ask them questions in English, I shout and I talk softly and I plead and I do it for three hours every day for these wonderful fourth graders and they go home and they forget it all. There are goats to be petted, and food to be eaten, and their families must put them to work. I am not clad in light. I am no better than the Khmer teacher. Often I think I'm worse. Sometimes I find that I want to cry, or howl into the wild flat land that is Cambodia like a madwoman. The truth is that I do not think I can help them. I am not a goddess, not a sage, not a shaman.

But it doesn't matter, you know. Because after class, they come to me and they hug me softly, and I'm at last free to smile at them. And they bring me small pink flowers they pick by the flag, and I talk with them in English and in Khmer. 'Cher, they call me, lovingly It's short for "Teacher". 'Cher sa-at! And I tell them that they're beautiful and I hold their hands and walk to the lower school, and they giggle and try to tickle me and I sing songs with them and I think that I don't deserve to have such wonderful students as these. And there you have it.

And, friends, even if I could teach them English--I mean, really teach them English, not just show them the few small lessons included in the Let's Go English curriculum--I do not think I would be useful. This I have learned in 6th grade. In 6th grade, you see, I do a few things that the Khmer teacher does not. Oh, I can be clever, sometimes, not that it's worth much. I've started a few new things in class--regular listening practices like we did in my French class, and speaking practices. I also think that I teach the material pretty well--because I do my best to go beyond the formulas in the book, and have them reapply grammatical principles in new and different ways. They're clever students, really, but I can trick them, sometimes, and then I tell myself that they're learning. And--you know what? These students are ages 15 to 18, and they're still in 6th grade. The PIO might have funding to teach them next year. And it might well not. They might well be left out in the cold (heat, rather) after this. They can't go to a public school, because Cambodian education requires their parents to pay half of the cost--something none of them have. University is quite well out of the question. They'll probably take vocational training after this. And get jobs, and get married, and have more children. How can I possibly help them? What good will English do them? They're bright, and that won't get them anywhere, because they're poor and this is Cambodia. Their eyes always smile when they meet mine.

And I wake up in the morning knowing that my life is utterly my own, and that I can take it anywhere I want to go. And they wake up and sometimes, when I hear about all the work they must do to sustain their families, when I look at the options available, I think their lives never were their own. And still they smile. And here I am trying to teach them English?! For what? What good can it do them? Oh, sure, a few phrases here and there will be good, no doubt. But they already have that. I'm irrelevant. Utterly, laughably irrelevant, except there's nothing here that's laughable. I thought I could give them the world. I thought that this language was magical. I was wrong.

So what do I do? I teach them English. I teach them a little bit, step by step, and I do not try to compare my teaching with anyone else's. I do not expect drastic improvement. How could I? How absolutely presumptuous of me--18 years old, and thinking I can teach well. If I am lucky, I think they will improve a little bit. And maybe one or two will improve a great deal. This is not an expectation, only a wish.

And I love them. Because in the end, I cannot make anyone learn English. No matter the discipline I enforce, my students will not learn English if they do not want to learn English. And maybe if I love them, they will love me, too, and if they love me, too, then maybe that will help them. Maybe, somewhere down the line, they will be faced with a decision that is important, and maybe they will think of me and go in the better direction. I know that in times of trouble, I often think of my teachers and what they would have me do. Perhaps---there's a wild chance--someday they will think of me, and that will help them. I do not know. All I know is that, if I do care about them, then maybe there is a chance that they will be touched by this, and that they will want to learn English from me, and that they will want to be good people. (am I a good role model? Do I count as a good person? This is beginning to sound pretty arrogant, this paragraph...) Scratch that. I think they're already wonderful people. But maybe they'll be more hopeful people. Maybe, at least, if they care about me, and care about what I think of them, they will want to learn English. There's a chance that will help them. At any rate, what else I can do?

Anywise. I love them, you know. Oh, sometimes this drives me to insanity, this attempt to teach. I kick myself. I howl in the silent spaces of my soul, because showing emotion here is taboo. But then I reason with myself that this is humanity. We can do so little--but we must try. I don't even know why we must try anymore. Only I know that it is infinitely better to try than it is to give up.

