Time for a Toothpick

Sra Alley

Hearing stories or reading in the police blotter about tragedies in Cambodia, particularly out in the countryside, I sometimes can't help but feel as if I'm contemplating a William Hogarth print. Most stories in the blotter seem to go along the lines of "Person X is drinking with friends, Person Y interrupts the dirinking somehow, so X attacks Y with an axe." There are variations, of course: sometimes it's a son burning down his mother's house for haranguing him, other times it's a group of "anarchistic ruffians" attacking their schoolmates with samurai swords. But it usually involves alcohol, and lots of it. (The Khmer have a saying that sums up their attitude towards imbibing: "Drink, Drink to get drunk. If not to get drunk, why drink?")

But not all drunken attacks make the newspaper. Oftentimes they stay within the home, as the wife and children suffer silently. I asked my students to discuss why some men hit their wives when they are drunk, and after questioning the ambiguity of the posessive plural (how many wives does each man have?), they offered some interesting explanations, but the most cutting was, "because if they hit somebody else, they'd get in trouble." That's one of the less enchanting aspects of 'traditional culture.'

"Samnang"

It's fascinating what you learn from casual conversations. Today I learned that one of the elder teachers here at ELSU completely fabricated his name, birthdate, and age after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. He shed the Chinese name he'd had all his life and took on a new Cambodian one, and became five years younger, all with one stroke of a pen. He did it because otherwise he wouldn't be accepted by the teacher training program he wanted to get into. He also devised new names and birthdays for his parents, who speak mainly Chinese. He could do this easily because there were no records in 1980. The last real census had been done in the mid-1960s, and the government had a fundamental problem of not knowing exactly who was living or dead, or even who had been living before the KR period. (That's one of the reasons that estimates of deaths during the KR period vary). Just as land was up for grabs, so was identity. While Samnang is a somewhat extreme case, most people over thirty have no idea what their real birthday is, so they just pick a day.

It's funny: this is the kind of story you'd expect to hear in some academic work about identity in the early modern period, and yet here Samnang is, cracking jokes about when people ask his parents how old they are or what their names are, they say "Ask my son."

Tontine au Cambodge

Cambodia does not have a modern financial system. While we Americans have lately come to deride the idea of "financial innovation," there's no denying that we could use some over here. There's no really stable form of investment beyond land-- which is still shaky unless you have ironclad title--or banks, a few of which are fairly deserving of the title "wildcat." This makes it difficult in my history class to explain the idea, for instance, of a national debt. When we're watching the "Connect with English" video series, I have to explain the concept of "insurance" to my students, though I tend to avoid the intricacies of health care in the US. (Here it's a bit simpler: people either pay for care, or they die on the doorstep to they hospitals because they have no money.) There have been baby steps toward modern financial system (the stock market has been "coming soon" since 2007), but in a country this corrupt I reckon it'll still be a while.

For the time being, people have to make do with informal, traditional ways of raising capital.

]]> Case in point: the other day, I was hearing one of my co-workers talking about something that seemed to be called a 'tong-ting.' The way he explained it, a bunch of people give money to an organizer. Every month, people kick in certain amount, and then submit a bid. A sort of credit auction happens among the members where everyone submits a secret number representing the interest rate they would pay if they win. If you have the highest bid for the month, you can get out your contributions and get loans from all other members, but then you can't bid again, and you have to pay your loan back in installments until the it ends. The payments from the borrowers thus reduce the required contributions for the remaining members.

The process ends when there is only one person left who hasn't borrowed money, and that person gets all the accumulated money left. So there are basically two kinds of people who "play:" people who need a lot of capital fast for some sort of investment, like buying land or starting a business, and people who play for the long-term, either as a form of investment (since you come out ahead late in the game from all the payments from borrowers) or to win it all.

As I inquired further, I learned that it wasn't called a tong-ting, it was a tontine, the form of annuity developed by Lorenzo de Tonti in 1653. You may remember it from Agatha Christie novels as the long-term investment where members' shares are redistributed upon death to the living members. Here, though, it's mutated somewhat--instead of investing the capital in other things and paying the dividends to members, cambodian tontines increase due only to the members. And instead of going out of the fund when you die, winning the credit bid is called "dying" in the game of the tontine.

