No, I'm still not working - and here's why

Every week for the past six months or so, I've picked a morning to walk down the stairs, out the gate, and just a bit up the street to buy baw baw (rice porridge) from my neighbor. Unlike many customers who order it to-go, I sit unhurried in one of her red plastic chairs and eat my breakfast on her shiny metal folding table. And so there's time nearly every week for her to ask the question, "Are you going to work today?" 

Not just rice and water - this steaming hot baw baw comes with fish/chicken and bean sprouts, and I can add lime juice, pepper, hot chilies, and deep-fried pastries. Not bad for 62 cents!

The best is when her super-extroverted granddaughter is visiting

The answer is always no, I'm just studying Khmer for now, but I get why she keeps asking. It's confusing! Why am I, a grown single woman living away from my parents, not going out every day and earning my keep? She's been placated some to hear that I'm employed by an organization that's paying me to study right now, so that I'll be able to do my job down the road. I've told her, too, that I like coming and hanging out at her baw baw stand so that I can practice speaking and listening with native Khmer speakers. 

But if I were to tell her the truth - that sitting at this shiny metal table and chatting with her is literally part of my "job" right now - I think she'd need my help to pick her jaw off the floor. Wait till I tell her I'm graduating language school this week and I'll *still* be a full-time student. (Actually, she might never know - yesterday she told me she was moving away that day to take a new job due to a family health crisis! I'm going to miss her and her other baw baw customers.)

The truth is, I can't just learn language flipping through flash cards in my kitchen. Vocab and grammar are just a tiny part of learning a language. As we learned in my "Continuing Language" seminar this weekend, you also need...

• sociolinguistic competence (using language appropriately considering the context, listeners, etc.)
• strategic competence (finding ways to convey your meaning despite obstacles like limited vocab or a noisy room), and 
• discourse competence (knowing how a news article, conversation, short story, etc. connects phrases and sentences to create a larger meaning). 

I'll need to keep growing in these areas for years to come - learning a language is a lifelong process. And it takes intentionality. Language school graduates tend to be "intermediate" at first - nowhere near fully proficient and able to do their whole lives well in the new language - but actually regress over the years that follow, except in their vocab. That's why this seminar aimed to give my classmates and me the tools we need to keep honing our skills outside of a formal classroom setting. That's also why my organization is giving me a few more months to keep growing before I start work. Several of my teammates have told me, "When I finished language school, that's when I really started learning Khmer."

It's impossible to learn much language in isolation from culture. One way I've gotten to combine the two is by tagging along on home visits by community workers at three local nonprofit schools for children from low-income families. Since I hope my work will benefit students like these, I've loved glimpsing the students' context beyond the classroom. 

There's a lot to learn from each conversation between the community worker and a family, and the seminar gave me even more ideas on what to listen for. For example, what does small talk look like in this community? How do you transition from that to the purpose for the visit, and then signal it's time to wrap up? It's neat to see how each worker builds rapport with the family before bringing up the task at hand, which is often a student's chronic absence, but sometimes other topics like good news about their progress. We're able to sit with some parents and families probably 20 minutes, surprisingly long for this time-oriented American, before it's time to go. 

Photo credit: Mindy Kozloff

Across from one school, this lady was picking lotus flowers to sell at the local pagoda: 60 flowers for $5. Many families here make their living that way, and some can also get higher prices by taking them a few miles down the road to downtown Phnom Penh. She said there are lots of leeches - eek! Her long pants guard against them, but we met another lady that day with leech bites and scars all over her legs. 

The school, like this whole community, has no running water. It collects rainwater in these huge containers (left) and buys water by the truckload in dry season. Rainy season had just ended when I visited last November, but the water was already gone. Apparently everyone at the school says rainwater is more delicious than truck water.

This student in the second community was happy to show off his puppies. They were so cute! He had a smart idea for helping them thrive: keep them under a mosquito net so the bugs stay away. Since his house is on stilts, pretty soon he'll need a new plan for keeping them from falling down the ladder... one ventured awfully close to it before he grabbed it and carried it back to safety.

About half the students in this community are ethnic Vietnamese, meaning their families don't have Cambodian citizenship or the right to own land. Many of them still live on houseboats and earn their living by fishing, like when they first emigrated here nearly 40 years ago. I'm not sure where they park their motos, but it must be on land, because there's no way this bridge is for anything but pedestrians! I feel for the parents of small children, trying to get them back and forth daily. 

While the footbridge was pretty rustic, the houseboat we visited seemed sturdy and spotless. The owner was the only one of all the families we visited to offer me a drink. And I hadn't expected to find a well-tended hanging garden in the home of someone I considered poverty-stricken and oppressed as an ethnic minority. It reminded me of Chimamanda Adichie's TED talk on the dangers of a single story. I'd been reducing our hostess to the caricature of "victim of Southeast Asian politics" or "mother of an underachieving student," rather than seeing her as a whole person who's ahead of me in her gardening and cleaning (and I'm sure many other skills). I still have a lot of layers of pride and ignorance that God needs to strip away if I want to truly serve families like hers.

Walking back to the school, we spotted another skill I lack: gutting fish using a metal roller. I'm guessing they were going to dry and sell these fish. It seems to be an all-ages activity; I know this community has many kids dropping out to help on the fishing boats as well. But these young girls are in their school uniforms, so they're just helping in their off hours. They laughed at me for wanting a video, but I was mesmerized watching them.

The third school is just a couple miles from my house, and one of the families we visited is less than a mile from me. They even sell corn at the market a block from my house. But it felt like I was entering another world as I stepped into the cluster of shacks across from the vats of boiling water. Geese were waddling around squawking, and you'd never dream that we were two blocks from a major road whose traffic jam had made me late that morning. 

At that house, the mom had good news and bad news for the community worker. The bad news: her second daughter is still under the weather, hence the recent absences. (A much better reason than another mom's "Oh, I think he's out flying kites with his brother.") The good news: they were finally able to get a family record book. This government document allows their family, among other things, to register the kids in public school... something that should have happened years ago but somehow didn't. It sounds like the oldest child has special needs, so maybe public school wasn't a good option as it offers no special services.

At two of the schools, I got to stay and enjoy lunch with the teachers. While picking up some iced coffees from the market with two of them, I spotted this gem of a T-shirt. (8+ years in, I'm still not tired of Engrish and nonsense messages on Cambodian clothing.) 

I'm hoping these visits and other community interactions will help me build bridges, not burn them. But... for the innumerable times that I mess up... this shirt is a good reminder to laugh at myself, see the light in the fires of humiliation, and move on.