In America, Virak tells me, the parents care about their children’s studies. They discipline their sons and daughters, and they teach them how to behave in school—how to learn and pay attention to the teacher, how to not scream in class, etcetera. Here, parents often do not care about their children’s education. These are the poorest families of Phnom Penh. A child is simply another mouth to feed—and so, when my students get home, they must cook and clean and help their mothers, and try to repay them for the rice they eat. They haven’t time to learn how or why to go to school. They simply go, and it is our task to discipline them and teach them to live—and to give them a reason for their education.

And after school, of course, the sun begins to sink into the jealous sky. The goats baa, the bats wing around us, the children run home singing. And I beat a slow path to the lower school, where a bare bulb—sorry, a bare fluorescent tube—illuminates the office.

Sometimes I go home directly with Kumneth, on her moto. Sometimes we sit and watch the children leave, then buy a Coca-Cola and share it between us, counting out the letters until the tab on the soda can comes off, the only bit of genuine Americana I’ve been able to show her. (For those of you who don’t know—to determine the name of your future sweetheart, take the tab on a soda can and push it back and forth until it comes off, saying a letter of the alphabet with each push. The letter at which it detaches from the soda can is the first initial of said person. You can then either repeat the process with another soda can to determine the second, third, and fourth letters ad infinitum (which will lead you to the conclusion that you are destined to marry a Klingon), or you can guess names that begin with the letter, forget ‘em, and try again next time. So far, it looks like the lucky man is going to be called Xavier. I digress). We sit with the can between us, drinking it from straws, talking about the kids and letting the night thicken in the palm trees. Next to the school, the boys strip off their shirts and play volleyball and football (soccer, you’d say), whooping and shouting in the bare lot strewn with old bricks.

And sometimes, I go into the office, and Virak (who lives at the school) unfolds from his chair and talks with me quietly, over the buzz of the fan, in English and Khmer—for hours on end. Mostly we talk about our students, and why we’re here, and where their lives are going—and where ours might go because of them. The sun sinks over the rubbish dump, and the poorest people light fires around the upper school, which cast eerie, wavering shadows into the night. This is the worst neighborhood of Phnom Penh. The roads are dirt, and there are no streetlights. The few fluorescent bulbs in houses are dim and bluish against the thatch. We talk, and listen to the voices of the people next door, and the dogs howling, and then eventually he or Kumneth take me home through the flooded areas near the dump (they don’t like me walking in this area, with my blond hair). The night is soft in Phnom Penh, and it nuzzles at you in a not-quite-T.S. Eliot-ish fashion.

And I get home, and I open the door and I eat my evening rice and fall fast into sleep, and I wake up and I'll do it again tomorrow.

So there's that.

Ok, ok, I'm here.

2009-11-13T21:52:00.000-08:00

It has been brought to my attention that there are certain parties who still don’t believe that I’ve been kidnapped by the Resistance/ eaten by cannibals with rabies/ seduced by a young, handsome Khmer man with his very own motorcycle and taken to live in the jungle off of mangoes, chili, and sweetened condensed milk (oh you just wait…) and would therefore like to know what I’ve been doing with myself these past days. So, lemme see…

This weekend, I was spirited away from Phnom Penh into rural Cambodia, with someone who was at the time nearly a complete stranger. Her name is Sophors, and she is the best friend of my host brother, Samnang. We had met briefly while singing karaoke, and she text-messaged me on Friday asking me if I wanted to go visit her hometown with her. Most of the people in Phnom Penh have families in the provinces of Cambodia, and frequently they go to visit them on the weekend. Sometimes husbands and wives are separated in this way; often, too, mothers and children. At any rate, this sort of…er…kidnapping has happened to me quite a lot, of late. While there are disadvantages to being a young female traveling alone (well, obviously), there is one singularly great advantage in that people everywhere consider you harmless, in need of friends, and possibly entertaining, and therefore will bring you along with them almost anywhere, like a kid with a stray puppy (Lookit what I found! It talks! Let’s feed it and do cool things with it!).