Of course, all too often the organizer just runs off with the money, leaving all the participants in the dust. So it goes.

Don't Call it a Comeback

Friends and Enemies, I'm sure you have been eagerly awaiting the revival of my periodic adventures through the indo-chine. Well, I have reasons but no excuses for my absence. It is difficult to keep up a steady stream of witty bon-mots and socio-cultural observations without encouragement. In fact, it was only after periods of prolonged inactivity that people mentioned how much they missed reading my stuff. So I shamelessly implore you, dear readers: if you want Mr. Flynn to keep writing, let him know when you like something!

In any case, the times find me well. I am once again in Phnom Penh, the pearl of the orient, trying to teach my students the difference between the -ed and -ing forms of participial adjectives. (example: "Teacher, I am boring with this book.") But in addition, I have taken on a new and somewhat quixotic adventure: Teaching American History.

While interpreting the mighty forces that made America the way it is can be difficult even in the home country, it's triply so when your students a) do not live with the liberties that've been a part of anglo-american political culture for 700 years, b) have very little background information on world history before 1914, and c) speak, read, and write english with at best intermediate ability. The History department is not one of the leading lights of RUPP, but there's potential. There will be a lot more updates on this in the future.

So, dear friends, grimace not on my absence, but simply smile at my return. I have much to say.

This Land is Your Land? This Land is My Land.

Land rights and forced evictions have become a huge problem in cambodia over the past five years. While Cambodia shares many aspects with squatting and shantytowns around the world, there is one important difference: all titles and claims prior to 1979 were basically eradicated. Families returning home after the end of the Khmer Rouge found themselves in something vaguely reminiscent of the state of nature, albeit one administered by the Vietnamese army. According to Boramy, in the early days you could just move into a house, clean it up, and take possession. (By 1981-82, things had settled enough that while you could still claim open land, houses were pretty much a closed matter). Of course, you couldn't take any house you wanted, because some were specifically reserved for government officials.

And therein lies the biggest problem in Cambodian land issues: if you don't have a clear title to the land (something that seemed like an unnecessary expense in terms of the bribery and fees to make it happen), it probably belongs to the government. And if the government wants to sell off that land to some foreign company or some company run by friends of the government, there's not a lot you can do. The government might make some token effort at restitution, but mostly that involves moving from a central city location you've lived and worked at for 30 years, to some exurb without plumbing, electricity, or decent roads. Too many of the shiny shopping malls and
The land law says that five years of continued possession is enough to grant you a legitimate claim to the land, and that was the law, which was more or less followed until fairly recently. The real estate boom and ensuing rampant speculation (particularly by government and army officials) changed things so that there's a much stronger constellation of private and public forces pushing for unjust evictions, and much less recourse in the face of illegal actions by private companies.

It's a messed up situation, and it's one more reason for you, dear reader, to be grateful that you are not poor and Cambodian.

]]> For more info, check out this report from Amnesty International.

Anyway and on a happier note, Khmer New year was a lot of fun. Hopefully I can put together a quick retelling of all my various adventures soon enough.

Scene and Herd

Most travel/'adventure' blogging is centered around narratives. Often, they seem to revolve around going somewhere with either nature or culture relatively undisturbed by globalization, and the 'deep lesson' the author receieves from such an experience. It doesn't matter if the people imparting the experience have done it a thousand times before for naïve westerners, it's the narrative that ends up on the blog. Either that or it's a 'awareness-raising' post about some sort of downtrodden victim group in need of assistance.

Both are worthy when they come from the right places, but the thing is, everyone wants to do that, regardless of whether their experiences actually match up to the template. That's probably why blogging from afar gets tiring after a while: sometimes life doesn't fit the template. [NOTE: MY ENTRIES DURING KHMER NEW YEAR ARE LIKELY TO FALL UNERRINGLY INTO THIS TEMPLATE]. Sometimes you just get busy living, and it's hard churning that into content. Sometimes the real grain of your experience comes from the apparent husk--strange details and observations, that are common currency to people living here but impossible to guess for outsiders. With that in mind, here are a few interesting things I've seen, heard, or thought about:

-Cockfighting has been banned by Hun Sen's fiat. I wnder if this means that they're not going to have the weekly televised cockfighting on CTN (complete with stats, record, and play-by-play) anymore...

