We are safe and sweating in Cambodia. It took 25 hours of plane travel to get here and it has been worth the pain. We have been in Cambodia over a week and are having an amazing time.
Day 1 Phonm Pehn
The third eye opens. When you travel you must open the third eye to study the new land as quickly as possible. It is this third eye which keeps you safe, respectful, and learning. When you travel you must be a quick learner. You must study, observe, and research if you are to last long.
The first day in the city was familiar yet novel. The familiar came from our experience in Central American cities. The air is thick and you instantly start to sweat and squint in the baking sun. The streets are filled with mostly small scooters called motos. There are also tuk-tuks which are like a moto with a rickshaw attached to the back. Cars, trucks, bikes, pedestrians, cattle, etc are also in the streets. The activity in the street is random and at first glance with little order. If you study though you can see there are rules and in the chaos the system works just fine. I admire their traffic because it is calculated yet free. A moto around the city costs $1 and we can ride three deep on it. Which is nothing…as of right now we have counted 6 people on one scooter.
Shopping: Our first destination was the Russian Market. The Market is dark and cavernous, filled with many gems if you spend the time to look. The vendors know just enough English to say “hello sir you buy,” two fa one dolla,” or “I make spesha deal.” In bartering it helps to just use the calculator and bounce numbers back and forth until a price is settled. The smell is most memorable. First of all it is about 95 degrees inside. There is no wind or airflow. Just the little rusty fans in the stall blowing hot air around. The recipe for the Russian Market smell: 500 people + warm meat + vegetable stand + life fish being butchered + chicken liver + sweat + trash + cooking food + incense + many mystery bowls filled with things I know not the name. Cambodia shopping is similar to the dollar store. You want a t-shirt? That will be one dollar. You want some scarfs? How about 8 for 4 dollars. The new Sex and the City movie? That’s $2 because the guy who shot it with his camcorder in the theater did a poor job. (I appreciated the womans honesty) I think you get the idea about the shopping.
History: Did you know Cambodia is recovering from genocide? Did you know there is a landmine in the countryside for every person in the country? That’s 10 million people as of right now. The Khmer Rouge were a political party who devastated the country. They actually restarted time calling their first year in power year zero. They were focused on creating a isolated agrarian Maoist/Communistic state where if you were of the wrong “class” you were executed. The first to go where the intellectuals, thinkers, doctors, etc. Most of the teachers I have been working with are my age for this reason. Before you died you went to Teoul Slang. This was first a high school in a neighborhood of Phnom Penh. Thousands of people here were brutally tortured before being sent to the killing fields. We visited this place and walked with ghosts of the prison. The museum has left much of the place untouched. Rusty bed frames with shackles lie like nightmares in the center of the room. On the walls are pictures of twisted bodies laying on the very frame you are seeing with your eyes. They have huge boards with all the inmates frightened mug shots. The crumbling brick cells have engravings, shackles, and fading stains of pain. Cara and I were mostly quiet as we read and watched the horrid history. What was scariest was this happened only 20 some years ago.
On a lighter note…Cara has a good friend named Mindy who lives in the city. It was great to have her there helping us with taxis, bartering, and directions. She has a great ex-pat community and we ate with them one night out on the town. Mindy is working here as a counselor for Cambodian counselors who work with girls from the sex-trade. Her organization saves girls from 18months to 18years. Many girls are sold by their parents for a few bucks. The dark culture is not on the surface of the city but look in any shady corner and its readily available.
After Phnom Penh we took a 5 hour bus to Siem Reap. This is a province to the north west of Phnom Penh and is also known as the temple district. Siem Reap is where the Teachers Across Borders workshop is conducted. The workshop has been amazing! I am team teaching Methods of Scientific Inquiry in Biology and Chemistry. There are 30 some students in the class, 90% my age or younger, with the other 10% from 30-60ish. This experience teaching here has taught me many things about HOW to teach. The teaching here is raw, slow, and fun. The biggest source of technology we have is electricity. Most of my teachers do not even have that in their classrooms. The lessons we shared were geared toward using what is available to teach the scientific method. I used paper airplanes, plastic bottles, and small plastic chips to teach how science is conducted. We had no powerpoints, laboratory, chemicals, microscopes, or internet. I must say this experience will make me a better teacher. The reflection and thoughts on what is real education are still to come and I am eager to process it fully.
You may be wondering about Cara. She is with me and actually teaching an ESL class with a girl from Switzerland. She has been having a great time working with the teachers and soaking in the culture of the country. You may remember before I was in the picture that Cara was a finicky eater. Well just the other night at dinner I shared my barbequed snake with her and she ate it with gusto. Now the caramelized beetles in the market is another story. Maybe a few more years of marriage and we will be at that step.
Temples: Siem Reap province is known for Ankor Wat. This is the largest religious complex on earth and has over 100 temples in the area. It was built between the 10th and 11th centuries, starting as Hindu temples and then changing over to Buddhist. The temples are stone intricacies built from sweat and work of generations of labors. The grandeur of the buildings and the mystery of the corridors is peaceful and inspiring. Carvings are on every piece of stone. The time and energy it must of taken to create such a wonder is amazing. You will have to look at our pictures to see what I am trying to convey…words do no justice.
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