It was thus that this Saturday I went on the back of a motorcycle for two hours, through vast flooded country and over muddy rivers rimmed with huts on stilts, past men and women sitting in the shade of hammocks or harvesting rice as their dogs ran wild in the streets and their children played naked in the mud. The land is fiercely green and wide and flat, and so very alive. There are fields of lotus flowers blooming with the nonchalance of miracle next to the road, and boats shaped like flattened crescent moons ply the rivers, with the romance of a South Asia that I thought had only existed in dreams. I clung onto Sophors through all of this, (though we stopped once to buy a snack of lotus seeds, mango with salt and chili, and sugar cane juice), watching the pagodas and the huts go by, her aunt behind me speaking only in the language of the wind.

When we arrived, I was honored to eat lunch with her aunts, Khmer style. For those of you who don’t know, in Cambodia one eats while seated around the table or on the floor. Food is placed in large dishes in the middle, and each person has their separate plate of rice. And you eat with your hands—taking food from the large dish, dipping it in a small bowl of sauce, then, well, popping it in your mouth. The difficult part is the rice—you have to press it into a ball before you eat it, and sometimes little grains flail awkwardly out of your hands—well, at least, they do if you’re me and a clumsy foreigner. We sat on a small table in front, surrounded by strutting roosters, scratching hens, and a big black dog, and her aunts smiled at me as we had the meal. It was very good—Khmer food is always well-spiced—and, as Sophor remarked, it tastes a lot better when you eat with your hands, so much so, in fact, that I’m thinking of continuing this practice when I return to the States. You’ll still invite me over for dinner, right? Right…? Guys…?

At any rate, after lunch we went and visited the pagoda next to Sophor’s house—a beautiful old thing set in front of a grove with tall trees and slanting, gold light, covered with grey stonework and gold paint. There were few monks prowling the area, draped in their harvest-colored robes (gold, rust, or orange) and absolutely silent, and innumerable carvings of the Cambodian traditional seven-headed dragon. The front was vividly colored with a picture of the Buddha, holding his hand as if to pluck from the sainted air a lotus blossom, which he seems to do quite often but which is never mentioned in his teachings. The air in back was absolutely still, as if to petrify the afternoon like an ancient insect in its amber light. In the stillness were older stone structures, rising out of the leaf-strewn ground. Ornate tombs, said Sophors. The carvings on them are delicate and some are eaten by black lichen. Many are slick with humidity and leaf rot—but you can still trace the images; the temples, the dragons, the gods, the bare-breasted dancing girls (of which there are quite many, I should remark, for such a conservative culture). We tried to go into the pagoda, but were halted by the sound of low, syncopated chanting. The monks were inside. The interior was red and dark, like a womb, perhaps. We left the temple grounds, kicking through the fallen leaves, and crossed the street and the school grounds to the river.

The river was the Bassac River, I believe—one of the many that cuts across Cambodia. It was wide and muddy, and curled slowly between tropical islands, its currents carrying the occasional coconut or palm frond. It is—for perspective—I’d say about eight times the width of the Colorado—and, of course, far deeper. We walked down to the bank, which was muddy and rimmed with small huts nailed together out of weathered boards, where people were cooking in the coals and doing their laundry in the brown waters. There was an ancient tree rooted in the water, and we carefully swung over to it. Sophors remarked that she used to climb these trees when she was young—and so I shinnied up the smooth bark and swung up over the bright waters. We passed some time in the tree together, watching the woven boats pass beneath us, and a group of men trying to catch a fish, and a woman swirling suds into the current. The moment was beautiful in a way that is hard to describe. It had, I suppose, that spark of eternity that is a property of certain rivers and certain angles of light, coupled with the peace of people doing work that was utterly human all around us. It felt good.