]]> -one of the most common vectors of computer virus transmission is through USB flash memory sticks. They can sneak in through the autorun protocols, so you barely have to click on anything. And at the same time, there's really no getting around it. Given the unevenly distributed and usually poor bandwidth here, physical storage is the only way to go. Actually, if you think of it that way, the piles of software, gaming, and film DVDs for sale in the markets really just represent a form of arbitrage between areas of high bandwidth to areas of low bandwidth (and low regulation).

-interest among the Cambodians I know has slightly risen for the first of the KR trials, but overall it's still fairly low.

-I keep reading in the paper about westerners being found in their guesthouses dead of heart attacks. The thing is, they're all under 50. Speculation suggests that it's got to do with heroin, either spiked or being sold as cocaine.

-Given the myriad Mennonite, Mormon, Maryknoll and other non-M religious charities operating here, it seems like it'd be much easier to get a steady gig teaching and working on educational capacity development here if I got churched-up a bit. But seeing as they don't have any churches like the one from the Blues Brothers (the late Rev. Cleophus James presiding), I'll pass for now.

-it's MANGO SEASON, and it is indeed as wondrous as it sounds. Mangoes! Mangoes! Mangos for the taking! They're also accompanied in April by the "Mango Rains," cloudbursts that break the heat and often loosen mangoes from the trees. My Khmer tutor told me a funny story about when he was a kid. A ferocious storm hit his hometown when he was at school, knocking mangoes off trees for miles around. He ran around gathering them up, elated at the prospect of bringing so many mangoes home, when he found out that the storm had knocked over his house. You win some, you lose some.

-I went to "Culture Day" at RUPP, a big pre-Khmer New Year celebration organized by the tourism department. There were other parties sponsored by other departments, and my students were very happy and surprised to see me (I accentuated the surprise by arriving several hours after the 8am beginning of festivities) I saw lots of my students in various forms of traditional or semi-formal dress(the guys mostly wore the same things they wore for school, but the girls were practically wedding'd up in makeup and stiff, uncomfortable shiny attire), playing those silly games and dancing. (Here, slapping and hair-pulling as a form of flirtation seems to go on into your early 20s.) One of the games was similar to a piñata, but involved a clay pot and no candy. I was amused because it emphasized the humiliating aspects of swinging a stick whilst blindfolded, with none of the rewards we normally associate with such activity. I also learned some of the khmer standard party dances, which I was able to pick up on fairly quickly, The biology party was for some reason more raucous than the others, and I was asked by some possibly-drunk students if during the hip hop tracks I could "show us your stylez." Needless to say, that is the kind of offer Adam Flynn never refuses.

Bananarama

My TOEFL students were shocked yesterday to learn that there's only one kind of banana in the United States.

This somewhat odd discussion came out of a listening selection on heirloom crops. For that to make sense, I had to explain the concept of selective breeding, giving cows as a basic example (ie, for dairy, meat, or in the case of Cambodian cattle, physical labor). The biology and environmental sciences students already had some idea about 'biodiversity,' the topic of one of our better master's programs, so this wasn't too much of a stretch for them. Then I explained how the bananas I ate in the states were generally grown in Central or South America, and since they had to keep fresh over a long travel time, they were generally bred for that quality above others.

Cambodia, in contrast, has a very short time-to-market, and generally isn't so systematized in its agriculture. So that means that without even trying Cambodia has many different kinds of bananas that might be considered "heirloom" in other countries. They are incredibly flavorful; I particularly enjoy the short, fat "chicken-egg bananas" you can get on the street in any number of ways. When wrapped in sticky rice and grilled, they're one of my favorite roadside foods.

It's the same with tomatoes (some of which, admittedly, come from Vietnam). But I should note that Cambodia isn't necessarily the organic paradise you might imagine. A lot of farmers buy pesticides and fertilizers with directions and warnings in languages they can't read, and drench their crops with these volatile chemicals in concentrations far above recommended or safe levels. The chemistry department has done some really interesting work in this regard, and education on the matter is an ongoing project for the NGOs.

"On-on..."

