Week One Phnom Penh

Well, Charlene and I have been in Cambodia for about 1 week now, living with a family in one of the poorer pockets of Phnom Penh. It is beginning to feel challenging these last two days, and at times I wonder what we are doing here when we could be in a regular Canadian/Australian house and living a normal month (by Western standards). As much as it is getting hard I'm glad it is. Not sure if that makes sense. The first few days felt a little too easy- a bit like camping. I think what threw me was, I expected the food to be nasty and the house to be tiny. From the houses in other areas, their house is not the smallest (still 8 people living on a 300 sq ft block is tight by our standards), roughest or most tightly packed house. It has two rooms upstairs (they have given us one room to ourselves) and downstairs where you spend the day (because it is so hot) is dirt floored with bamboo sitting tables. They have a dog with seven puppies so the floor has wet patches in varying spots throughout the day. They are cute, but are covered in fleas (layers of fleas) so patting is usually kept to a minimum. They run around the neighbourhood and it is quite amusing watching them chase their mum for a feed.

Our family consists of Ming Kan (mother), Om Pon (father), Naree (25 year old daughter), Vasna (19 year old son) and Sompanut and Sompanni (17 & 16 yr old sons respectively). Ming Kan usually cooks and makes really good, but simple food. Chngang (delicious) was one of the first words to be learnt. Meals are always rice and then there is a stew like dish that you put over the rice little by little as you eat. It is impolite/greedy to cover all your rice at the start of the meal, so there is a lot of double dipping in the community stew dish. For each mouthful of rice there might be one small piece of green vegetable (described to us as sewer cabbage on the first day) and maybe four slices of finely cut pork in the whole meal. I have a feeling these meals maybe more extravagent due to their guests. Anyway, I really like the food. It is nice to appreciate the equivalent of a small piece of spinach so much.

The thing that has made it rough for us is that the family went away for the weekend and we chose to fend for ourselves for the weekend rather than going to the team centre. Charlene and I are usually quite capable of cooking etc, but everything seems to add up. There's a small window from 5 til 9am to do stuff like washing when the temperature is cool, but then it gets stinking hot after that. It is dirty, going to the toilet and showering is foreign. Trying to maintain hygiene is hard. The water is not safe for us weak westerner's to drink (we do have a filter upstairs - a clay pot plant looking pot in a bucket that the water seeps through), we don't know the vegetables, noone in the community speaks english, and we don't know how to make the yummy stuff that can make rice taste so good. Also there is just nowhere comfy to sit and hangout, and there's bitey things besides mosquitoes and fleas that make life a little uncomfortable.

This really feels like I'm rambling, it is all quite different and hard to know where to start describing life here. There is lots of goodness in this place too. The family have been really welcoming and made us feel at home, the kids of the neighbourhood all come to hang out with us and are perfect for practising/ learning Kamay. Due to the small amount of things to do for them, we are great entertainment.

After one week of being foreigners, we are beginning to understand in some small way the experiences and frustrations of refugees/ emigrants to our countries where basic living skills are so different. We are glad that our host family will be back in an hour and on that note we should get home.