Afterwards Sophors invited me to go visit her fields. She’s a farmer, as are her aunts, and she had promised Samnang that she would bring him some chili, and some Chinese radishes. So we took the moto on a rough road through the country, past children walking to their parents, who work the swollen fields as they go to school, past thin and white cows and papaya groves and mango trees and chili plantations . We stopped at a row of chilis which stretched back from the road next to the papaya grove, and Sophors called to her neighbors harvesting rice in the field next to us. The chilis were mostly green, but a few red and orange ones poked out among the foliage, and we set to harvesting these as the evening seeped in around us, humming distant harvest songs and glancing occasionally at the sun, which was a broken egg yolk paling in the pearly clouds. We then stored the bag in the moto, and walked through rows of rice and water lilies, beneath the near-silhouettes of tropical trees and through the thicket of frog-calls, into a path rutted with muddy water. Sophors glanced back at me and grinned, and then started running, and I leapt after her, following through the rows of rice and vegetables which stretched out all around us, into the great, vast, and tropical country. Her neighbors glanced up, adjusted their shawls, and smiled so their eyes crinkled and their rotting teeth showed, and I knew they understood why she loved her fields. The life here is so abundant that it saturates you, curling under your skin with the mosquito bites (which I’ve stopped noticing), breathing green into your dreams, taking root in your very sweat and ascending above the earth in a haze as the day ends. The country is so very flat and vast that it gives me vertigo to drive through it—as if the hands of some god were upon me when I watch the earth fall away to the horizon, walking with me into the vast country.

I was going to go back to Phnom Penh at this point, but Sophors’ aunt asked me to stay the night, and I could hardly refuse. The house was simple—three rooms, one after the other, floored in concrete and housing three people. I took a bath (the Khmer are meticulous about their baths) and then walked from water to water as the monsoon split the sky. You have not known water, I think, until you have experienced a tropical monsoon. It turns your skin inside out and the world becomes water like your pulsing blood. You are wet in half a second, and you begin forget the feeling of air as the rain pours down around you for hours, tossing the palm trees and flooding the streets. Sophors’ aunts wouldn’t let me help with dinner, but rather sat me down outside with a mango, some salt and chili, and told me to watch the rain in the flickering fluorescent light. I did, as well as the twenty pale orange lizards that writhed above me, and the violet lightning that snaked across the sky and the thunder that broke the backbone of heaven. And after dinner, we all sat there in the front for a while, talking with some other neighbors (they live ten feet away and were watching the rain from under their stilt-ed house) about Cambodia and America and people they knew and the jackfruit we were eating. The people in Cambodia have old eyes (mostly), and the brightest smiles I’ve ever encountered. Since I don’t speak the language well, smiling forms the bulk of my communication with anyone. Somehow, it’s enough. More than enough, actually.

The aunts seemed to like me very much, because I kept trying to speak Khmer with them, and they playfully made fun of me to the neighbors. I liked them, as well, and I very much liked Sophors—she’s kind and energetic and very good-hearted. She has a very graceful way about her, and a beautiful singing voice—and she’s very genuine. All her neighbors know her and shout out to her as she passes, and she greets them in turn. I’m happy that I’ve met her, and think that I will have occasion to spend time with her again. She seemed to think so, too, and, as we sped back to PP after a breakfast of grilled bananas, laden with several jackfruits and a papaya, past people and motos and elephants and the neverending river, she said to me,“My aunts want you to come stay again. Maybe…could you?” “Without a doubt.” All around us there was sunlight.

A Confession

2009-11-13T21:51:00.000-08:00

I should also mention, now, that I am now the…er…proud...owner of a mobile cellular telephone. It’s a surrender I had to make, as otherwise anyone who wanted to contact me would have to track me down on foot (I have neither a home phone number nor a reliable way to check e-mails, though I do stick out in a crowd with my blond hair). I have even, yes, learned to text message. I compensate for this faltering in my character by sending the most grammatical text messages possible. I can’t help it. Something in me says that if I can use the em dash correctly in a text message, it isn’t really text messaging and there’s a chance that maybe god will forgive me/someone will finally love me/ I won’t be such an awful person after all. It's dangerous logic, but...well...(Yes, I have used the em dash correctly in a text message. Don’t tell me you don’t know how to find the em dash button. I did, and I’ve had a mobile cellular telephone for but two weeks. From now on, em dashes, people!)

