I wish you could read the label on the can better. It's Bumble Bee Alaska Wild Salmon. I found it in a big grocery store in a big city. Since my Cambodian family has seen all the pictures of my Alaska kids, grandkids and fish I figured now I could at least share a taste of salmon with them. Phouen here usually does the cooking, and she giggled at the thought of me preparing dinner. Nothing but nothing comes out of a can here. Phouen goes to market every morning and comes back with fresh, in season food including Mekong River fish. Okay, I accepted her help. That cleaver I could use for the business of butchering Dungeness crab but not for can opening. She fired up the wok for me - yes that usually does mean a fire - and I threw the contents in with some onion, garlic, and green vine leafy stuff of the day. Of course it was served on rice. Did they like it? Maybe. Did I like it? Not so much. Did the cat, Thom, like it - a definite 10!
Yesterday afternoon, Yous Thy, our director, asked if I would give a workshop this morning on report writing. Until now, I thought she was a reasonable woman! We worked things out so we would co-lead the workshop. Tona translated for me, but I was pretty impressed that the staff understood so much of my English. Our 2 classes a day are helping. That and I practically act out everything I am saying! You'll see in the photo that being on the floor is preferred. I still always shake my head when I see the staff hard at work on the floor next to their desks. You''ll note a motor cycle or two in the room which is also normal. Isn't the Khmer writing beautiful! What you can''t see is that we're all barefoot, something I have gotten use to and come to love!
It was a very ticklish deal! I got caught in the Siem Reap night market when the downpour hit. Deluge is the better word for it. One of the only dry spots was in the fish massage pool. For only $3, I could sit as long as I wanted while the fish nibbled off my dry, dead skin! Lots of laughter and comraderie with the young, beer drinking attendents who took care to wipe my feet really well when I was done. I got soaked a second time from the tuk-tuk driver. He was the only one in sight in the still sheeting rain so I paid the exhorbidant $3 back to my hotel - all in good cheer!
ps for you tile folks, there's a lot to be sold in Cambodia! These pools are going to catch on!
Did I really want to take a 10 hour bus ride to Siem Reap for the weekend? Why not? I had a mission. Four years ago I was in Cambodia for only 4 days. I connected with 5 little girls who sold me enough of their mom's grass bracelets to cover my arm - wrist to elbow. It was my first morning and the girls and I ate fruit together by the river, learned to play cat's cradle, and sang Itsy-bitsy Spider. I rented a bike so I could take them up on their offer to meet their moms at their homes, an hour's pedal away. It was a moving, magical day for me. They had so little, their bamboo huts so small and they were so kind and appreciative of me. I took the girls to lunch - I'm sure their first time to eat in a restaurant - and saw them the next day and the next. Fortunately I was able to give them their family photos I'd developed because I never saw them after that. I got called back home, back in time to see my dad just hours before he left us.
So here I am back in Siem Reap wondering how I can possibly find the girls who must now be 13 and 14. My tuk-tuk driver from the bus station recognized the grandparents. He would meet me 8 the next morning and we'd see if we could find them. Nephew Nate and one of his Putney Summer Travel students, Nat, went with us and I dubbed him official photographer. We weren''t sure the tuk-tuk could make it down the dirt paths, but it did and we kept getting pointed closer as we showed the pictures along the way. The last person we showed got all excited and emotional. It was the grandmother! The one there in the picture! Runners were sent down the winding footpaths and two of the girls were found. Of course they remembered me! And they could still sing Itsy-bitsy. In four years, the bracelets were still a dime a piece. I now have enough to go all the way to my arm pit. The girls have pretty necklaces from Alaska with gold flakes inside. One girl, the one with the amazing smile, came back to town with us so I could give her the extra pictures I'd brought. She and Nat played cats cradle the whole way in.
I didn't know what to expect by finding the girls or even why I wanted to do it. But I feel fulfilled. And yet I feel sad that only the one girl is still in school. Grandfather who was very ill is still alive and getting around on his toothpick legs. Father who played music for me on a Cambodian instrument was now drunk. One family looked better off. The other with only the little they were still getting by on.
