Voices

Greetings,

A man's voice from magnified speakers echoes down river on new year's day. He talks about what ifs and maybes. Exhortations about the dire need for clean drinking water, sanitation, education and medicine.

What is the significance of new year? Another day, another opportunity for talking animals to discuss, share and elaborate on gaseous topics like:

• how to mill around without causing damage to the environment
• how to wear a yellow "HELLO" cell phone t-shirt without a license
• how laughing orphans fill up a wheelbarrow with lost dreams
• how perpetually distracted humans face unpleasant facts
• how loose tongues are required to discuss, share, elaborate or mystify a woman slicing limes
• how three foreign female educators chew nails and contemplate new programs in circular fashion
• how humans will never escape 'art'
• how teams of ants try, try, try to maneuver a large piece of sugar candy up a steep cement mountain
• how an experienced bicycle traveller from Holland named Harold helps at the grassroots level to improve children's quality of life in Cambodian orphanages and Burmese refugee camps. How he eschews large organizations working directly with the people. 

How bullet points fly to a target.

On new year's day, the woman in her blue pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, candles, candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling dogs, baboons, balloons, clouds, clones and clowns.

She turns on the TV. She turns it really LOUD. Her daughters, 4, 6, are entranced and captivated by the visual circus. They never read books. The idiot box allows the kids, servants, tuk-tuk drivers, husband and foreign guests to give up their consciousness. Another diversion, another day, a new year day. April Fools!

New day, new diversion, people pretending to be busy.

Angkor Wat Hindu dancers in gold silk lame dresses with towering headdresses perform ancient dances. Apsara fingers, delicate movements. They celebrate seasons, fertility, rice, fish, nature, courtship, and joy. 

She is frail, about 80 with silver hair. She sits in front of her house. Her left hand rests on a cane. She wears a beautiful purple sarong with golden threads and a white lace blouse. Her daughter trims her hair above the left ear with shiny silver scissors. The woman's smile illuminates her tranquil face.

Metta.

new year boredom

Greetings,

It's the new year here.

People get together, celebrate, travel home for three days to their village if they have cash and places get cleaned up. Everything increases in cost; food, transportation, quietly depressed bar girls, medicine, education, laziness and boredom. Boredom was cheaper last week in a free market economy. 

In front of the ornate French colonial court house teams of boys chew up old soil removing dead tree trunk roots with crude effective Paleolithic stone tools slabbing the area with miles of bland red tiles. The amount of stone work is tremendous. Across the street at a government building boys slap a fresh coat of white paint on pillars. Women weed a grassy plaza featuring a huge seagull. It needs a coat of paint.

White shirted men supervise garden teams and completion of tall heroic patriotic statues at an intersection. 

Boys rapidly pave a huge swath of land in front of a new grocery store with red tiles. The owners brought in outdoor fern planters and steel shelving for consumer goods no one will want.

Frantic men salvage gutter weeds and wild grasses for their livestock before someone chases them away. A young girl tries to focus on copying texts under the watchful eye of a private tutor while adults with a lack of focus and direction distract them with meaningless chatter.

Countless people with nothing to do practice the endless art of milling around. They practice the timeless art of pretending to be busy. They pay more attention to see if anyone is watching them than to what they are actually doing. This is an unpleasant fact.

Across the street from a small place where I enjoy noodles, carrots, spuds, eggs and fine green tea, boys in straw hats protecting them from a blistering sun create four new rooms with high brick walls at a primary school. No windows. Window dressing. A new year, a new wall. 

Metta.

Vietnam

Turkey

Shaman - Vietnam

No, thank you

Greetings,

How and why it happened to briefly consider teaching a Speaking-Listening class at a Kampot university. It's existed for three years. 700 students. 

I met a man at lunch. He called his friend the director. I pedaled over at 1430 to meet him. The impatient head of English jumped in, "Yes. We will hire you."

They needed a native speaker for six hours on Saturday and three hours on Sunday once a month. Students also take core, writing, reading and culture classes with local teachers. 

"Do you have books for the class?"

"No. In Cambodia teachers provide the materials."

"I see. What levels?"

