I'm a Lucky Lady

So a ton has happened over the few weeks since I’ve written on here. And though I haven’t be blogging much, I have managed to completely fill the 160 page journal my friend Kate gave me before I left, and 20 pages in a new journal I just bought, so I have definitely been recording my adventure in that form and through many pictures and videos. I will try to fill you all in on what has been going on, however I am almost certain my descriptions will not fully or adequately describe everything. But here goes:

As a foreigner who cannot speak the language I am learning to accept that I rarely know what exactly is going on or what is going to happen until it is actually happening here. Basically I am just along for the ride and figure things out as I go along, which is quite an exciting way to live actually.

This lack of knowledge is what led to my complete shock and amazement two weeks ago when I discovered construction was beginning on the girls’ dorm! I was working on my lesson plans around 7am on Friday morning, when suddenly I heard loud yelling and laughter coming from outside. I ran out to the balcony to see what all the commotion was about only to see about 40 children and adults physically lifting up the kitchen and walking it across the yard! Now you have to understand, this is no ordinary kitchen. The APCA kitchen is outside of the main building and is made of wood, with a thatched roof and palm leaf walls and our own mother earth serving as the floor. Makara (Dara’s wife) had told me the day before that they’d be moving the kitchen tomorrow, but I honestly just thought that we were having another miscommunication moment. It was hilarious!

A Korean donor committed to funding the girls’ dorm building a while back, and the money finally came through, so construction literally began immediately. It’s been 12 days since work started, and the base, which is covered in rocks right now, and the walls, which are made entirely of brick, have already been built! It’s interesting to see how construction is done here. There are about 15 men who are here every day, including Sundays, for at least 10 hours. They don’t have many tools or fancy equipment to work with. Trucks keep bringing in huge piles of materials such as bricks, dry concrete, sand, dirt, and big and small rocks, which the workers then move by hand or in baskets to the spots they need them. It’s an interesting process to watch. This morning the kids and I helped move small rocks into the building for the floor. I’m guessing they will cover those with concrete soon.

Another shock came when I found out two Saturdays ago that we’d be building a chicken house. The children, five guys from local villages who are volunteering here for the next month, some of the adult staff members, and people from the local village all worked on it together. The smaller children’s job was to move dirt over to the area we were building on using small baskets or old rice bags slung over two pieces of wood, to form the floor of the house. That’s what I mostly helped with. It was fun, but considering how hard the kids had to work to haul the dirt, I think a wheel barrow or two would have really come in handy. The older boys got to work stripping bark off of and cutting long pieces of wood down to size to form the structure of the building. Once the floor was in and the wood was up the older guys and volunteers began tying on pieces of palm leaf to make the roof. They also built a small pond using bricks for the chickens to drink and ducks to swim in. Work began at 7am, and by 5pm the building was completed. The reason we built the chicken house is because APCA is going to begin an Ecological Chicken Raising, Training and Saving Project in October. The project will be funded by Dan Schwartz and his family. I went on Semester at Sea with Dan back in spring of ’07 and he volunteered here at APCA earlier this year. The kids absolutely adore him, and he is very committed to helping improve their lives here. I worked with me Dara on the proposal for the project for several days, and it is now approved and funding should arrive shortly! The project is aimed to teach the children proper chicken raising techniques so that they can acquire knowledge and skills to use in the future. The children will also be able to eat the eggs and the chickens, as well as sell the chicks in the future. According to calculations done by APCA staff, one chicken will provide enough income for the children to attend school for one year, and two chickens will allow APCA to save towards the children’s future education, either in university or for vocation training. I believe we will be getting about 100 more chickens once the project begins. Right now we have 26 chickens which the five community volunteers are taking care of. During the day the chickens roam freely around the property, and it already feels like they are everywhere, so I can’t even imagine what it’s going to be like to have 100 more of them running around! We began construction on a second, larger chicken house this morning, and it should be done by the end of the weekend. It’s exciting to see and help with the process of this project too!

