Portrait of a Phnom Penh Tourist

I need to get better at sharing links to Facebook when I post new photos there. It takes a while to load each individually on this blog. However, glimpses of my shining face - is it delight at being in Cambodia, or is it just sweat? - are only a click away. Here's my first photo album, entitled "My New Life." Others, courtesy of my roomie Sarah, are below. We and several friends declared Friday, September 18, to be our official "Phnom Penh Tourist Day." (It was a national holiday due to Pchum Ben festivities.)


Our first stop was the notorious Tuol Sleng prison, converted from a school during the Khmer Rouge atrocities. It looks eerily similar to other local schools, and they've changed hardly anything inside since the prison stopped operating. But apparently it's been cleaned up a bit in recent years.

Each of its 20,000 prisoners was subjected to these rules upon arrival. Seven survived. Tearey, a Khmer-American woman who works at Logos, was with us and told us many stories from her childhood fleeing the Khmer Rouge in the jungle. It was really powerful - I hadn't expected her to open up so much.

One of dozens of torture rooms, with shackles, a box that served as a toilet, and a food dish.

Each room in this corridor held 16 cells, about 2 feet wide. The cells, like the rooms, have no doors, because there was nowhere to escape to.

Startlingly bright and cheerful after Tuol Sleng, our next stop was the King's Palace and the Silver Pagoda. Apparently the king still lives there, but tourists are only permitted to view the grounds outside.

Susie could feel her heart take wing when she discovered the shrubbery!

Left to right: Susie, me, Sarah

The World Tetris Championships...

...should be held right here in Phnom Penh. We would OWN them. I'm convinced. Well, maybe not Tetris. Maybe it's that snake game that we should host the championships for. Or even speed-texting. All I know is that a cell phone is all that stands between many Khmer guys and Death By Boredom.

"Waiting" seems part of the job description for house helpers, guards, moto drivers, food vendors, and many others. One house on my way to school always has 3 uniformed guards sitting around, watching me walk. I pass probably 10 moto and tuk-tuk drivers in my 5-minute walk, waiting for passengers. Guys sit outside the car wash, which rarely has cars or motos to clean. I bet 30% of Phnom Penh males spend more than half their day sitting around with their cell phones. (Girls? I'm not sure. Some are vendors or collect recycled goods, but mostly they're not outside as much. They're more likely to be house helpers - cooking and cleaning - or to work in the schools, run stands in the market, raise children, etc. I'm sure many girls and guys also work in factories, unseen by my eyes.)

The lounging guys make it weird for me, because as a girl, I'm not supposed to make eye contact or acknowledge them at all. But I pass them every day, and they have no qualms about staring at me, as they would at any obvious foreigner. Let's face it: a white person is 60% more interesting than Round 92 of the day on Tetris. In the US, if I passed someone daily, we'd exchange a smile, nod, or quick "how are you," but that could get me into trouble here. So I focus on the road until there's a little kid or a woman for me to smile at. Sometimes they even make a joke out of it, staring at me from a few feet away so it's really unnatural for me not to look at them, then cracking up. I sometimes glance at them out of the corner of my eye, but I'm trying to be good and not act familiar with them. (This is also a challenge when I'm in a tuk-tuk facing backward, toward all the moto drivers looking straight ahead.)

State of bewilderment

culture shock - a state of bewilderment and distress experienced by an individual who is suddenly exposed to a new, strange, or foreign social and cultural environment.

In France, I learned about the different stages of culture shock: first you think everything's more or less the same as at home, then you think it's fun that it's different, then you get angry with the differences, then you feel sad, and finally you grow to accept the differences and maybe even adopt some. I don't think I've been going through clear stages here: I've mixed them all up regarding various aspects of life, and I'll probably continue to for a while. But while I don't feel distressed, I have felt bewildered by several phenomena here.

For example, it's rainy season, so on most days, it rains hard in the afternoon or evening. The rain doesn't shock me. But the drain clogs do: even after a moderate storm, Logos' street is often submerged by a few inches. One teaching assistant has a first-floor apartment in a particularly low area (Phnom Penh is mostly flat): her house has been knee-deep in water for weeks now. That means she can't ever put her baby down. Her family has been getting sick as a result, so she stayed behind to teach while her husband, mother, and baby went to stay with relatives in the provinces for a week. They can't afford to move, so they just have to deal with the water several months a year.

