Today I head out to permanent site. As training is over and we have officially been sworn in as volunteers, it is now time to move to our respective permanent sites all over the country and begin the work we are now prepared to do. My community is small, and very isolated but I am ready to rise to the challenge. I am as prepared as I think I can be for an adventure like this. I will get to my site late in the afternoon today (its about a seven hour trip by bus from Phnom Penh to my site) where I will meet my family for the first time. Tomorrow I will go to the school and meet the teachers as well as some of the students while we all help to get the school campus ready for the school year which may or may not start this week (it depends on the school). For the first month of my service at site I will observe the different English teachers in my school to learn about how they teach, and then talk with them about which ones want to work with me as my co-teachers. I will work 16-20 hours in the school, and then spend a half-day or two each week at my site's health clinic getting to know the staff there as well as the patients. Really the first few months of service will be about observing my community, figuring out how it functions, making friends and meeting people, and then starting the process of where I can fit in to help my community in the ways they find the most effective.
Hopefully over the next two years I will be able to keep this blog updated at least once a month. It will not be easy- I am over 90k away from the closest reliable internet. I really want to keep everyone in the loop, so as some of yall will be recieving post cards and letters, please share those with others who are interested. Like I said, I will try to keep this as up-to-date as possible throughout my service, but as with anything while serving in conditions I will be, anything and everything can change from day to day.
Love to all,
K
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
on the eve of swearing in
Just a short update before I go off to bed- tomorrow will be a long day full of celebration because we will swear in as official volunteers.
We did it. The K3s have completed training successfully- we survived hours of technical sessions, bumpy remork rides, hours upon hours of Khmer instruction, thousands of bowls of rice (collectively), a few cases of giardia and dengue, the dreaded LPI (language sufficiency test which we all passed), and spiders the size of our hands. We survived, we got to know each other, we recognized our strengths and weaknesses, and now in two days we will leave to go to our permanent sites all over the country.
We had a farewell party for the host families in our training village yesterday. We formed groups last week to make different kinds of American food to serve to our families at the party and went on wild goose chases all over our provincial town to find ingredients. I decided it would be a great idea to try and figure out how to make chili... it turned out more as a bean surprise, but it was pretty delicious. A few of us also had the brilliant plan to make a piñata for the party- paper mache and all (now thats what I call Peace Corps ingenuity). Our families slowly trickled in and greeted one another and sat under the shade to chat while the trainees prepared food. We spent the next hour feeding our families and trying to explain what american food is, much like they had been doing for us for the past two months. As I watched the trainees, my friends, chat in Khmer and laugh with our families and extended families I thought back to our very first day in the village two months ago when we were all unloaded at a strange and dusty Wat knowing almost no Khmer at all. We were blessed by monks and then introduced to the heads of our families. We were scared, had no idea how to act or what to say, and didn't know what we would face once we got to our homes. The contrast between the scared, timid foreigners and their extremely nervous new parents and the happy families that I saw at that party was incredible.
I cannot speak for all of the trainees in my village, but my family had nothing and yet gave me everything. Every moment of time and every ounce of patience they had, they expended it on me to make sure I felt safe and loved. It was extremely awkward in the beginning for both me and my family- just imagine a stranger who could not speak more than ten words of English sitting at your dinner table and trying to listen to your conversation. Mid conversation this stranger suddenly says "lizard!" or "bowl!" or "rice!". This is how the first week or two of my home stay went with my training family, and yet they always smiled, laughed, said "you are learning so much!" in Khmer and then went back to their conversation. Slowly but surely I learned how to communicate, how to joke around with my sister while we were cooking dinner, how to ask my little brother where he went that day or if he won his volleyball game, how to ask my father if his cows were doing well... My family in the training village will always hold a special place in my heart. I will go back to visit them as soon as I can, and my host dad said he would bring my host sister out to my permanent site to visit me next summer.
As sentimental as this post is, its only a tiny outpouring of the gambit of emotions I feel everyday here in this place. Tomorrow I become an official volunteer, and I will leave for my permanent site on Sunday where I will live and work for the next two years of my life.
Love to everyone, stay well.
K
Friday, September 11, 2009
Sokapeip and the Bamboo Train
Its been a while since my last entry... things have been really busy on this side of the globe. After my visit to permanent site I went to the Khmer Rouge Tribunals being held in PP. They currently have Dutch on the stand, who was the right-hand man of Pol Pot, and was responsible for the genocide that happened at tuol sleng work camp/killing field. If you want to know more abuot the details of this trial, please send me an email, or visit any number of websites about the Khmer Rouge. Anyone over the age of thirty five in this country will tell you horrific stories about what they had to endure during the regime, the number of family members and friends that they lost to either starvation or execution, and how it has affected every single day since the regime ended... I know a few volunteers who are working with NGOs to document stories about the Khmer Rouge in particular regions and what happened during that time. My permanent site has a very different story- my town was one of the last garrison towns of the Khmer Rouge until their official disposal in 1996 because it is so close to the Thai border. I have already heard stories about how people were still running away from towns and hiding in the jungle when the Khmer Rouge came through up until fifteen years ago.
Currently, I am on a health trip with the 10 other health volunteers. Like I said before, we are the pilot health volunteers for Cambodia, and we are SO excited. So far we have spent the last few days working with Khmer staff from several international NGOs in different villages (some of which are VERY isolated, up to 100k away from the closest health center which may or may not have a nurse or a doctor and over 200k away from the closest referal hospital wich may or may not have one or two doctors on staff- this is the story of almost ALL of rural Cambodia- more than 80% of the country). We went to see a community education project on maternal and baby health in a town in Kampong Chnang yesterday. I will recount first how we got there:
1) A bus ride about 30k down a dirt road
2) A 'bamboo train' (a bamboo platform with an engine and a large wooden stick for a break situated on four wheels that fit over train tracks) that we rode 18k down the train tracks where the 20 of us riding it had to get off three times and dissassemble the 'bamboo train' i.e. get it off the tracks to let other 'bamboo trains' and a REAL train go by... (mom and gran, im sorry if you are reading this, we were safe I promise and no one got hurt)
3) another 20k truck ride down more dirt roads to the village
That, also, to put things in perspective, is what any person in this village, or surrounding villages would have to go through to get to the nearest refferal hospital if they or their family members got sick.