Things are going pretty well, and I've actually been pretty busy. Over the past 2-3 weeks I have:

-started playing basketball at the US Embassy on a weekly basis. It really is like going to another country; they have their own water supply so you can actually drink the tap water.
Attended the CamTESOL Conference and listened to a great number of talks on teaching English and teaching thinking (more on this in a bit)
-Contributed to the development of Cambodian hip-hop through my technical assistance on matters of production, as well as by sharing with them some excellent sampling material. Peanut is doing some amazing stuff making beats out of old 60s Cambodian Rock.
-Run with the legendary Hash House Harriers. The Phnom Penh Chapter is something of an expat fixture (since '92), and it's a nice way to deal with both the desire for exercise, and the desire to meet new people. You also get to see random parts of nearby provinces, and drink a reasonably unreasonable amount for a Sunday evening. I also really like the way it's non-competitive, and how this is ensured by the course design: lead runners have to check out all the possible forks in a path when they hit a fork. By the time they've figured out the right path, the slower people have caught up. Plus you get to shout things like "on-on!" that leave no doubt as to its british origins (the songs after a run and before/during the drinking are also another tip-off).

]]> Anyway, in between all this I managed to squeeze in a conversation with Pok Visalboth, one of my students from last semester. He's also studying Korean and a little Japanese, and we talked a bit about linguistics (he's a Khmer language and literature major) and language learning. It reminded me of a talk I attended at CamTESOL called "Teaching Space." I hope you don't mind if I geek out a little bit here, and explain it in brief...

Basically, the promised findings of universal human cognition haven't really materialized so far, and so cognitive scientists lately have had to pump their breaks and ask some anthropologists for directions.(at least according to the Belgian giving the talk.) While there certainly are innate parts of human biology, any sort of 'universal grammar' that obtains in the human brain is probably are just the hardware (or the programming language), not the software. Thought and perhaps even phenomenal experience are shaped at a very deep level by our native languages. If your language uses an entirely absolute frame of reference (no left/right, only north/south), it will be difficult for you to parse ideas or thoughts in english that make heavy use of prepositions and latinate prefixes (both of which are heavily based on a certain idea of space).

This is in essence a retooled (and probably less deterministic) formulation of Sapir-Whorf, a hypothesis I grow fonder of the more I teach. It was an interesting talk, and it made me realize that I'm not only teaching how to read/write/listen/speak in English, but also the tricks of thinking in my language, something I've been doing without knowing. I almost always try to put abstract concepts into visible space, and it's helped a lot.

V-C Day

Valentine's Day in Phnom Penh is intense. Way more intense than in the states. They don't really know where it comes from, but seem to have picked it up from Thai and Korean movies. Regardless, for couples aged from 15-24, it is THE day to go out with your sweetheart, to bring her flowers, and to coax her into sexual intercourse. Some couples only have sex on Valentine's Day and, bizarrely, International Women's Day (March 8).

I've read the qualitative report mentioned in the latter article, and it's interesting albeit a little unsettling to find out about the sexual habits of people not unlike my students. There's such a divide between the very high-school attitudes and 1950s-style mores the girls seem to be locked into(or are willing to admit to), and the seamier exploits admitted to by the men. It reminds me a bit of the city of Lumberton from Blue Velvet: wholesome and staid on the surface, but hiding a lurid, violent, parallel world within. How many of my students, for instance, have taken part in the apparently widespread practice of bauk? (Bauk could be described charitably as "running a train," or more accurately as "gang rape." It's usually practiced as a bait-and-switch on sex workers, getting her to agree to go back to a guesthouse with one or two men, only to have 4 more guys waiting when they get to the room. According to the interviews, many young men don't consider it wrong, because they've "already paid for it.")

In other news, the first trial of the Khmer Rouge Tribunals is starting up with Duch, chief of S-21 (Tuol Sleng), the central interrogation and torture center of the KR...

]]> Plenty of ink and pixels have been spilled on this, most of them by people better informed than I am, so I will refrain from saying anything other than that I have serious doubts about the ability of the KRT to bring any sort of justice to either the former KR leaders or the Cambodian people. They may be able to get Duch, but the rest of them will just keep dragging things out until time does the job we can't.