Corruption is engrained deeply in Khmer culture, and I think it'll take me years to see how pervasive it is. But one place where it shows is in the school system. This year, as usual, test answers were for sale outside most schools on the day of the national high school exams. Unlike previous years, teachers were supposed to confiscate those booklets and fail students caught cheating. They didn't catch everyone, and probably didn't try to. But the failure rate jumped from almost zero to 80%. Yes, only 20% of students passed the exam this year. One Khmer person pointed out that it's futile to change the high school exit exam when students have never taken a test without cheating during their entire educational career. It continues in college: students routinely bribe teachers so that they can cut classes for weeks at a time and still earn passing grades. As a result, employers value experience over degrees: they have no idea if a prospective employee actually learned anything in college.

House helpers are another source of bewilderment. Most foreign families and wealthier Khmer families have one or more. Rich families have many: a guard or two at the gate, a cook, a chauffeur for their shiny black SUV with the giant "Lexus" logo, a nanny, a Mr. Fix-It guy. House helpers earn about $50-80 a month, but also expect help when they run into difficulties like illness, a moto breakdown, family trouble, etc. In this hierarchical society, they are not just employees but clients under a patron. They're often left in charge of children, but without the real authority to discipline children. So there are children who talk back to their nannies and hit them, and there are many children who do whatever they want when the parents are gone: stay up all night on school nights, watch uncensored TV, whatever.

I'm slowly discovering more about Khmer culture, but hearing about it and even seeing it doesn't mean that I understand it. And that's OK.

Sureyah's off to Canada!

Have you ever felt attached to a total stranger? It's one of the cool and surreal things about life at Logos. There are a few former teachers and students about whom I've heard such extensive praise that I honestly care about them. Sureyah Tach is probably the strongest example. A full-scholarship student who commuted from an orphanage far across town, he was deemed "Student of the Month" for this past April and earned the admiration and friendship of students and teachers alike. All the teachers have told me how motivated, warm-hearted, and spiritually mature he is. He's a gifted leader, strong in academics, who aspires to study medicine and help address the myriad gaps in Cambodia's medical care. But at graduation this May, he had no money and no plans for college.

The Logos administration fought hard to get him a full ride at Trinity Western University in Vancouver. This summer, Trinity finally agreed, and Sureyah was able to start the slow process of obtaining a Canadian student visa. He arrived in Bangkok, Thailand nearly two weeks ago. After a successful interview and piles of paperwork, he had his medical forms sent to be signed in Singapore: a process that could take up to 6 weeks. Until then, he had to wait alone at a hostel in Bangkok, since he didn't have money to fly back and forth. Meanwhile, orientation starts Saturday, and his flight today was looking impossible. With funds dwindling and no familiar faces, he was getting pretty discouraged. Praise God - on Wednesday, the paperwork arrived, giving Sureyah 24 hours back in Phnom Penh to pack and say goodbye before flying out this morning! (He stopped by my British Literature class to say goodbye to my juniors and seniors, and we laid hands on him and prayed for him. I felt as though I was meeting a celebrity!)

Pray for Sureyah on his flights and during his adjustment to Trinity. It's miraculous to see how God has already taken him from an orphan doomed to poverty, to a high-achieving high school student, to an international at a top Canadian university. But Sureyah's needs will be great in the next few years...emotionally (apart from his siblings and the only home he knows), academically (as an English language learner), physically (he's going to freeze!), spiritually...and we at Logos will be continuing to count on God to supply his every need.

New Friends

Sarah, Lorissa, and I tagged along this weekend with the Khmer teaching assistants to celebrate a birthday and a graduation. The birthday girl was Sophorn (right), who taught in Chambersburg, PA last year with the Mennonite Central Committee; we Pennsylvanians stick together, and I love her sense of humor. Srey (left) is a Logos veteran who's been wonderfully kind and helpful. They help with fifth and second grades, respectively, and even teach several subjects.

Susie teaches kindergarten at another local school, but she spends a lot of her free time with us. She's an expert at bartering, which makes her a useful friend as well as a sweet and fun one. On Sunday, when we tried to go to church together, she found she was locked inside her gate, and the house helpers with keys had gone to church! (They left her only 1 of the 2 keys she needed.) So we chatted for a while through the gate while she waited for them to return and rescue her. We were only 10 minutes late to church, since I had the time wrong and thought it started half an hour earlier.

