A Little of This and That...

The two months since my last blog post has been a very eventful time of life for me, and filled with some pretty high highs and some pretty low lows. Since my last post, I’ve been through my first holiday season away from home, caught a lot of fish, visited four provinces, celebrated, mourned, taken thousands of photos, eaten dozens of pounds of rice, gotten serious about improving my mental health, and found time for a couple other things in between.

I thought I would use this post to highlight some of the experiences that stick out to me looking back at the past season. And I use the word “season” here for multiple meanings, because while the past two months have been a memorable season of life, I’ve also enjoyed the recent shift in weather now in the middle of the mild Cambodian winter. Night time temperatures reach low 70s, and by mid afternoon climb to a very bearable 90.

Rice fields approaching harvest near my home after a late season rain storm.

Many people shared with me as the holiday season approached the challenges of experiencing Christmas away from family in a new culture. There were certainly times when I felt the loss of missing traditions I have grown up with, and not being with family in a time that I am accustomed to packing in lots of family time, but there were also a lot of joyful moments too. Christmas in Cambodia looks a lot different from Christmas in the States, and celebrations also look a lot different between the Chrisian community of MCC and my Buddhist host family.

Most of the celebration I experienced was while visiting Phnom Penh to have Christmas with my fellow MCCers. I went to a Christmas Eve church service, Christmas morning service, MCC office party with a white elephant gift exchange, and a little gathering at the Conklin’s house on the evening of Christmas Day. There were plenty of new Christmas experiences during these events like a dance party with all the MCC staff, taco soup and sticky rice-filled jackfruit for the Christmas meal, and being surrounded with friends instead of family. Some things felt familiar though, like lighting candles while singing Silent Night in church, reading the Christmas story and singing Mennonite hymns (from the New Hymnal!), and doing some last minute Christmas shopping in the market that I pushed off until Christmas Eve.

Christmas festivities with the MCC crew in Phnom Penh.

Just before Christmas I had what I consider to be my favorite day so far of my SALT term. At the end of the wet season and the start of winter, many of the ponds scattering the landscape among the rice fields are drained to irrigate the new crop of dry season rice and catch the fish living in those ponds. My host family undertook this job at a pond near my home, and we spent the greater part of a day pumping the pond dry and wading through the mud to grab all the fish. A process akin to the practice of “noodling” in the southern US, this involved getting really muddy and was much harder than it looked. I managed to catch a few fish, but certainly wasn’t double-handing forearm-sized fish like all the other guys I was fishing with. During a break from fishing, we made a fire and cooked some of the fish and frogs directly in the coals, and enjoyed a hot and fresh snack before getting back in the water to finish the job.

Neighbors and myself catching fish in the mud from one of the drained ponds near my home.

During one of my visits to Phnom Penh recently, I made the trip by bike to Choeung Ek, also known as the “Killing Fields” in the outskirts of Phnom Penh. There are tens of thousands of mass graves holding anywhere between 1.5 to 3 million people across Cambodia representing a legacy of the nearly four year Pol Pot regime in the late 1970’s. Choeung Ek is one of the largest and most famous of these so-called killing fields, where an estimated 18,000 people, largely former Khmer Rouge members imprisoned during internal purges, were killed and buried. The site was turned into a memorial and historic site by the Vietnamese during their occupation of the country in the 1980s, and remains a powerful reminder of a traumatic and recent history that lives on today in the collective experience and memory of nearly everyone in Cambodia at least 44 years of age.

A seating reflection area at the site of the Choeng Ek memorial.

The site is quiet, green, and peaceful, but is heavy with the weight of a torturous history. Dominating the scenery here is a tall glass-sided Buddhist stupa, filled with a tower of over 5,000 human skulls and other bones exhumed from the site. The vast majority of mass graves are still unknown or remain unmarked, so this site attempts to memorialize both those killed at this location as well as those killed by the Khmer Rouge throughout the rest of the country.

The stupa at Choeung Ek filled with skulls and bones exhumed from the mass graves at the site.

I’ve been settling more and more into routines that feel good for me as I hit the halfway mark of my SALT assignment this week. One of the most important parts of my day is my morning routine, starting well before sunrise with a run/walk on the dirt roads surrounding my house. I think my neighbors are starting to get used to what was at first a pretty strange sight to see a foreigner running by their home before dawn. As the sun pokes up over the rice fields and illuminates the high flying flocks of egrets leaving their nightly roosts, my walk/run is followed by a short meditation session, and then breakfast before I head to work. The stability of having a routine has been invaluable for me and creates critical time for me to prepare for whatever I may face during the day, as well as reflect on whatever may be on my mind. Weekends are still a bit unpredictable, so whatever my family does, I either do with them or just watch.

My host dad harvesting grass from a field he maintains behind our houses to feed to the cows.

Life at my workplace has also taken on a steady rhythm as well. Trips by motorbike to various villages in the nearby districts are separated by days in the office editing photos from said trips and working on a variety of other tasks such as researching grants, writing reports, and brainstorming new projects. Taking photos has become one of my main tasks recently at work, and I have greatly appreciated the opportunity to document the important work happening at ODOV as well as learn new skills photographing people, something I tried desperately to avoid for most of my photographic endeavors until recently.

Tae Khung, a farmer supported by ODOV, stands in his vegetable garden in front of a fishpond he dug by hand 20 years ago.

I'm sorry this post feels thrown in a lot of different directions, but I also think that feels like a more accurate representation of my experience here right now. My time as a SALTer thus far has pushed me greatly in both ways I expected, and many more that I did not. While the past two months have seen me build relationships in my community, establish healthy routines, and make lasting memories, they have also been a time of extreme personal challenge and growth. I have felt very cared for through both my existing support structures in the States, as well as through new ones I am creating here in Cambodia, and a couple places in between.

Thanks for sticking with this one until this point, extra points for you!

Below are a few more photos I’ve taken recently, both at work and at home.