How to make friends in Cambodia

2009-11-13T20:47:00.000-08:00

I was out walking this evening, around the Independence Monument, which is perhaps the most beautiful thing in the city when the sun sets (I have taken pictures, but I have yet to internetify them). I usually walk to the Russian Market, as the Independence Monument is across the city and therefore too long of a walk when your family wants you back before eight, but I decided to treat myself when a mototaxi driver offered to make the trip for about one-sixth the price of the normal trip. Motorcycle taxis are, in my humble opinion, the only way to travel in Cambodia—actually, anywhere. You get to ride under palm trees and pagodas, your hair blowing in the wind, inhaling the sharp scents of fermenting fish and frying fritters, through traffic that would give a New York cabbie permanent psychosis. Usually your mototaxi driver will be simultaneously trying to drive, talk to the people on the moto next to you (usually two per moto, sometimes three or for), slap mosquitoes, and strike up a conversation with you in pidgin English and Khmer. (Ta niak like Cambodia te? Ta niak single te? Kh’nyom che ni-yay phiasaa K’mai tik tik. Kh’nyom mung mehn barang teh, dtai khn’yom che phiasaa barang.) It’s a rush only comparable to reciting the poetry of William Wordsworth or William Blake while dancing naked in a violent thunderstorm after ingesting a double shot of espresso and half a can of sweetened condensed milk.

Almost as fun as the ride itself, though, is bargaining with the moto taxi driver. I have an edge on most foreigners, because I speak Khmer and am quite willing to walk anywhere. In other words—I never hail mototaxis. They hail me. Our conversations usually go like this: “Hello, beautiful lady, you need a moto?” Me: “Ah-teh, ahw-koon!” (No, thank you!) “Hahahah ah-teh ahw-koon, no, ofcourseyouneed a moto please?!” Me: “How much?” “Well, where do you want to go?” “I’m going to Preah Sihanouk Boulevard and Norodom Boulevard.” “Five thousand.” Me: “Hahahahaha aha ahahaha aha ha no. Khn’yom dar lein.” I start walking. This is my response no matter if they give me a good price or a bad price. Them: “Ok, ok, four thousand!”. Me: “Naaaah…thank you!” (keeps walking). “Ok, ok, what price you want?” Me: (harassed sigh, smile) “Two thousand.” “Ahw, c’mon, no, three thousand…” Me: (keeps walking, puts hands in pockets, starts whistling). At this point, they will either go away, or drive their moto in front of me, grin, and say “Ok, ok. Two thousand. Come on.” While you’d think they’d resent my driving the bargain the way I do, they actually seem to find the whole business funny. The one who took me there tonight let me off his moto giggling as he bid me johm rieb liea.

At any rate, I walked past the Independence monument, dodging the chicken sellers and the fruit sellers and the fritter sellers and the balloon men, and into the park where the people were doing their evening socializing, taichi, dancing, and wanabe hip-hop-ing. (The Khmer like to exercise together, in the morning and evening—flocks of strangers in the parks moving in time to Western pop blaring out of static speakers) I was just crossing the park with the fountains when I noticed a young guy in white T-shirt kicking a soccer ball ten feet away from me. I stood, cocked my head, and nodded, and he kicked the soccer ball to me. I booted it back. He kicked it again. I booted it back—well, I booted it off on an angle, that is, because I play soccer about as well as your average orangutan. He ran for it, then kicked it in my general direction, and I ran for it and kicked it back to his general direction, and we ended up doing this for twenty minutes, not saying anything, but occasionally laughing softly. Finally, as it got well and truly dark, his friend sauntered over and conferred with him a bit, then walked to me. “Hi—he doesn’t speak English.” “Hi!” “He says you kick—you kick this—very good.” “Ah! Thank you—ahw-koon!” (I don’t, you know. But I’m adorable when I try.) “He says—what’s your name?” “Khn’yom ch’muauh Aisha.” “Ah you speak—ta niak che phiasaa K’mai?” “Kh’nyom che ni-yay phiasaa K’mai tik tik!” The guy smiled, and his friend said, “So—same time, he says, tomorrow?” “Saturday I’m busy. Does Monday work?” They confer. “Ok, Monday is ok.” I give him my mobile phone number, and he (the young guy) is introduced as “Red. Um. Mr. Red.” So now I’m playing football…er…kicking a soccerball around…on Monday!” We’ll be friends, I’m sure.

While I'm here, though, I should probably talk about Cambodian men. I was friendly to this one because he wasn't too forward--but--well, I've had more interesting encounters.