Erin, Danielle, and Lorissa are other new Logos teachers. We've been exploring Phnom Penh together, and they're also a few of my classmates in the Khmer class for teachers. We stumble together through words and phrases like "three o'clock" and "see you tomorrow"...and feel so excited when we learn them! Every morning during orientation, Logos provided us with tropical fruit to snack on, and one day we had purple dragonfruit! Usually the outside is magenta like this but the inside is white with black seeds and tastes similar to a kiwi. I prefer the white's flavor to this overly sweet fuscia variety, but this one sure looks more fun!

Rags alongside Riches

Probably my main impression of Phnom Penh, during my first few weeks here, is that there is absolutely no zoning. It was really overwhelming for me to see glitz and modernity alongside utter poverty. (My neighborhood, which recently exploded with new development, is somewhat more extreme than in other areas.) To illustrate this idea, let me show you my daily walk to school.

Every morning around 7, I leave my pink building and make the brief 5-minute trek to Logos.

I pass a small car wash filled with young guys and my small friends Bara and Pei, then this bar/cafe where the workers sleep on the tables inside the mosquito nets.

So what if this Internet cafe probably runs rampant with computer viruses, if its computers' speakers never seem to work, or if the Internet is slow at best and sometimes out completely? I love the colors and the family who runs it. (They taught me my first number in Khmer: muy poan, meaning 1000. 1000 riel or 25 cents is the price of an hour there.) And you can't beat the location, at least not unless my laptop is picking up free wi-fi in my apartment, as it is tonight.

Psar Toul Kork, the market in my neighborhood, is conveniently located at a 30-second walk from my front door. It's well-stocked with cheap plastic stuff (including kitchenware and cleaning supplies), cheap clothes, and produce. It's also home to about 12 different hairstylists. For under $4, I left with a rug, 20 clothes hangers, carrots, beans, and a spray bottle. Three of the hangers have since broken. The greatest thing about it is that it's a landmark known by every moto/tuk tuk driver, meaning they can bring me home from downtown with no problem.

Barely a block from my house is the worst housing I've seen so far: a line of wooden buildings that always seem about to collapse, backing up to a field full of trash.

The front of the recycling center, which makes it sound fancy and official, but which is really just a big dilapidated building with some extra pieces and a bunch of people hanging out with recycled materials. Notice the red sign and the ivory fence in the back left: the side of the hospital adjoins the recycling place.

The middle worker at the recycling center sports typical Cambodian accessories: a wide-brimmed hat wrapped in a krama, a multipurpose scarf that gets a lot of mileage here.

I guess recycled cardboard is a thriving industry here; people walk around every morning carrying wagons and squeaking a rubber horn so that everyone knows to come outside and hand over their recyclables, which end up on big trucks like this one.

It looks like a mansion. It's actually just a real estate office. It's about 100 yards, maybe, from the recycling center.

Reminders of Cambodia's Buddhist majority are everywhere: usually some kind of gold house like this, where people can leave offerings for their ancestors.

This hospital is spiffy and brand-new. But apparently the quality is pretty low for anything significant. This is true across the board in Cambodia; for anything bigger than a straightforward broken bone, you really need to leave the country to get adequate
medical care.

My walk ends at Logos, whose pleasant airy courtyard is usually filled with children and teens in blue, maroon, and white collared shirts. This is my building, with the principal's wife and daughter leaving the main office.

Dinner at Sovannary's

Left to right: Sarah, me, Danielle, Lorissa

So when I left for Cambodia, I thought that I would get a house helper to prepare meals for me, because that's what all the Westerners seem to do. (Western groceries are expensive, Khmer groceries are hard to cook with if you're inexperienced, and getting food cooked for you can be really cheap. Plus it helps the local economy.) However, house helpers can get complicated. They want a full-time job, and might expect you to pay their medical bills, buy them a new moto when theirs breaks down, etc. Some are also dishonest and take money if you carelessly leave it lying around. Sarah and I still might hire a girl she met to clean our house a few hours a week, since she's really desperate for a job in order to continue paying for college.

For meals, though, we followed a friend's advice and headed to Slek Chheur, a small restaurant a few doors down from us. It's run by the lovely Sovannary, a former Logos cook who can make anything, from pad thai to potato soup, taste amazing. So, for $1.50 a night each, Sarah and I have been enjoying her delicious meals every weeknight, on a monthly menu rotation. Lorissa and Danielle do the same thing, and it's so nice to hang out with them and chat with Sovannary. (Plus she's installing wi fi and adding a ping-pong table and a DVD player!)

Suzanne joined us for the first time last night, sampling the marvelous banana smoothies (Cambodia's superior bananas => superior banana smoothies), and took our picture for us. She's excellent about documentation!