The trip to the Vietnam border four weekends ago to see the Rural Economic Development Association (REDA) center was really interesting. We left at 5am, and what I thought would be a small group of people going actually turned out to be 16 people total as we picked up Dara, Makara and Sophea’s relatives and several of the REDA guys and their wives along the way, all of us packed into the APCA van. Though crowded, it was a pleasant, scenic, and thank goodness air-conditioned 6-hour drive along Route 4 into Svay Rieng Province near the Vietnam border. We arrived around lunchtime at a village set about a half mile off of the road where REDA has a community center. There were multiple buildings at the center for administration, education and community projects. The community center was started by Dara’s brother and is for People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA) and for Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC). There are also a lot of sustainable development projects going on for the community including a catfish farm with tons of huge catfish living in multiple ponds around the property, a frog farm, a lot of vegetable crops, tons of rice fields, chickens, and a bunch of concrete pig pens that are currently under construction. There are 36 kids in the OVC program. The director there showed me their records, and most of them lost one or both of their parents to AIDS, and many of the kids have HIV or AIDS themselves. It was pretty sad. Unfortunately because of the communication barrier it was hard for me to talk to the director and other staff about what they are trying to do for the kids in the future. I'm not sure what they have there in the way of medicine either, so I don't really know how long the kids with AIDS end up living or any of the details. I wish I knew how to speak Khmer so I could have found out more information. But it does seem like they are doing a good job building up and supporting the community and the children there.

We spent the night in a guest house a bit closer to the Vietnam border. Somewhere along the way on the trip I got TD (which you can feel free to look up on the CDC website) from some food which my stomach clearly did not agree with. The ride back to APCA the next day took 8 hours due to a long wait to get on the ferry at the Mekong Delta River, and was truly the most uncomfortable car ride of my life. I was so incredibly happy to get out of that car and be back at APCA. It took me two full weeks to get the bug from that trip out of my system, and I’m back to normal now. But man, that was just annoying. My mom is sending Samantha with more Cipro for me when she comes to Thailand next week-just in case.

Some of the staff members and volunteers had been asking me to help them with their English, so three weeks ago I added a fourth English class to my daily schedule for staff, volunteers, and the community. I teach the class at 7pm Monday-Friday and there are about 12 people who attend, including Makara. It’s a new challenge teaching adults compared to children. I realized when I started their class that I don’t know much about grammar, which is pretty much essential to know about if you want to learn another language. So I went into Phnom Penh and picked up a bunch of teaching materials at a book store, and I’ve been studying up on grammar myself. Now (hopefully) I sound like I know what I’m talking about. I am also developing closer friendships with the staff and volunteers and have been spending more time talking to them during the day, which is nice. Sung-ku left on August 19th, and I’m now the only non-Cambodian volunteer here, so that has been a new adjustment as well. It was nice getting to know Sung-ku. He gave me some helpful advice on being an ESL learner, since English is his second language, and it’s been pretty useful in my teaching. I now teach four, 1-hour long classes a day. I teach the smallest kids (4-9 year old) at 8am, mid-level kids (10-14) at 9am, and older kids (14-18) at 10am. Now with four separate classes every day I am usually very busy either teaching or lesson planning. Though sometimes it’s exhausting, I can see why people say teaching is such a rewarding job. And all of my students are very enjoyable and enthusiastic learners, so I’m more than happy to do it.

Three weeks ago Dara’s sister, Rom, moved into APCA with her young daughter and has been cooking all of the meals for Dara, Makara, the volunteers, and any other guests who come and go, such as friends or people from our partner NGOs that Dara is meeting with. She cooks in the inside kitchen, as opposed to the outside building, which consists merely of a sink and two burners. With so little to work with in the kitchen, she somehow manages to whip up amazing meals every day. I feel so spoiled getting to eat her cooking. We have rice with every meal, usually a fish dish, sometimes pork or beef, vegetables, and occasionally fruit. I’ve also tried some interesting Cambodian foods like congealed cooked pigs blood, other parts of pig and chicken that I never would have imagined ingesting before, and lots of different fruits and veggies. The food is always very fresh, picked up straight from the Bat Deng open air market down the road. So in case anyone had concerns about my diet, please do not worry, I am eating very well.