One time, for instance, I was walking through Phsar Thmey, the central market, when I was stopped by a middle-aged woman selling mascara. "Ah! Ah, a foreigner!! Please sit down, please! (proffers a plastic stool). I love foreigners! You can practice English with me, yes?" Me: "Well, ok. I do have to leave soon, but...ohwhattheheck." She smiled, and her fourteen-year-old daughter rolled her eyes in a very fourteen-year-old way (Maaaa...you're totally embarrassing me in front of the foreigner. Like, it's so not cool to stop them in the marketplace. They have foreign things to do. Oh, come on. Oh jeez. I am so not related to you...) The mother ignored this, and a conversation in pidgin English and Khmer ensued. ("You're from Amerik?! Where in Amerik?! Do you want mascara?). All the while, the mother had a hold on my arm and was sort of petting my arm hair, which happens disturbingly often around here. Khmer people seem to be very into white skin, especially when it is accompanied by blond arm hair. Anywise, we managed to establish in the conversation that the woman had a daughter and a son, and I was a single (I'm too young to be married, come on! How old are you? Um...eighteen. You are not too young to be married!!), volunteering to teach English, and going to return to America in 4 months, where I would go to the university and possibly study English and physics. Fairly shortly, though, I had to leave and continue on my walk. They seemed upset, though, that I was leaving, and asked for my name, address, phone number in the US, etcetera. I gave them my mobile phone and e-mail, and, thanking them, went on my way, thinking perhaps that the daughter wanted me to help her with English, and would call me.

Ten minutes later, as I was walking past the fish sellers and dodging a group of giggling Khmer teenagers, my phone vibrated. "Hello?" "Yes, hello. I am...you know that woman who you gave your phone number in the market, yes? I am her son."

"Well...hi."

"So, um, how are you?"

"Just fine, thank you, you?"

"Yea, I'm fine, thank you. So, where are you?"

"I'm in the market."

"Really? My mother said...she said you had to go home or your family, they would want you home."

"Ah, yes. I'm headed in that direction."

"So...my sister says you are very beautiful."

"......I guess that that's a matter of opinion."

"You're a foreigner, right? Yes, because, I think foreign women are very beautiful. You are one of them, right?"

"Um...yea, that's right. I am a foreigner. Khmer girls are very beautiful, too, you know."

"So, um, so good to talk to you!"

"Yea, likewise. Er--I have to go, now! But, um, have a good day!"

"Ahw, ok. I will talk to you later!! Goodbye!"

He has called me back several times. I have not responded.

But ah, well...

October 30th

2009-11-02T23:14:00.000-08:00

At least I don’t have to worry about finding a place to recycle it…

Walking the road today, still achy from jet lag, I passed by a red stand in a tattered wooded fence selling Coca-Colas. How much? The young girl, who wore pink and had a purse around her neck, held up one finger. One dollar is far too expensive—no, wait…Two thousand riels, for one Coca-Cola. Fair enough. I nodded and fished 2000 riels out of my wallet, and she, in one smooth motion, poured the Coca-Cola into a small plastic baggie, put a straw in it, and handed it to me while putting the emptied bottle under the stand. I looked at her. She said something which may have been You speak Khmer?, or You don’t speak Khmer, don’t you? or You ignorant foreigners shall never defeat us, the Khmer!, or The weasels are restless. I took the bag from her, gingerly, and walked off. Probably should have bargained the price down to 1000 riels. Ah, well.

If you were to walk through Cambodia blind, perhaps, the most basic sound would be that of the crickets. At night, at least, there are a chorus of them, some fast and chattering, some lower and sweet. Beyond that—you reach out further and hear the sound of the traffic, the motos like so many fish, the hum of bicycles, the occasional car or car horn. After this, the sound of Khmer, a language which twangs and plucks at the ear, like drops of water falling fast into a deep basin, or the clucking of certain types of hens. This is the most alien language I have ever encountered, one which twists around vowels and consonants, and has sounds in it that I cannot hear. These sounds are elemental.

