Thinking about Cambodia part II (Please read part I if you haven't already)

It was early May and I had accepted the posting in Cambodia.  I had just a few days to take care of some preliminary vaccinations that the State dept. required for all postings.  Tetanus, TB clearance, polio etc.  The specific ones for Cambodia: Typhoid, Hep A/B, etc. would come later.  I went to the Kaiser health service in Oakland, California to get my immunizations.  When the woman who was helping me was getting my polio vaccine ready she unwrapped the needle and said: "Why do you need polio?"  She had my birthdate and knew that, being born in the 50s, meant that I had been vaccinated as a child.  I told her I didn't have any of my childhood records and that I needed it for this position to teach English in Cambodia.  She smiled and said, "I'm from Cambodia".  I looked more closely at her and saw she was probably near my age which would put her at the age of 20 or so when the Khmer Rouge came to power in April of 1975.  I did a delicate test by asking when she came to the United States.  "1979".  I said, something like "oh, you saw it all, didn't you?"and I already could feel this trepidation and empty feeling welling deep inside me that I continue to feel every time I see an older person here in Cambodia, a combination of compassion, admiration, fear and sadness that I never have felt before. She stopped, the needle naked and poised above my arm, and looked somewhere far away and then back to me.  "I saw my son killed.  My husband was tortured and killed.  I woke up everyday touching myself to see if I was really there.  If I was still alive.  Everyday until I got out with my sister."  And then the tears, both of us, hers controlled, but deep, and mine, well, not so controlled, the tears dropping onto my shirt.  "I'm sorry I brought it back", I said.  She said, "No.  I haven't cried in a long time.  No one around here asks.  I've worked here for 15 years and no one has asked."  "You sure you can still do the shot?"  I asked, noticing the needle.  This one would hurt I thought, you don't want a crying nurse giving you a shot.  "Of course", she said, and the needle went in, and I hardly noticed.

 I continued to go back to her over the summer, about 4 times, to get a variety of vaccines needed for the trip.  And there was always a lot of conversation. She'd tell her fellow nurses, "He's going to my country." It turns out her home town, Kampong Cham, is where I will be spending much of this placement.  We have exchanged emails and she is coming here in October, and will introduce to me some of her family that survived.

I think now that story is the reason I came to Cambodia.  Cambodia is in my own backyard in Oakland, with many people with stories like Leang's.  Cambodians, Laotians, Burmese, Somali, Yeminis, etc.  all with stories and no one asks.  I think I'm here to learn how to ask.  And then to listen.

Thinking about Cambodia

These next thoughts will be split up into several postings--indulge me as I work through the answer to the question that so many of you and others asked me:  Why Cambodia?

I am sitting in a hotel right now, in Phnom Penh, waiting out an afternoon Monsoon.  I was thinking about what brought me to this fellowship year in Cambodia (jet lag has a way of keeping your mind whirling about while your body tries, and fails, at every attempt to really rest).  What I kept on coming back to was how I never really imagined that this would be the country I would end up in.  When I applied for this program I imagined South or Central America first.  Perhaps Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, or Peru.  Places I could finally achieve a real level of fluency in Spanish, places where my wife, Laura, could imagine herself living.  Tango in Argentina?  Why not?  Or maybe Turkey, which I enjoyed so much during a Fulbright -Hays program for teachers 5 years ago.  Or Morocco, Algeria.  Places to study Arabic language and music.  Lots of places, but not Cambodia.   

Why not Cambodia?  When I was matched to this project I initially turned it down.  Maybe it's my generation, but all I could think of was Nixon's illegal bombing and invasion of that country, which was followed by civil war, and then the ghastly genocide of the Khmer Rouge.  And the painful rebuilding of a country devastated by this weight of history.  No way I would want to live there.   Plus the heat of the jungle...  could I even survive it?  But I spent a weekend reevaluating this hasty decision.  Why was I applying for this fellowship?  Certainly there was the desire to travel, to live in a different culture for a year and really experience it.  Then there was the desire to simply mix things up.  I was turning 60.  My wife already turned 60.  It would be easy to continue things as they were, continue to teach drama and ESL in the public middle school I have called home for 25 years.  So maybe I needed to move out of my comfort zone a little to really mix it up. But Cambodia?  It was my 26-year-old daughter who changed my thinking.  She said something along the lines of "Perhaps you got placed in Cambodia because that's where you need to be.  You probably will travel to all the other places you want to go at some time, but you will never go to Cambodia.  I'd go there if I were you.  It's only a year."  And that made me think differently about this possibility and rather than resist it, accept it and learn from it, perhaps learning something I didn't expect. What that will be I am not entirely sure of, but for my next posting I want to write a short anecdote about something that happened in Oakland, California soon after accepting the fellowship in Kampong Cham, that I think captures the essence of this quest. I leave you today with two photos I took at the central market here in Phnom Penh, where we met a Cambodian woman from California, who left here at the age of 8 after she survived the Pol Pot regime, and who shared with us her bag of silkworms (to eat-- not bad, crunchy and clean) and left us with hugs and tears and promises to meet again.  We've had a lot of that (hugs and tears) in only two days.  And maybe that's why Cambodia.

Preparing for English Language Fellowship in Cambodia

 

School started up this week in Berkeley, but because of my sabbatical and waiting for my plane tickets from the state dept. for Cambodia, I’m not teaching.  So instead I took a mid morning run and found myself on the UC Berkeley campus and saw this tree.  It is the tree we used to sit under during breaks from my teaching credential program there back in 1979.  I didn’t learn how to teach that year, and still am learning how, but I did make some lasting relationships.  A bit of nostalgia as this is the first year since then, so that would make it 36 years, that I haven’t been in a classroom at this time of year.  I don’t mind at all.  But it seems like a long way from this tree to whatever tree I soon find myself under in Kampong Cham, in the shade along the Mekong River, escaping the heat of the jungle, waiting for my afternoon classes to begin.  This tree is where my journey as an educator began in the late summer of 1979.  Education has changed, but the tree hasn't.  Although the green grass that had surrounded it is gone, torn out due to the ongoing drought in California.