I just hope the trial sheds light on the inner workings of the Khmer Rouge, something that remains bizarre and puzzling to even the best historians.

MM..Food

Last weekend, I caught some fish off the coast of Sihanoukville. Yesterday, I skinned 'em, seasoned 'em, wrapped 'em in foil and steamed 'em in coconut milk with ginger and garlic. I actually used my rice cooker as a steamer, a highly useful kitchen hack that I'm going to use more often. This is something that I simply would not have done in America.

Cambodia has made me learn how to cook. It's amazing what the simple fact of not having a microwave will do for your sense of culinary adventure. Plus there's the fact that because we're at the far end of the processed-foods supply chain out here, it's actually cheaper for me to buy tenderloin at the market than spam in a can.

It's really strange how fast the change has been, especially considering that the most I had really attempted beforehand was garlic-toast. Now I'm trying to do stir-fries, curries, marsala, homemade french fries, all sorts of crazy things. It's cheaper than street foods and probably much healthier (though there's something to be said for fat-noodles and hot sauce). I mean, I do have a job that gives me a lot of free time, so it helps that I actually have energy in the evening to whip something up. Anyway, I just thought I'd share that neat fact.

Holiday in Cambodia

WATCH THIS SPACE, friends and confidants, for a full account of Mr. Flynn's attempts to "save Christmas" in a country that does not technically celebrate said holiday.
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Ever since I was a little kid, I loved Christmas. I've never been particularly religious in my love of Christmas (I usually fell asleep during church services), but I am such a sucker for the spirit of the season, for gift giving and christmas caroling and funny beverages and various strange norse/germanic holdovers from paganism.

In fact, I decided that even though I had to work on christmas, I would still ring in the season as festively as possible. Christopher suggested the idea of getting Santa suits from friends in Hong Kong (where they have a yearly Santa pub crawl, and thus good supply of Santa suits.) I brought up the idea of going out to the shooting range in Santa outfits. We also floated various ideas like riding around in a cyclo on christmas, giving candy to random children and strangers. Though I didn't get to pull that off, I do have a long-lasting souvenir of this christmas season: a custom-made Cambodian Santa outfit. I decided to have one made after concluding that a) getting one made wouldn't cost any more than buying a Santa suit would, b) none of the Santa suits available here would fit me comfortably, and c) the idea of a custom-made Santa suit is just plain awesome.

[Photo to come: Mr Flynn in Santa attire, riding in a tuk-tuk]

]]> So, as I do when I need anything, I went to the russian market to buy fabric and find a tailor. Luckily, I had Wanna (librarian extraordinare and friend of PIA) along to explain what precisely I wanted. The fabric is either thick silk or some sort of partly-synthetic material, but it looked like it would breathe decently well. The tailor hadn't done work like this before, but luckily there was a child-sized santa suit hanging in one of the nearby stalls. It was a 3-4 day turnaround and I ended up with something that will proabably make a good pair of pajamas when/if I move to a colder climate. (The Santa Hat I already bought: it says "Feliz Navidad" and lights up when you press a button. It, too, is awesome)

My love of secular 'xmas' is probably a good thing, since at the university we are officially not allowed to discuss religion or politics. So when I talked about Christmas, I tried to emphasize that most of the traditions we observe aren't particularly Christian either. I explained the influence of Yule and Saturnalia on current traditions, and I pointed out that Santa Claus is a great way to get children to behave. My students more or less have a decent understanding of who Santa Claus is (though one of my students confidently claimed that Santa was a "ship captain"), but I made sure they knew that Santa only gives presents to good children. Christmas is something that's really only caught on in the last ten years, mostly as a social or commercial kind of event here. But Santa outfits make people happy, so it's become fairly common to dress little kids up as Santa. Cambodian children are already unbearably adorable, so this just makes them even more so--especially when they wear fake beards. I didn't manage to ride around town, but I did visit my fellow teacher Boramy and her son, Alexander (named after Pushkin...a legacy of her 1980s study in russia.)

Here's Boramy's description of my visit:

"My son - Alex - likes Santacloud or Christmas man. He learns that he is welcomed by a Christamas man if he behaves well. This year, Adam visited my home with his red christmas suit and the chocolate of Christmas man and Christmas tree. They got along very well in English language. Adam is not a religious person.He just sings the variety of his christmas songs with the long deep memory of his childhood.That's great for me and Alex."