After them come the sound of birds, perhaps, the hiss of oil and sizzling tarantula on the street stands, the sharp sound of the television. And, later still, the sound of music. Many Cambodians (Khmers) like the sort of pop music that most people in America (save for certain types of teenage girls) claim is absolutely unbearable—music with lyrics like I never had a dream come true, till the day that I met you, the sort of stuff which you secretly like only when you’re so in love with someone that their name is tattooed on the inside of your eyelids. Except a lot of Cambodian people listen to it all the time. I went with my host brother, Samnang, on Sunday to sing karaoke with his friends. This was a good deal for me, as it involved riding through downtown Phnom Penh on the back of a motorcycle, which is definitely the most fun anyone can have with their clothes on. (The traffic in Phnom Penh is nothing short of incredible. More on it later.) We then were led into a room which was basically a small, tiled box, whereupon we sat on a sofa, were handed two microphones, and then took turns singing the lyrics which appeared on a television screen at the front of the room. The lyrics were in Khmer, so I really don’t know what they were—but it wasn’t hard to figure out what all the songs were about, as they were accompanied by Bollywood-esque music videos. Guy meets girl, guy and girl run through flowers/walk on beach. Girl hugs guy. Or guy hugs girl. The end. Or! Girl and guy have already met. Girl and guy have argument. Both very unhappy! But, in the end, guy says something and then girl says something and they’re hugging again. No one ever kisses in public in Cambodia. Even hugging is a bit risqué. And, half the time, the girls are just casually wearing Cambodian traditional dress—the silk sarongs, etcetera. There are also the few awkward Khmer hip hop songs, with the girls in traditional dress rapping something along the lines of (Khmer Khmer ) sexy (Khmer Khmer Khmer ) Party hip hop! (Khmer). Why all the songs that use English words must be about sexy hip-hop parties (I didn’t know there was such a thing! Have you been to a sexy hip-hop party? What does one do there?) is beyond me, but…

In Cambodia, though, all songs are love songs. And you know what? I like them. They fit, somehow, with the romance of this country, with the people who cannot stop smiling at you, with the flowers and birds, with the extravagance of the marriages (tents of pink satin all over Phnom Penh!) and the sheer numbers of young people here, all somehow hoping to fall in love. I feel a great kinship with them, and I find myself humming these pop songs, too. I hear your agonized moans, Scott and Shella. All that work you put in! The Kamelot you showed me! The Iron Maiden! The Epica! And yet here I go listening to Cambodian (and American) pop music—and liking it! As for Stephanie—well, you knew I was beyond hope. Yes, yes, that’s right. This is worse than three chords and the truth—this is—well, you don’t know what this is. You haven’t been to Cambodia. It’s a far cry from home, here, a far cry from musical elitism. And I like it that way. Perhaps I, too, am in love—with this nation, at least. Certainly with these people.

October 27th

2009-11-02T23:11:00.000-08:00

So! Cambodia. There truly aren’t words for it, but I did not think that there would be. It is a place teeming with people and sickness and joy and poverty and love. So many people live in just one room—a tin shack that looks as if it can barely hold together—and yet there is the ornate gold splendor of the Royal Palace, the dark burnished glass of the skyscrapers, the smooth cars alongside the tuk-tuks and the innumerable motos. And the history of this nation, too—dark and brutal beyond measure. These people were once the kings of South Asia, the greatest and the earliest civilization on this peninsula, but they fell, and were torn apart, and then tore themselves apart again, and are only now finding all the scattered pieces. Raksmey, our Khmer coordinator, explained to me the history of Cambodia. He spoke very softly and matter-of-fact-ly—I suppose he must do it a lot, but I couldn’t help watching his face as he talked about the genocide, and the bombings my country perpetrated on so many Khmer in the ‘70s. He didn’t seem to betray much emotion—even as he talked about more recent occurrences—domestic violence, corruption, etcetera—yet I wondered what he was thinking. This is his country. These are his relatives, maybe, who perished in the genocide (I don’t know, as I know almost nothing about Raksmey). These are his friends, perhaps, his neighbors at least, who beat their wives. How must he feel, explaining this to us? Are we the model civilization, the people of clean water and the United Nations, the dreamers of peace in a broken world? Are we the monsters who carpet-bombed Cambodia late in the 70s, killing hundreds of thousands in a futile war against an idea? Are we both? And what of the genocide? The horrors of Pol Pot are still in living memory, and will be for decades to come. What must it be like, to explain that to us? How can we possibly understand?

