We arrived in Phnom Penh on September 6 or so. It has been so long and time does strange things here. We are not tourists, but we live like tourists and we are not locals but we are trying to learn the language and culture in order to function locally. So we have an in-between identity now of mostly living as a group of 18 volunteers and attending language lessons four hours a day. We have a cook who makes amazing food for us (Khmer food) and we have 2 'barang' (foreigner) restraunts that many of us frequent along the riverside. We go to the market, find material, have clothes made for our work, bike around the town, and do some touristy things as well. It's a strange mixture of waiting and doing, of dipping a toe into the local culture and being sheltered in an old French colonial mansion, with people to get us breakfast and meals, and only having to study. The panic of knowing that I can barely say 'hello' and a few nicities, which will open the door to more necessary learning, and the yearning to leave the comforts of the familiar and start to look around my workplace. (saying that I will 'start' work would be way too ambitious--the plan for the first 3-6 months is to look, ask questions, be supportive, build relationships, and DO very little in the way of what we would think of as a way of starting a job)
We are staying in Kampong Cham, about 3.5 hours by bus from the capitol, Phnom Penh. It is an old colonial town that sits on the Mekong River and was a transport center before. For tourists, it is mostly a 'pass through' town on the way to someplace else. There are about 40,000 people who live here, but it seems smaller than that. It supports 2 large markets and many smaller, morning markets that have vegtables and fruit for sale along with freshly killed (or in the case of fish, still alive!) meat. There is a very ancient Buddist temple, or Wat, at the far end of town that is said to be older than the famous Ankor Wat. In the middle of that is a functioning temple that people worship at still.
We took a boat down the Mekong to see a silk weaving village and a wooden Wat. The Wat survived Pol Pot times because it was so modest and wooden. It was used then as a 'health center' where 2,000 people died due to lack of medical supplies, malnutrition, and starvation. History is so layered, as it is everywhere, but here it comes into stark relief in hearing these stories. Even buying a coconut to drink can elicit stories of how there was no food in Pol Pot times and how they were skinny, and something about their skin (my Khmer is not good enough yet to understand most of what people say to me). Just that normal, everyday things can be turned on their head with a sentence. The silk weaving village was incredible--women working looms to weave colorful silk cloth. They do the entire process of washing, spinning, dying, and weaving the cloth. The only thing they don't do that they used to do is grow the silk. During Pol Pot times, the trees were all cut down that fed the catepillars. They import the raw silk from elsewhere now. Many villages are trying to go back to traditional crafts but face big hurdles because of resources and changes that were made in the 1970's. In addition, more than 50% of the population is under age 15, so much of the old knowledge is dying or has died. And the younger generation, as everywhere, is changing and wants city life, less work, different things.
This is the first installment of impressions so far. It's a test and if it goes well, more will be posted shortly.
