The fish are still swimming...

...but they have migrated upstream to mouthful.tumblr.com.

This is my final post here. I do not plan to delete this blog, but all new content will be posted to mouthful. I hope you will find me there...

All old content and a collection of my writing can be found @ mrwoodard.wordpress.com

East>West

I've been neglecting my blog these past couple of weeks--not sure if I was too lazy or had nothing to say, maybe both. My time in Cambodia is now flying by and unbelievably, I have just under a month left before starting my next adventure. My return to PEPY has been what I expected (same great people) and hasn't been (lots of office work rather than trip leading). Nonetheless, I am extremely happy with my decision to come back for four months, as its been rewarding to again be a part of an inspiring organization, and I have certainly learned a little more about Cambodia and Khmer culture.

On March 14, I'll fly to Honolulu to visit Aki, a good friend from Japan whom I haven't seen since I left. It will be my first time to Hawaii, and we have plenty of plans for sun and beach and biking and hiking volcanoes and maybe kite-surfing and eating too much and rehashing good times from Japan. 本当なつかしい！

Ten days later I will fly to Panama, my first return since I finished my Peace Corps service in December 2004. I'll have about a week to see old host families and friends and check out a friend's (and former PC vollie) Planting Empowerment project before busing up to Quepos in Costa Rica to meet my dad and his Rotary Club for a week-long project there. Afterward, I will return to Panama for a few more weeks to visit my site El Satro in the Veraguas mountains and enjoy everything Panamanian I have missed these past four years (patacones, tipico music, salomas, campo Spanish, conversations with strangers, etc.).

I will return to NC in late April for at least a month to spend some time with the family and enjoy Appalachian Spring. In June, I will return to Backroads for another summer of tripleading and campcheffing, though I don't know yet what region I will work.

Feels good to have a plan...

Vignette #7: The FCC Angkor

The Foreign Correspondents Club is full of foreigners and empty of correspondents, as always. No hobnobbing journalists expounding on the days events, no reporters revising their stories, no photographers discussing recent shots. In fact, the only person doing any correspondence at all is a young woman writing in a spiral notebook at a candlelit table on the veranda, and even she seems more interested in her glass of white wine than her journal. It’s 5:30, Happy Hour a quarter-finished, and the wait staff have just turned on the soft-yellow wall lamps. The wooden-louver doors of the second-floor lounge are open on both sides, allowing the gentle evening breeze to filter in, joining the ceiling fans in swirling the lively conversation and cigarette smoke about the room. From the veranda, one can see the river and the tangle of Christmas lights in the riverside trees, hung rather haphazardly and left over from the water festival several months ago. They are tacky and beautiful at the same time, fitting perhaps in this town, struggling to modernize and exhibit its rich, ancient history simultaneously.

Vignette #6: The Widow Waitress

Lina likes to sit with me at lunch, and tell me fragments of her life. She’s one of the waitresses at the café, but it’s difficult to think of her as such. She’s too forward, too amiable, too chummy. When I arrive, she without fail plops down in the opposite chair to chat and teach me Khmer. Like most Cambodians, she looks younger than her years, and yet, like all those who survived Khmer Rouge, has a melancholy in her eyes that makes her age seem irrelevant. Her bright face does a courageous job of camouflaging the somberness, but it’s always there, lurking in the back of her dark pupils, like black diamonds set in a gold engagement ring.

The first time I shared a table with Lina, or rather, Lina shared a table with me, she told me about her lesbian Japanese friend, whose sexual orientation she neither agreed with nor understood. But, as Lina reassured me, “Ot panyiha”—it wasn’t really an issue. She spoke fondly of the woman, and was clearly sad her foreign friend had returned to Japan. It occurred to me that Lina too might be gay, and this was her way of telling me without really telling me. My dinner arrives.

The second time I met Lina, she told me about her dead husband and one of her dead brothers, mentioning them casually, like two perished houseplants. Her spouse died in a motorbike accident, struck by a hit-and-run SUV, the driver of which she claimed to be a government minister who offered no apology and suffered no consequences. The brother died at the hands of his own wife’s jealous lover, who drowned him in a basin of boiling water after a merciless drunken beating. He too, escaped punishment. Another waitress brings out my lunch, and Lina disappears to the back.

On the third occasion, Lina tells me about her 11-year old son, who likes school and learns English at the Christian church they attend on Sundays. She pronounces Jesus “Jay-soo” and finds it peculiar I claim not to be Christian, or Buddhist, or Jewish, but does not press for an explanation. I want to ask the name of her church, but do not know the word for church in Khmer. I resort to calling it “p’tea Jay-soo, pagoda robhas Jay-soo”. The house of Jesus, Jesus’ pagoda. She understands, but cannot remember the name of the church. This time she watches me eat, and smiles when I look up from the plate.

The fourth time we meet, she recounts her experience as a refugee in Thailand. She was six when the Vietnamese overthrew Pol Pot. With her father dead, her mother dead, a sibling and cousins dead, she was taken to a camp just across the border to live with her mother’s sister. Four years later, Lina and her remaining siblings returned to Cambodia, where they grew up with another uncle. The aunt moved to Long Beach, married another refugee, and had two daughters who are now both medical students. Lina mentions the daughters suggestively, as if I might be a suitor, and then just as quickly, dismisses the idea silently, refilling my glass of iced jasmine tea, and asking me about work.

And so I come to know Lina, glimpses of her life like shards of glass on the sidewalk, inviting me to peer inside the broken window. Our limited skills with each other’s language force us to speak simply and directly. The blend of Khmer and English entertains us both, as we find indirect paths to communicating when we cannot find the words, and the inevitable misunderstandings bother us not in the slightest. Mostly she talks, and I listen, failing to understand the source of the sudden bond we’ve formed, and not caring to understand.