Dara explained to me that Rom can’t read or write in Cambodian because she was unable to go to school when they were younger. Dara and I talk a lot throughout the day, especially at meal times, and he has told me quite a bit about his past, which I think is really interesting, so I’ll share some of it with you.
Dara was a very young boy when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975, led by the infamous Pol Pot. His mother was killed by the Khmer Rouge when he was three, and he and his father were lucky to escape to a refugee camp on the Thailand/Cambodia border. His father carried him on his back the whole way since he was so small. They lived there for 12 years, and that is where he grew up. Rom was at the camp too, but it sounds like they didn’t meet up with her until later. Some of the story gets a bit lost in translation. It was at the refugee camp that Dara met his wife, Makara, and his good friend Sophea. He has many other friends from the camp who he is still in contact with, a few of whom I have met. Dara went to university in Thailand, as well as the Phillipines, and moved back to Cambodia in the late 80’s. He’s had all sorts of interesting jobs including working as security for the US-Cambodia Ambassador at the US Embassy in Phnom Penh, working as a black market investigator for Global Witness, which sent him on many dangerous missions, working with NATO in Kosovo, and he has been a leader in Rural Development with several NGOs. He is often invited to speak at conferences both in Cambodia and many other countries to talk about APCA’s work and serve as an example for how to run an NGO sustainably. He and Makara started APCA back in 2000, and the organization has expanded very rapidly in the past 9 years. APCA now works with partners and donors all over the world, from the US, Japan and Korea, and affects thousands of vulnerable women and children in 14 rural villages, as well as here at the orphanage. Dara has many contacts with people all over the world and seems to be a very well respected guy. I feel lucky to get to work with him and learn from him every day.

I have been reading a lot here in the evenings, and there is one book I absolutely recommend if you want to learn more about the Khmer Rouge and recent Cambodian history. The book is called “First They Killed My Father” by Loung Ung. Loung survived the Khmer Rouge genocide, however many of her family members were killed. Though not exactly light reading, it is an amazing account of her struggles and is very well written.

The kids here are absolutely some of the most awesome people I’ve met in my life. They are so energetic, constantly smiling and laughing, and so hard-working. They are also always grateful, and take really amazing care of one another. With so many kids of all different ages, it would be easy for them to be cliquish or to single some kids out, but instead everyone seems to get along really well and care for one another. I’m learning a lot from them.

My friend Rachel is coming to Cambodia to visit me in October! We will spend a couple of days at APCA so she can meet all the kids, and then take a bus up north to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat. From there we will fly to Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, and then take a bus back into Phnom Penh, Cambodia. I can’t wait to travel with her! I am also incredibly excited that she’ll get to see APCA and meet everyone here. I wish everyone I know could come here to share this experience with me, because no matter how much I write on here, these blogs will never do this experience justice.

Yesterday I spent over an hour picking and cutting lice and lice eggs out of three girl’s hair. I am incredibly bummed out about how bad the lice problem here is. The kids, like kids everywhere, share a lot of things like brushes, pillows, blankets, etc., and they play together all the time, so the lice are able to spread quickly. Just about every girl, and a lot of the younger boys have it. I have no clue how long they have all had it, but the problem seems pretty prevalent. I’ve been reading up a lot on treatments and ways to get rid of it, but even for people in developed countries with modern amenities it seems difficult. A lot of websites recommend washing clothes and pillow cases in extremely hot water and drying them, as well as using medicated shampoos. Finding that out makes the prospects of doing anything about it here feel really daunting. The boys all shower outside using basins full of rain water, the girls’ showers are inside with little water pressure, there is no hot water, and we all wash our clothes outside in buckets using the rain water. However, I am determined to find a way to help them make the problem better because I hate seeing the kids uncomfortable. I think sterilizing all of their brushes, making sure every kid has their own brush, and educating them on washing their pillow cases more often and not sharing hair things will be a good first step. My mom is going to send some lice medications with Rachel when she comes in October, which I’m hoping will help. If anyone has any other tips on getting rid of lice, I’d greatly appreciate them.