Turkey = "Mwan Tohm" = "Big Chicken"

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WATCH THIS SPACE, dear readers, for Mr. Flynn's curious account of a thanksgiving celebration both international and Cambodianin its character, and his reactions thereto.
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As I explained to my classes, Thanksgiving is a time for families to join together, eat a big meal, and feel thankful for what they have, rather than resentful for what they don't have. I also tried to explain that turkeys were different from both ducks and chickens, with mixed results. Perhaps it was because we were reading about lonliness in our "Issues for Today" textbook, but my students could definitely tell that I was missing my family. I was pretty sad this week, but little moments here and there lifted me up.

Quick highlights, to be expanded at leisure, after the jump

]]> *My birthday is November 25th, so it almost always falls on the week of thanksgiving. Upon finding this out at the beginning of class, my essay writing students were able to pull together a birthday party within 20 minutes. They may be up and down in terms of doing homework or structuring an essay, but organizational skill is staggering when it comes to throwing parties.

*My 301 students wished me "Good Luck, Good Health, and more handsome in your life and work...especially your work."

*We had a sort of pot-luck thanksgiving at the apartment of my friend Sofia (whom I actually first met on the plane to Phnom Penh). The girls tended to make amazing things like pumpkin soup or hand-mashed potatoes. I brought about 6 ears of corn on the cob that I bought from a street vendor. In all, it was a pretty huge spread. I was asked to carve the turkey, and though it was my first time I did a remarkably adequate job of it. This was probably because I was able to draw on my experiences from brunch spreads of yesteryear. I sort of took on the ceremonial role of 'symbolic american' during the evening, explaining things or behaving in the traditional thanksgiving style. This mostly included getting into a pointless argument with another guest (one of the most important of thanksgiving traditions) about how America doesn't have to adopt the metric system if it doesn't want to.

Legends of the Hidden Temple

WATCH THIS SPACE For Mr. Flynn's account of his adventures in the ancient and renowned ANGKOR WAT TEMPLE COMPLEX.

Tuk is a very useful word.

It is not surprising that Phnom Penh does not have an organized recycling service. What is interesting, however, is that residents are more likely to separate bottles and cans from their trash here than they are in Arizona. This is because the city has a small army of street urchins who scrape together a living by collecting empties and turning them in to some central location. If you don't separate your trash, they tear open your trashbags and leave your front gate strewn with refuse. It's a very cambodian answer to the problem, but it seems to work out okay. I mention this because the urchins are most visible after big public events, especially sporting events, because of the large number of empty bottles resulting from such events. After the boat races today (great visual: big long boats full of furiously paddling village representatives in color-coded hats and shirts), the oarsmen threw their empty water bottles to the couple of fearless urchins who dove into the water to get them. Granted, they didn't seem to be in too much trouble, considering that they were holding tightly onto highly buoyant bags of bottles that were almost as big as they were, but it was another strange scene on this, the first day of the Water Festival.

The Water Festival is held every year on the first full moon in November. It celebrates the changing of seasons (from rainy to dry), signified most spectacularly by the reversal of the Tonle Sap river. Half the year it acts like a normal river, running from the lake of the same name confluencing at Phnom Penh with the Mekong. But during the rainy season, the Mekong swells and forces the Tonle Sap to run backwards. This leads to dramatic variation in the size of the Tonle Sap lake, which some archaeologists believe was an important cause for the prosperity of Angkor: when the lake was low, the uncovered areas were perfect for growing rice.

]]> The scene by the riverside is nigh-on insane: the city doubles in population, and almost all of that is concentrated by the river. Anywhere with a patch of green space was turned into a zone for open air concerts and/or product hawking. (I personally preferred the boot advertising the Thai Mr. Clean knockoff, Mr. Muscle) The ministry of tourism, in connection with its "Cambodia: Kingdom of Wonders" ad campaign (it aired on CNN), set up an 'international visitors only' area that I immediately dubbed "The Barang Pavilion." It felt pretty weird to step past the huddled masses into an exclusive area, but it was admittedly a nice break from the shoulder-to-shoulder (or in my case, shoulder-to-everyone-else's-head) crowding. Maybe because people were coming in from the hinterlands where giant white people are less common, I felt like much more of a curiosity than normal, given the comments, laughter, and attempts by random people to walk side by side with me to ascertain our relative heights.

