OPERATIONAL DISTRICT: DAUN KEO
HEALTH CENTERS: PREY SLEOK
Breakfast was at the same place as the night before. When we left, the owner said that his breakfast is very cheap and very good, and encouraged us to come back. So this morning, to save time, we didn't decide on a place and instead went back to where we came from. This time, there weren't so many small flies buzzing around the table, attracted by the fluorescent light. Dawn lighting made it look like a completely different place. It was 06:30. The village was already bustling. Kids were riding their bikes on the way to school, and the elderly were opening up shop for the day.
Everything about the countryside seems to operate at a different rhythm. When we drive around at night through the streets, many people will just be sitting there and relaxing, usually under the single lamp that lights the entire household. The other day when I briefly stepped outside at 02:00 to get some cash, there were still people sitting and relaxing just outside, after the rains.
A brief break in the story. As I write this, a man is walking his cow on the street for a graze.
And so whether it's 07:00 or 02:00 or 15:00, somewhere I always see people in the countryside occupied with some activity. I often wonder just where everyone is going. In cities like Mumbai you would expect to see people 24/7 scattered across the streets, but in the less populated areas in the villages you do not expect the same thing. Yet here I was, people getting up early, going to sleep late, as if there were people awake at every hour. They are not bound by the 9 to 5 workweek, but the seasons here. Nor are they bound by bedtimes. Here, simply you sleep when they can, and work when they need to make food. So, being on this circadian has a free feeling to it. At times you will see people lounging in cafes in random times of the day, and at all times of the day you will see the people lounging on the various hammocks strung anywhere possible. Anytime two trees permit by distance, there will likely be a hammock stuck in between. And, there will even more likely be someone occupying it. This fluidity in concepts of 'times for things' doesn't exist and is refreshing.
During breakfast, we have the option of noodles or beef rice. I take the beef rice. The noodles come and it's Pho-ish in appearance, but is flavored differently. Z, who is sitting to my right, takes her chopsticks, but to my surprise grips it in the most peculiar way.
Most Cambodians will eat with a spoon and fork. Spoon in right hand, fork in left. When people in Singapore saw me eating with a fork in my right hand they knew I was foreign. Why wasn't I using the spoon, which is obviously more efficient in scooping up rice? I never really made that distinction myself, but the reasoning made total sense. Here, they do the same. Scoop with the spoon, and if there needs to be anything scraped or sculpted around the edge of the spoon, then use the form to do that. The way the use it is almost as intricate as the knife-fork use in western cuisine. Watching them use the two utensils together is an art in itself, as if they were sharpening each one as they went. I tried to watch and then mimic but just felt awkward.
So, Yang had chopsticks and a spoon, and her spoon in the left hand and chopsticks in the right. Instead of 'picking up' the chopsticks from the bottom and straddling the sticks between the pointer and middle finger, she did an overgrip and picked it up as if it were picking up an iron for clothes. She held this overgrip and stuck her pointer finger between the two sticks, creating a small gap. She would scoop the noodles up with the chopsticks and then twirl the two chopsticks clockwise so as to scoop the noodles up. Then, she would stake the chopsticks tip against the spoon and twirl further into the spoon. She was using the chopsticks as if it were a fork, eating spaghetti. I'm not a chopsticks purist (as some Westerners are with their knife and fork) so I just found it fascinating. Like their expansion of the use of a motorbike, tacking on carriages and carrying many people, they did the same with their utensils. The chopsticks didn't have a right way of being used. Over the table I saw T eating in the traditional style, but Yang was there twirling away. There was an art to it, too.
Dropping off D to his site, we passed by some more bumpy roads destroyed by the rain. It's always an adventure, and locals look at our big yellow bus bobbing up and down the road, clinking its way through a terrain who has already defeated our pipes and bumpers. Still, A pushed forward, and we eventually made it.