We went to a meeting of moms and small children (infants to children about six years old) where the trained village staff from the NGO had made a special kind of rice poradge (a staple here) using vitamin and nutrient rich locally grown plants to show families how to increase nutrients and variation in their diets so their kids can be healthy. The NGO had also brought in a doctor to give bi-annual vitamin A vaccines and an injection of vitamin suppliments for the children and post-pardem women. While the families were eating, they were getting education from other people in their village about basic nutrition and sanition (washing hands, how to get clean water, etc.). After the meeting was over, we followed some village health volunteers to a few families homes to watch them do health interviews/intakes with the families. They asked if the children got sick, what they got sick with, looked at where the food was prepared, looked at what water source the family was using, etc. and then educated the mother and father about basic nutrition and variation in foods throughout the year so that their children can get the proper nutrients they need to have a healthy immune system (12% of chilren here die of preventable diseases before the age of 5). This NGO also promotes home gardening of native veggies to supplement diets which is a rarety here because almost all airable land is devoted solely to rice farming. After this, we went to a HUGE party for mothers and children held at a local wat to educate families on water sanitation using the SODIS method (basically its well or covered rain water put in water bottles and left out in the sun a proper ammount of time so that it will kill the bacteria in it and make it potable).
It was absolutely amazing to see a community come together like they had with very little assistance from the NGO to improve the lives of almost everyone, especially the small children. These communities very clearly have extremely few resources, but what they do have they use in an amazing capacity to do so much good. It made me so excited to get to permanent site and figure out where the health needs lie in my community. Basically, once I get out to site I will spend four days a week at the high school teaching english, and one to two days a week at my health center which focuses primarily on expecting mothers. I am pretty sure that there is one nurse and one or two midwifes who work at the health clinic, and no one else... and is about 65k away from the closest referal hospital in the provincial town.
I have so much more, but this is a LONG entry, so ill write more later... I miss yall terribly, and send me an email or a letter! I will respond! Love to everyone.
xoxo
K
Currently, I am on a health trip with the 10 other health volunteers. Like I said before, we are the pilot health volunteers for Cambodia, and we are SO excited. So far we have spent the last few days working with Khmer staff from several international NGOs in different villages (some of which are VERY isolated, up to 100k away from the closest health center which may or may not have a nurse or a doctor and over 200k away from the closest referal hospital wich may or may not have one or two doctors on staff- this is the story of almost ALL of rural Cambodia- more than 80% of the country). We went to see a community education project on maternal and baby health in a town in Kampong Chnang yesterday. I will recount first how we got there:
1) A bus ride about 30k down a dirt road
2) A 'bamboo train' (a bamboo platform with an engine and a large wooden stick for a break situated on four wheels that fit over train tracks) that we rode 18k down the train tracks where the 20 of us riding it had to get off three times and dissassemble the 'bamboo train' i.e. get it off the tracks to let other 'bamboo trains' and a REAL train go by... (mom and gran, im sorry if you are reading this, we were safe I promise and no one got hurt)
3) another 20k truck ride down more dirt roads to the village
That, also, to put things in perspective, is what any person in this village, or surrounding villages would have to go through to get to the nearest refferal hospital if they or their family members got sick.
We went to a meeting of moms and small children (infants to children about six years old) where the trained village staff from the NGO had made a special kind of rice poradge (a staple here) using vitamin and nutrient rich locally grown plants to show families how to increase nutrients and variation in their diets so their kids can be healthy. The NGO had also brought in a doctor to give bi-annual vitamin A vaccines and an injection of vitamin suppliments for the children and post-pardem women. While the families were eating, they were getting education from other people in their village about basic nutrition and sanition (washing hands, how to get clean water, etc.). After the meeting was over, we followed some village health volunteers to a few families homes to watch them do health interviews/intakes with the families. They asked if the children got sick, what they got sick with, looked at where the food was prepared, looked at what water source the family was using, etc. and then educated the mother and father about basic nutrition and variation in foods throughout the year so that their children can get the proper nutrients they need to have a healthy immune system (12% of chilren here die of preventable diseases before the age of 5). This NGO also promotes home gardening of native veggies to supplement diets which is a rarety here because almost all airable land is devoted solely to rice farming. After this, we went to a HUGE party for mothers and children held at a local wat to educate families on water sanitation using the SODIS method (basically its well or covered rain water put in water bottles and left out in the sun a proper ammount of time so that it will kill the bacteria in it and make it potable).
It was absolutely amazing to see a community come together like they had with very little assistance from the NGO to improve the lives of almost everyone, especially the small children. These communities very clearly have extremely few resources, but what they do have they use in an amazing capacity to do so much good. It made me so excited to get to permanent site and figure out where the health needs lie in my community. Basically, once I get out to site I will spend four days a week at the high school teaching english, and one to two days a week at my health center which focuses primarily on expecting mothers. I am pretty sure that there is one nurse and one or two midwifes who work at the health clinic, and no one else... and is about 65k away from the closest referal hospital in the provincial town.
I have so much more, but this is a LONG entry, so ill write more later... I miss yall terribly, and send me an email or a letter! I will respond! Love to everyone.
xoxo
K
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