Another cool part of the water festival is the salutation to the moon, as conducted via fireworks and brightly-lit barges depicting the seals of various government ministries. I used how impressive each ministry's float was as a gauge of its place in the pecking order. And, no surprise given current events, the Ministry of National Defense had a pimped out float, complete with nagas spouting blue light that almost looked like water (if you squinted) and a lit up 'mythical monkey of giant-killing' that is apparently the RCAF's totem animal. The Central Bank also had a cool float, with single-point perspective all leading towards a radiating Riel (the currency) symbol. Initially I was kind of skeptical, but I honestly think it would be pretty cool to see a gigantic barge towing a lit up representation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs down the Potomac.

I'm going to Battambang tomorrow, and probably from there to see the 'greatest hits' version of Angkor Wat, partly just to figure out the lay of the land before I go visit it more fully next time. Also, I'm not entirely sure if this is true, but I've heard that Battambang is named after a whupping stick (literally, the bat of Dahmbang) that some emperor could throw really far. I'll get you the scoop later.

The Nearly Obligatory Elections Post

This was my first real vote and I'm glad it counted, even if it had to wing its way across half the world and back in order to do so. It's been a strange electoral season to follow, especially from Cambodia. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but the only news channels on my TV (besides the Singaporean propaganda outlet) are CNBC and BBC. CNBC gave me a pretty interesting perspective on the financial crisis (I gauged the severity of the crisis based on the frequency of the analysts alternately screaming at each other or admitting their bewilderment.) Still, it didn't give me a (main) street level view of what was going on. That was where my brother came in handy, working as he does in the local congressional office of Patrick Murphy (D-PA) in Bucks County. Without him, I would have felt so distant and disconnected from the mood of the country, like Howard Hughes or Wm. Randolph Hearst or something. Thanks, Brendan!

And while BBC's coverage is fascinating to watch (and freely violates the unquestioned shibboleths of coverage pitched at the American voter), it's just not the same without the endless dissection of minute details (and the irrelevant pleasure thereof) I get from watching MSNBC or CNN with the family on election night, which for me started at 8am Wednesday morning. So I had to settle for the next best thing: talking to my parents on Skype while we endlessly dissected the results. I'm particularly fond of my observation that Obama was on the way to a Big Ten sweep.

I wore a huge smile all through Wedenesday, and tried to explain it to my classes. Most of them sort of got it, but it was really only the Vietnamese exchange student (who had studied American History in high school) who really understood what it meant, both for me and the country. For my Essay Class, I could explain it in terms of 'America as unfulfilled promise, that slowly moves toward fulfillment;' In other words, we need to face the promise of the promised land.

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For my low-intermediate class, many of them barely understand what's going on in Thailand, much less the rest of the world. I had to explain that Obama was not in George Bush's party. I had to explain that there were only two parties in America. I had to explain that Obama was the first black president elected in over 200 years. I had to explain that Barack Obama was not a muslim. I had to explain that many people in rural america, especially those in George Bush's party, were afraid of Muslims. Then one of my students asked me why there was conflict between Muslims and Christians, which stumped me when it came to giving a clear, concise answer that can be understood by intermediate speakers of english. (For that matter, it stumps me when it comes to giving a clear, concise answer to speakers of any level.) There's certainly awareness, but not a lot of deep understanding. BBC's callers from Nigeria and Kenya might have the Obama talking points down, but most Cambodians are what you might call "low-information foreigners."

You can't really blame them, though: it takes a significant amount of either leisure time or internationally-minded education to develop an understanding of world politics. Right now, they're just trying to balance demands from parents, jobs and school, hoping to make it through and start a comparatively lucrative career, probably at a nonprofit or international organization(it's a pretty good sign that you're country's a bit skewed when the most coveted jobs are all at NGOs). Maybe their children will have the educational infrastructure and and time to figure it out, but for now they need all hands on deck just to help rebuild Cambodia. Y'know, it's like stage two of the old John Adams saw:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.