Today I am accompanying K, one of the new data collectors, to hs field site to make sure all goes well. The car drops us off after dropping D off, and he says his aunt lives nearby so we can wait at her house for a while. I show up and it's a house-cum-cafe, or maybe a cafe-cum-house. what they have done is set up the garage to be a rest stop for students and workers during the day. There are two columns of lawn chairs paired together, all facing the front of the room. There is also a plastic table in front of each chair. I walk in timidly since I'm stepping into his family member's house, K's aunt gives me a stare, but after she knows who I am she tells me to sit and relax. She brings me a plate full of jackfruit as well as a Korean energy drink and does the urging with two hands, nodding, and smiling, encouraging me to partake.
K's command of English is good, to the point that broken sentences are enough to communicate. He offers me many things, asking if I need anything, a coffee, a tea, more to eat. I feel bad since I am taking up their space and so offer to pay, but both his aunt and him flatly refuse saying we cannot in good conscience take the money as I am a guest. So I smile hesitantly (still a bit awkward), but they tell me to relax, and I sink into ease while I do some data entry. K is out in the back with his baby cousin, a cute girl of only a year old with short cropped hair and a sarong-ish thing on. She's awfully calm for a child of her age.
I love the hospitality in the countryside. It reminds me of when I go to the mountains in Taiwan and the aboriginals are way friendlier than cityfolk. And, it's not a forced kind of friendliness. It's genuine and considerate; they make you feel like part of the family unit. K says his mom lives 10km down the road, and he went to high school about 1 kilometer away from his aunt's house. He used to live with her when he was studying for exams and didn't want to commute. He's a man of this village, and he's proud to call it the vilage he grew up in. When I asked him whether he prefers Phnom Penh or his village, without hesitation he smiles and says "I prefer home." Like many rural kids, they went to university in the big city and have settled over there to work. A not too uncommon story in the developing city. When asked how often he goes home, he said he comes home twice a year by his newly owned motorbike. K says, "I bought it with my own money. When my mom asked me if I wanted a scooter I said of course, but on my terms. So I bought it with the money I saved from work. It's not the newest model though, but it let's me come home when I want. And, it's bought with my own money. "
He calls me into the back and says we're going to have lunch now, and I quickly pack up from the cafe area and move to the back of the house. His aunt brings out a large metal tray containing three smaller bowls in it as well as a pot for rice. I've seen the food served in these big platters, something about how it's easier to bring everything out at once. For lunch, we were having his aunt's pig curry, pig intestines, and some veggies. Upon a closer look at the curry, I see that there are small fire ants interspersed throughout the bowl. I'm not sure if this was meant to be part of the dish, but even if it weren't it made a wonderful texture to the smooth curry. Biting into the ants, they are soft and grainy and don't taste anything like you'd imagine the house ants we get in California would taste like. Seriously, from food, to scooter use, to chopstick use, the Cambodians are masters of adapting and utilizing what is around them. The ants are a simple touch of texture and protein, but add so much to the dish. After that, she whips up a cup of Cambodian coffee. K also hands me a random potato to eat, so I'm like sure, I'll have your potato.
Like much of the coffee in the region, it's made from Vietnamese beans. The coffee, without sugar, has a mocha kind of taste to it. When you add sugar, the mocha becomes more pronounced, but it's still bitter. If you drink and iced "Ca Phe", cafe, the word for coffee, they will often mix it with condensed milk and stuff it with ice, much like the Vietnamese. However, the flavor, like I said is still more mocha-ish and not as strong as Vietnamese iced coffee. If you take it black, they will serve it in a small glass at maybe macchiato volume. I've never tasted anything like it, and also adds to the colorful variety of foods that I have had thus far here. K says he's going to go say hello to a neighbor and leaves me with his cousin. She asks me to push her in her motorized car. I press the pedal several times to give her the message that she has to press it herself. What happens is she just ends up jerking back and forth as I pump and brake the pedal. Rocking, back and forth, smiling. She hits a button on the steering wheel and Thai disco electronic music comes on, and her head bobs to the beat.
K is extremely attentive to detail, and loyal to his work. After watching him run his session, he tells me what he is going to do when he goes back, and it's essentially a rehash of what I said he needs to do following his questionnaire session. He's a hardworker but humble about his accomplishments. His attention to detail is great, you tell him once, and he will remember it and do it to the best of his ability. On one of our questionnaire sheets, he wrote a comment and his penmanship is spectacularly in a straight line, and all of his letters curl sharply where they need to; accents placed above and below. It's textbook Khmer. He studied psychology in university, and has interest in the health field and doing field interview work, which is why he applied for his current post. After talking to him about how university was "so so" in terms of difficulty, he says to me that he knew Z and T from university. Turns out, he lived with Z for a while in college while studying and so the two know each other very well. At this point I notice he has a ring on his left finger.