"Pre-intermediate to intermediate." The teacher took me to a class of first year foundation students. It reminded me of teaching at the Chinese university. Hopeful, bored, alert, expectant faces. It was a beginning. Introductions, eliciting questions. Exposure to a new tongue with clarity and humor. Simple.

After class I gave the teacher some ideas for textbooks; New Interchange, Cutting Edge, Let's Go.

"Can you find them in Phnom Penh?"
"You should go to Phnom Penh and find them," he said.

I laughed. "That's not my job. My job is to teach. I need materials. The students need books. I will come back next week and see what you found."

Yesterday I returned to see him. "Did you find books for the class?" He showed me a 1-2-3 Listening book with CDs.

"Ok. It's a start. Where are the student textbooks for speaking and listening?"
"I couldn't find them Phnom Penh."
"Why?"
"Not available. We don't have the money."
"I see."

I kept it simple. "I am a professional teacher. I need materials. Students need books. Students are my customers. I'm afraid this isn't going to meet the needs of the students. I understand the nature of education here. How it works. I appreciate you and the director offering me the opportunity. However, I won't be teaching here."

"What! You're not going to teach the class?"

"That's right. Thank you for the opportunity. Please give my regards to the director. Good-bye."

I rode my bike to the river. The situation had offered students and I the chance to learn, play and explore together. Reality check. The system was ineffective. I assembled my small frustration, sadness and disappointment into a collective breath and let it go. It floated away, on, over, around and through a wide blue river. So it goes.

Metta.

Julia writes from Sweden

Greetings,

I received a wonderful email from Julia today to share with you. It's direct, honest and filled with her humbling life changing experience in Cambodia. She's amazing. I'm grateful we met in Siem Reap.

"Home again.

"Time flies when you're having fun and so I find myself back in snowy Sweden a month after I left. I have however, returned a completely different person, one I really like. 

"I have learned to appreciate the value of a pair of Tom Ford sunglasses, $440 - or 2 years of university-tuition for my friend Lina in Phnom Penh. A pair of Marc Jacobs', $325 - or 4 months rent on a decent house for a family on the outskirts of Siem Reap. A pair of seasonal Armanis, $100 - or two waterfilters that will provide 2 families with ten years of clean drinking water. And that's just the shades. Insecurities are expensive. 

"When I changed my mind I also changed my hair. I cut it all off along with enormous amounts of baggage. Turns out, underneath all that hair I'm cute, fun, kind, smart, interested and interesting, generous, loving, caring and very, very happy. Who would've thunk it? 

"Tim has become my mentor and he guides me towards myself. I am writing down the bones. 

"I have learned that in Cambodian traffic one relies purely on the force. Which is easier to locate once all the buzzing stops and you start focusing on the right now. If you try to think about anything in the past or in the future you will get hit by at least one moto. I know, I tried it. Twice. Navigating through the craziest jams becomes easy if you pay complete, relaxed attention. Life is "same, same - but different" as the tourist t-shirt reads. Mine reads "I heart Cambodia". 

"I have learned that a landmine costs $3 to put in the ground. A prosthetic limb on average $3000. 

"I have learned that a government-employed teacher in Cambodia earns about $40 a month, a privately employed teacher can earn twice that. 

"I have learned that with a little help a family can make some extra money raising butterflies. 

"I have learned that papaya and lime is an awsome combination, that amok is delicious and sweet and sour fish soup is even better, that coconutwater is best had out of a newly cracked open coconut after my new friend Mo climbs up the tree to get it for me, that Angelina has good taste in drinks and that Chin's mom can cook a fantastic feast on a nail. 

"I have learned that I can be useful and that I am needed. My life is no longer an empty search for anything to hold on to. My purpose has found me. I am greatful I decided to go to Cambodia. I am greatful I went despite second thoughts. I am greatful to all the beautiful, inspiring, wonderful people I got to meet there. I am greatful that I could be of service. I am greatful for the lessons I learned. I am greatful that this happened at a time in my life when I am open to change. I am greatful that I am out of the dark. My life is the light and I am living it intentionally. 

"All the rest is just detalis. I'll fill you all in when inspiration finds me."

Love,

J

 Julia and her village kids.

Julia wakes up in Cambodia

Greetings,

Julia is from Stockholm, Sweden. She is 36-years young. She was married for 10 long angry violent years to a Black man from Atlanta.