I'm thinking about my dad and how he'd be shaking his head that it was okay going back and reconnecting. Yes, it was okay. I feel good and I hope I brightened their day too.
The 5 hour trip back from Phnom Penh took almost 8 because the taxi van drove an alternate route to load up on live fish. There roadside fish ponds were operated by a Vietnamese family and they went fishing for us. The thousands of fish were the size of my pinky and varied from gold to brown to black. They sorted them, weighed them, got them into big bags of water, added air from a pressure tank then tied them off. Our luggage was taken out of the car, the third seat set aside and the van was loaded to to ceiling with the fish. Somehow the 7 of us fit back in with our bags at and on our feet, and we were off. (Bet I ended up delivering more fish than Lindsey's F/V Rainy Dawn! Bet I ate some of those fished mushed in my rice today!)
The usual route has a bridge to cross the Mighty Mekong, but now we had to wait for 3 ferry crossings, about an hour, before getting our turn to load on. Then of course, we got a flat tire and that delayed us another hour. We were all in good humor, and another passenger had enough English so he could translate the tourist jokes that had everyone else laughing their heads off. Like the one about the tourist who''s driver hit a cow and the tourist said "Stupid Cow!" I guess some things get lost in translation, but I laughed right along with my new buddies lest they be telling jokes about me!
Can you believe that's Boston nephew, Nate, with me in the tuk-tuk going to market in Phnom Phen! Minute world! We hooked up twice and may meet again next weekend in Siem Reap. Also magnifying our minute world, I hooked up with Susan, an AJWS volunteer who was in Uganda when I was there last summer. She and her husband John are about 9 hours southeast of here and we arranged to go into PP at the same time to renew visas. Also got to meet the other two AJWS in country volunteers over dinner Saturday night. While in the big city I got a $3 hour and a half manicure, bought a sheet, pillow case and tp and joined in aerobic dancing with throngs of Cambodians at the Asian Olympic Stadium. And now it's good to be home in rural Kratie!
After work each day, if it's not pouring - we're coming into the rainy season - I take a walk up my street. I'm usually going against the incoming evening traffic of cows and carts and motorcycles and the occasional car and truck. Children love yelling out hello and if we stay engaged for very long out comes my jar of bubbles. I'm becoming quite found of a rowdy group of 7 to ten year old herder boys that I frequently meet. I stopped in one wooden building that had about 20 sewing machines. Women are being trained so they can have an income. My new Cambodian outfit will be ready tomorrow. They wear a lot of pajamas here mostly outside so I want to blend in! On last nights walk a boy cut down a coconut for me, cut off the top and presented me with a straw. Slurp!
Pouen (poh-an) and I live together in the director, Yous Thy's (U-Tee)house high on stilts to protect it from floods. Pouen is twenty-five and has devoted herself to my care. She is the daughter of a women who Yous Thy survived with in the mountains during the Pol Pot regime. Every morning Pouen goes to the nearby market to shop for food for us and the restaurant that KWWA runs in front of the office along the road. She and other women get the fires going in the outdoor kitchen in back of the office and prepare the soups and sauces, rice and noodles, vegetables and fish. They then carry it out front under the steel roofed lean-to covering a counter, a table and about 10 bright red plastic chairs. Then they're open for business from about 8am to 7:30pm. The income helps to pay the staff. The women think it's pretty funny when I sit cross legged on the ground to help them prepare the food. This sitting on the ground business - also in the office and in the house - is a challenge especially when it''s impolite to point your feet outward like when you lean against a wall. Good thing Pouen gives me good back rubs before bed!
I wasn't hot for the first time last evening when I got caught in a monsoon rain. We were along the Mekong River in hopes of spotting rare white dolphins. Every scene is amazing to me. Oxen working the fields, people bent over planting rice, houses on stilts, papaya trees, babies swinging in hammocks, mini-horse drawn carts.
So is this a compliment? "You're so beautiful for being so old.""