I ask him whether he's married because of the ring, and he says not yet, but we are kind of engaged. "In Cambodia, when a man is seroius about marrying, he will ask permission from the daughter's parents, and there will be a ceremony that makes it official. My parents will meet her parents, and give permission to marry her away. And of course, we will eata lot. It's kind of like an engagement, but I'm still waiting until I have a stable job that I can pay for the wedding." That way, he'll own it and be proud of what he's accomplished, just like when he bought the scooter with his own money.
"My girlfriend is my idol. I met her in Primary 6 and from then I have always admired her. She's the top in her class all the time, and I've always respected her for being so smart." He talks openly about how much he likes her, and how she's also from the same village and from the same 'background' (presumably pointing to the fact that she's not a big city girl). He laughs and says "yeah.. still a while until marriage..." A blossoming love story from the Cambodian village.
While we are waiting for the others to arrive, his aunt decides to prepare us dinner. I kindly refuse saying we would eat with the group, but she insisted and so I was really left with no choice. Tonight, she made fish cake that was left to ferment, then packed with meat and having a thin layer of steamed egg baked on top. It tasted a bit like meatloaf, but this one had a homemade touch and the TLC of a Cambodian aunt. To accompany this, rice (pretty much a standard for all meals) was served as well as a large plate of fresh vegetables, grown from the garden just out back. I asked what kind of vegetables they were and he wasn't able to give me an English name. "Here, in Cambodia, we just call it ____." It's amazing the vocabulary that foreign countries have for food, based on what they come across. For example, you ask any Westerner what a durian is and if they haven't been to Southeast Asia, chances are they won't know. In the same way, if you ask a Southeast Asianer what kind of cheese is camambert, they'll just stare at you blankly. So, we had a plate of vegetables, two that only had Cambodian names, but all were grown out back. Organic village farming style.
If you ask me what Cambodian food is, I'll say it's a mix between Vietnamese and Thai. I don't mean to say it doesn't have it's own unique touch, but to a complete stranger, it's more likely that they've tasted Viet or Thai food. Some of the dishes I've had here on the street are mixes of Thai and Viet food. The Banh Cheo I had with D the other day is a Cambodian version of Ban Xeo in Vietnam, where they eat it wrapped in rice paper. Many of the soup dishes with beef taste like Pho, and some of the sour things taste Thai (especially that with lemongrass). Culturally and politically, too, Cambodia is mixed into these two countries. Wars, Culture, and language all are tied closely to each other. They all have their distinctive flares, but in general they're quite similar. Perhaps a comparable example is Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Although someone would say that they are different, they still show some striking similarities in terms of politics, physical looks, etc. At least, it does to the untrained eye. Maybe I just offended all three countries. The point is, Thailand and Vietnam sandwich Cambodia, and given Cambodia's ancient and recent history, there are exchanges of information at all levels between these three countries (food, culture, etc). Consequently, you'll often hear people comparing this and that to Thailand or Vietnam in conversation, since the words for Vietnam and Thailand in Khmer are same as English.
The aunt closes up the cafe for the day, and K tells me to go inside to the main house. There, his aunt's friend is rocking the baby to sleep in a hammock, watching a Cambodian drama that has a shocking amount of Chinese looking people on it. If they weren't speaking Khmer, it could be a Chinese or Korean drama. It looks nothing like the people I've seen on the ground thus far. But, there she is rocking her child and watching, and K is sitting on his phone. I look around, it's a simple one room house, with the bathroom in the back. The baby has a prop up mosquito netting surrounding her and the bed has a mosquito net around it too; a sign of Malaria territory. It's quiet now in the village with only the occasional large truck passing the road, breaking the silence in the countryside. We wait for three hours, but for some reason my sense of time tells me it's really only been one hour. Call it countryside jetlag. Then, our yellow van appears out of the silence.