We met at a guesthouse in Siem Reap, Cambodia. She was a tight bundle of burning anxieties. 

She opened up. "I don't know what I'm running away from. I don't know what I'm running toward." We talked about the amazing passages inside Angkor temples, being an allegory of her travels.

- One door opens and one door closes but the passages can be a bitch, whispered a traveling ghost.

I suggested she'd evolved as a willing victim of old lies, how she'd believed the old lies from the authority figures (family, husband, boss, friends) in her life. How she'd believed, in her heart, the old controlling attitudes and belief systems of others. How her new day in Cambodia, this beginning, offered her new opportunities for awareness and growth.

Like other humans, to become real, she'd eventually face her deep multiple fears. Plural. It was either that or keep on running scared. Wild animals on her trail.

"I want to cut all my hair off." It was long curling blond movie star mane quality hair. We went to a salon. She was naturally nervous. She swallowed hard. A woman cut it off. Julia felt lighter and more free. She altered her outward appearance, releasing old anxieties.

By cutting her hair with bright shiny silver scissors, a complete symbolic gesture, Julia realized how she felt was more important than how her stone cold colleagues back in stone cold freezing Sweden might react. It was a small significant step on her new path. 

One day Julia went far away to see, hear, touch, taste, and feel a temple's influence on her consciousness.

She visited My Grandfather's House and the village school. She bought them a water purifier. She bought them a battery so they'd have lights after dark.

Another day, returning from temples she stopped in a village and met some children.

The next morning she invited me to join her. We stopped at a shop where she purchased bags of toothbrushes and toothpaste. We rolled through the flat countryside passing simple bamboo homes, women selling, cooking, cleaning, washing and working. We were far away from the big bright town filled with happy white tourists doing Angkor.

Julia talked a blue streak...unloading all her honesty, hopes, and dreams well mixed with anxieties and fears.

"I feel good doing this," she said. "I've never done anything like this before. My past life was all about anger. It was shit. Way too many problems and conflicts. Now that I'm in Cambodia, what, less than a week, I'm beginning to learn about myself, seeing how my life was empty with no meaning. How it was all about pleasing others, buying useless things to make myself feel better."

We turned off the paved road onto a thin dirt track leading to a bamboo thatched home on stilts in a field. Half-naked kids played. Old women and men sat in the shade. Julia met the kids and a young mother.

"Here," she smiled, handing them toothbrushes and paste, "these are for you." The kids and mothers were amazed. An 80-year old woman, a former Apsara dancer performed some quick movements.  Julia copied her to the delight of everyone.

We left. "I'll be back," Julia yelled as kids ran behind waving. 

"I now feel more fulfilled," she said. We stopped in a small market village for coffee. Young girls selling small colorful bamboo paper birds descended on us. "Buy something?" 

Julia met Rita, second from the right. Rita's 14 and in the 5th grade. Rita learned her English selling to foreigners at the temples after school. "I saw a leader in the girl's eyes," Julia said as we rode back to the city. "Maybe I can help her, get an English teacher for her village. Give her an opportunity to really grow."

The short version is that Julia had to modify her dream for the girl. "Let's be practical," I suggested. Finding a Khmer English teacher for $80 a month was like finding clean drinking water.

The next day Julia bought a brand new pink bike for Rita. A bell, basket, the works. It said, 'NEW STAR' on the chain guard. We went to a bookstore and she bought a whiteboard, boxes of markers and 20 basic English books, picture dictionaries and story books. We loaded them on a tuk-tuk and rolled to the village. 

Rita, her family - they raise pigs, dad kills them, mom sells the meat in the market, older sisters hustle wealthy tourists hoping to get a boyfriend and get out - and friends were waiting for Julia.

"Here, Rita all this is for you," said Julia. "The bike will help you get to school, the temples and home. The whiteboard, markers and books will help you teach English here." Rita smiled. "Thank you."

Rita jumped on her bike and pedaled through dust, broken leaves, around the house. Julia spread the books out and all the kids explored new images, words, ABC alphabets and color. Julia exchanged email and postal addresses with Rita. 

"I feel real good about this," Julia said as we rolled through Cambodia. "Real good. I've made a small difference in a young girl's life. I am so grateful."

Metta.

Julia and kids...