A few days ago I went with Sophea and some of the community volunteers into four of the villages APCA supports to see some of the work they are doing. I got to see four kindergarten schools which are funded by a Japanese donor and Cambodia’s Hope. Cambodia’s Hope was started by Terry and Marvel Kellogg, and they are the reason I’m on this trip! http://cambodiashope.org/home/index.php I met them both on my Semester at Sea voyage back in 2007, and they told all of the students on the trip that we were welcome to come volunteer in Cambodia whenever we wanted. Cambodia’s Hope donors also support nutrition projects for all 14 of the villages, and literacy programs for women.

Before he left Sung-ku bought 8 more desks for the kids at APCA, so now every student has a desk to sit at during classes! He also provided chairs to one of the kindergarten schools in one of the villages. He and another Korean woman also committed to funding a water project for one of the villages. Right now the 160 families (about 700 ppl total) in that village get their drinking water from a dirty, swampy lake with plants growing in it. I saw it, and it didn't even look like water I'd want to put my feet in, let alone ingest. The people can't get their water from there all year though because it dries up during the dry season, so then for several months they have to go 10-15km outside the village every day to get water. Often the amount of water they are able to get isn't enough to bathe in, so they usually go many days without showering. I can’t even imagine living like that. With the donated funds from Sung-ku and the woman they will be building a 30 by 45 meter hole, 6 meters deep right next to the village that will allow them to collect enough water during the rainy season to last the whole year. That should really improve quality of life for people, and may even allow more of the children to attend school, since right now many have to work to get water, plant crops, etc. to help their families every day. Hopefully in the future they can find a donor to supply large water containers ($8 each) for each family so that they can bring water back from the water hole to store at their houses so they won't have to go so often. APCA also gives out loans to people in the villages, which they then pay back with no interest. This is similar to Kiva micro loans (http://www.kiva.org/), but on a more local scale. I am very interested in this aspect of APCA’s work, and am definitely going to ask Dara more info about how it is working, the percentage of repayment on the loans and how long it takes, etc. I feel really lucky that I’m getting to do all this field work, and I’m enjoying editing and helping with the proposals for the community projects as well.

On September 7th I will be taking a bus back to Thailand along the same route I came in on a little over a month ago to meet up with my sister, Samantha. Though the day I came in I was terrified of my cab driver’s driving, I now realize that he wasn’t crazy. Every time I’ve gotten on the road here in any vehicle my experience has been the same (except usually with less speeding). I’ve actually come to enjoy the chaos of Cambodian driving. It seems totally natural to me now to swerve around cows on my bike when I’m riding with the kids to the market, to cover my mouth to avoid eating dust when I’m riding on a moto or in a tuk-tuk near a big truck, or when Sophea or Dara speed onto the other side of the road to pass slower vehicles being pulled by cows or horses. The roads here are never dull, so I’m sure riding on a big bus to the border will be just as much fun. And this time I’ll have considerably less stuff and more of an idea of what I’m doing when I arrive at the Poipet border.

I have loads more to say, but I want to get back outside now to help with the chicken house building. I will try to write on here once more before I leave for Thailand next week. Thank you to everyone who has been keeping up with my blog and supporting me during this experience. I feel so lucky to have such wonderful family and friends, and your kind words and support mean the world to me. Please send me emails to update me on when is going on with you. I would love to hear from you. jlr60atpittdotedu@gmail.com
Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the end of summer!