I cannot know, of course. Oh, we in the United States have a dark shadow, to be sure—the Civil Rights movement, slavery, the genocide of the Native Americans. But we were the perpetrators of the genocide. We owned the slaves (at least, my ancestors probably did). The guilt is in us, still, but most of the pain has long since faded. We are not a Cambodia. Men don’t beat their wives as they do here—there is little prostitution, almost no desperation. A death toll in the millions (and this, let us remember, is a small country) is utterly alien to us. It is beyond comprehension. And yet—here, fourteen million people, living in the wake of the incomprehensible. Trying to help us comprehend it. Trying to move beyond it.

The food court at the DIA seems to have been kidnapped directly out of the 1950s

2009-10-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

what with the plastic tables and the red chairs and the fluorescent lighting and, well, I don't know. It just does.

Hi, everyone. I'm Aisha, I'm taking a gap year, and I'm going to Cambodia. And I'm going to blog about it. Right now, I'm at the DIA, waiting for my plane to show up. It is 2:40 in the afternoon, snowing darkly out the windows, and my flight has been delayed half an hour. It leaves at 5:00 PM to LAX, and gate C37 is too cold of a place to wait, so I'm in the food court, feet up, becoming slowly saturated with the smells of greasy French fries and dubious guacamole. There are small herds of tourists wandering like dry leaves around the concourse, weighted down with improbable rolling luggage, and there are melancholic yuppies in business attire at the tables around me, communing soddenly with various fast food items. I love airports. Can you tell?

At any rate, from LAX I go to Taipei, and from Taipei to Phnom Penh. But I've never been one to think ahead, and right now I'm pretty preoccupied with the 20 hours or so of flying which await me. I'm still a little kid, really, and I can't wait to get on the plane and take off and watch Denver and the snow fall away beneath me. Except I feel so grown-up, too--going through security on my own, checking in for my flights, etcetera. I guess I'll figure it out one way or another...

And, with that, I am off to go double-check my flight time.

Takin' my time, but I don't know where...

2009-07-18T17:25:00.000-07:00

I had originally planned not to start a gap-year blog until, well, I was on my gap year; safely in Germany and about to learn how to community organize. I say "originally" because my gap year program just fell through. You see, the very nice program I had found that would teach me how to become a community organizer in Germany, Ghana, and Slovakia turned out to have a religious agenda that was not made clear on the website; and though the work I would be doing would be nonsecular, the people with whom I would be doing said work would all be unificationists. If you don't know what a unificationist is, please go here and here and assure yourself that these are not exactly the sort of people with whom you want me to spend my gap year. They're a fringe group, almost a cult, and there's not likely to be a great deal of diversity of perspective among them. All in all I think I'd best look elsewhere for my adventures.

So here I am, then, starting the gap year by finding a way to spend it, sitting in the cool darkness of a summer evening and dreaming of oceans and cities and people and sound. I'm lucky, I suppose, that there are a great deal of opportunities yet for me on this great wasteland of the internet that spans the great wonder of the planet. Already I've found internships in places from Guatemala to India to Ireland to Micronesia, and I'm sure that if I work hard enough, I'll find ones that will work out. Soon, perhaps, I can teach English in a Buddhist school in Northern India, or help an NGO to help the Hill Tribes of Thailand, or do environmental work in Ghana. Soon the world is all mine for a year, and soon, perhaps, I will meet the varied tribes of the earth and learn by defying gravity.

But soon, of course, isn't now. Perhaps this is the best way for a gap year to start--not with promise, but with uncertainty. Not, then, with the touchdown into another nation, but the dreams of touchdown hatched in quiet dusk. And, of course, with the great frenzied hope that is America--that it will take work, yes, and pain, too, but that somewhere up ahead the work will work out and there will be enlightenment.

So with frenzy and hope, then, I write my letters and edit my resume and type "gap year" into Google just one more time. And with frenzy and hope I wait and work as around me night falls and the world goes on. And to you, friends, thank you for your ears and your hopes.