Thmey Runners and my double life

Good thing I believe in rewriting, because the first draft of this post was vying for World's Most Boring. 

“I’m in a running group. Our group is called Thmey Runners because we run in Phnom Penh Thmey. We go running in a group. Running in a group is more fun than running alone. The runners in my group are nice. We take selfies after our runs. Here are some of them. The end.”

OK, not quite that bad, but you get the idea.

The dirt road loop

And then I started thinking… I’ve been in this group for well over a year. I’m often hunting for blog topics. Why haven’t I blogged about this before? And I had to do a bit of soul-searching.

The truth is, it’s not just because I thought it would be boring.

It’s also because I was afraid of being judged. Because I was disappointing myself.

All those years that I worked at Logos School in my “expat bubble,” I told myself, This is temporary. When I become a ‘real’ missionary, I’ll spend most of my time with Cambodians.

And now I have, and I don’t. Even after the equivalent of 2 years of full-time language study. Even after 7.5 years in country. But I don't always talk about that to the outside world.

Most of my time is probably spent alone, actually, often on my computer, reading and writing in English. Second to that is time spent speaking English with other expats and occasionally Cambodians. A distant third is hanging out in Khmer with Cambodians who don’t speak English. Compare that to Logos, where even if I wasn't using Khmer most days, I was spending hours each day with my Cambodian students.

Part of that is my ministry focus: a big chunk of my job right now is helping other World Teamers to learn Khmer, a task done entirely in English. I'm hoping that proportion will shift over time.

Part of that is convenience and choice – the people I’ve clicked with, the people who invite me. Like these runners, who join me many Tuesdays and Thursdays, who are mostly English-speaking expats, who have become my friends since I returned to Cambodia in 2017, often through language school. I knew I’d still have expat friends through my Logos connections … but I didn’t realize how many expat friends I’d make entirely outside of Logos. Phnom Penh has a LOT of expats, even far from downtown.

Special workouts for Thanksgiving and Christmas

I realized my hesitation about writing this post when trying to describe the group makeup. “We’ve tried to recruit some Cambodians, but running isn’t very popular here. Only a couple have come more than twice, so most of us are expats.” It’s true to some extent. When one friend said she might join us sometime, I told her we generally ran 3k (2 miles) on Tuesdays. She gasped. “3k! And you run the whole way?!” I decided not to tell her that Thursdays are more like 5-6k. One of my neighbors has told me at least twice that I should be careful not to exercise too much, even though I work out less than the US guidelines recommend. In this culture, toned is NOT a good look for women, I think because it makes you look like a farmer or a manual laborer.

However, we usually pass a few Khmer runners on our route, and plenty of Khmer students are in the running club at Logos. So that can’t be the whole story. Several of the Cambodians who came were motivated to try and just didn’t have the stamina. We tried to accommodate them, with the group split into “short loop” and “long loop.” One built up his endurance and is now able to keep up the whole way. Others didn’t return, hopefully not because we embarrassed them or made them feel unwelcome, but I do wonder occasionally. If I were better at meeting them in the middle, would they be more inclined to come? What would it look like to join existing groups of Cambodians instead of trying to include a couple brave souls in with all these English speakers? Khmer aerobics classes are a pretty tame workout, and I'm not much of a team sports person, though I played soccer a couple times in Preah Vihear. 

A Thmey Runner organized this hiking/camping trip last month

The truth is, I run every week with mostly expats, and I enjoy it. I enjoy our chats. I enjoy the motivation to get out of bed, to keep going, to reach our target distance. I enjoy feeling tired at the end of the workout, though I could do with being a bit less sweaty and flushed. I even enjoy running on the street, with the dust and fumes and dogs, compared to a sterile, stationary treadmill. I enjoy doing something that I would do back home, with people who understand certain aspects of my life back home.

A teammate asked me last month, “How do you manage to spend so much time with Cambodians? On Facebook it looks like you hang out with them all the time!”

“I don’t really,” I answered. “It’s just always documented when I do.”

So there you have it, my dirty little secret. Even when my blog and social media seem filled with Cambodians, even when I have the same power cuts and the same juicy-sweet mangoes and even the same little “duckling” moto as many Cambodians, I am spending hefty chunks of time in a parallel expat-bubble universe. And despite our weekly selfie tradition, that reality doesn't always show up in the highlights reel.

I really do generally enjoy spending time with Cambodians. And I will keep looking for ways to broaden and deepen my relationships with them. But for the foreseeable future, part of my life will be in my “comfort zone” with English speakers and expats.

I think I'm OK with that.

Side note: In America there can be an "English-only" attitude: "Why do people come here if they're not going to learn the language and start living like we do?" Let me tell you, that is SO much harder than you'd think if you've never tried it. Even for those who, like myself, have the time and energy and money to learn. Also, I'm not sure which nationality is the best at adapting and integrating to a new culture and language, but I don't think it's Americans. So please go high-five your nearest non-native English speaker and thank them for the hard work they've done to bridge the gap between their culture of origin and yours. OK, rant over.