September 1, 2008

Meeting all the Usual Suspects, Part 1

So I've been in-country for 3 days now, and my sleep schedule is slowly stabilizing toward the Cambodian norm. Which, as it happens, begins by waking up at or before 5AM. So I've slowly been shifting towards that. I am quite tired at the end of the day, though perhaps naps are the solution.

My mom joked that the first khmer phrase I would learn would be "Hey, look at that big white guy." And while I haven't learned that particular set of words yet, I have definitely gotten some funny looks and smiles. I've had to re-acquaint myself with the metric system as most people I meet ask me how tall I am and how much I weigh. The shorthand answer of 2 meters (or m'er, as it seems to be pronounced here) and 120 kilograms seems to suffice.

I boarded the plane shortly after midnight thursday, and got off the plane on saturday morning, courtesy of the international date line. I'm not sure if I would recommend China Airlines as a means of getting to cambodia, but they did move me to a roomier seat when they noticed my obvious discomfort, and they do have this really adorable cartoon about what to do if you think you're exposed to SARS. I managed to make it through customs & immigration with my scanned, emailed, and printed-out letter of attestation, and was picked up at the airport by Sovannthea, a really great guy who handles some of the logistics at the little division I'm going to be working at. I was dropped off and checked in at a guesthouse in a part of town popular with NGO types (This particular street was filled with guesthouses and hotels that begin with "Golden:" Golden Gate, Golden Bridge, Golden Star, etc.) I got all my stuff inside, and then promptly slept for the rest of the day.

My sunday defintely deserves a full retelling, mostly for how rich and bizarre it was. I'm a big believer in the "aimless wandering" school of getting to feel out a city you've just arrived in, and Phnom Penh seemed to prove especially fruitful for this.

I got up and about probably around 8 or 9, and decided to wander in a westerly direction on one of the main boulevards, aiming roughly for the Olympic Stadium. No one's able to tell me why exactly it's "Olympic Stadium." Perhaps it's because they hold their olympic trials there? Anyway, it's actually a quite impressive complex, with a classic bowl that holds up to 50,000. It's got a lot of potential, all things considered. When I arrived, though, there were mostly homeless people huddling under the shade of the light posts, themselves were marked up with chalk inscriptions in both Khmer and english.

Drawn by the sound of whistles and clapping inside (as well as the booming of storm clouds to the north) I ducked into the indoor space, to find a gem of Cambodian sport. Initially I thought i was seeing some sort of regional amateur volleyball tournement, until I noticed something unusual about the players. They were all missing a limb. I was watching the Cambodian National Volleyball League (Disabled). And they were really good. Some of those guys had 30 inch verticals or better, and the action had me at the edge of my seat. Apparently Cambodia has the #3 team in the world in disabled volleyball (looking to be number one when the championships take place this year in Slovakia), and it makes sense. It's a tragic fact that they have a rather large talent pool, thanks to the thousands of landmines and unexploded ordinance that litters the country. The league seems to be sponsored by a number of telecoms along with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and it's really a brilliant idea, especially the way it raises awareness and pride without instilling pity.

I watched the games for a few hours until the rains passed, then walked further in the now clear (and hot, and humid) afternoon. After a bubble-tea-and-taro-ice cream float at a Chinese-run vegetarian restaurant (Fate-Blessing Buddha's, I think it was called), I noticed a sign that said "Fitness" and had a drawing of a muscled figure on it. Intrigued, I investigated, to find an awesomely old-school gym called "The King Kong Club." It was basically open-air, under an tin/aluminum roof, with a bunch of old weight machines and free weights. Admission was 700 Riels (about twenty cents). I figured that this looked like a great place to get a workout in, and besides, there was nothing wrong with a little grime; machines might be chancey, but how is a dumbell going to go wrong? It had a lot of character. I remember my high school weight room was pretty similar--if we wanted chalk, we had to wipe our hands on a slice of exposed wall.

I'll continue my tale of sunday later when I have time, but first a few further observations after the jump...

I feel somewhat well conditioned to the hassle of moto drivers and other solicitors thanks to my experiences in mexican border towns when I lived in Arizona, and my more recent weeks spent this summer in New York. Also, being as tall as I am, it's easier to avoid eye contact, turning people away with a shake of the head and a wave of the hand. Of course, when I actually needed a ride I didn't haggle as hard as I could, mostly because I knew that they usually don't make very much, and I was worried that my weight (probably that of two average cambodians) might affect their gas mileage. I'm going to try and get in touch with the guy who drove Andrew (my predecessor), since it makes sense to have a standing arrangement with one guy, who is satisfied enough with the guarantee of repeat business to offer a consistent and basically fair price.

Phnom Penh's traffic seems at times frightening, but on a basic level it made sense to me, probably because here it ceases to be a system of rigid order and instead is a system of fluid agents. As long as you're watching everyone around you, and actually paying attention to the road, it's less dangerous than it seems. That's not to say that it's *not* dangerous--I made room in my suitcase for a big white helmet for a reason--but it's dangerous the same way a river can be. If you don't respect the flow, you're going to get hurt.

Posted by flynn at 9:15 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

August 28, 2008

A deep breath before the plunge...

I'm looking down at my last 24 hours or so of my time in America, and generally I think I've had a wonderfully American summer, which included rock concerts, avant garde performance art, door-to-door political canvassing, a river trip through the grand canyon, and a number of lunches and dinners with some very interesting people. As a grand finale, I'm going to watch one of the first college football games of the year (A Pac-10 opener between Oregon State and Stanford) mere hours before leaving the country. College football is a bizarre, splendid American tradition, one I hope to spend many exasperated hours trying to explain to my students. I couldn't think of a better way to leave.

At the same time, the prospect of what I'm leaving for is suddenly becoming very real. I am throwing myself into a wholly foreign culture for a year with little more than a smile and a carefully-arranged bag of assorted medical supplies. There's the feeling as I met up with relatives and friends that this might be for one reason or another the last time I see them.

What's more, it might happen from some misfortune on my end, not theirs. Cambodia is a lot safer than it was even five years ago, but I'd rather not see for myself if there is a difference between 'safer' and 'safe.' I have an obligation not only to myself but also to my loved ones that I don't do anything unnecessarily stupid. (The category of the stupid but necessary, however, is one accepted and treasured by all working men and women.) So while I want to meet lots of people and have plenty of fun, out-there experiences, I'm going to try not to do anything that could get me stabbed.

Which, as I think of it, has generally been my operating principle all along. Maybe this will be easier than I thought...

Also, my mom is awesome. That is all.

Posted by flynn at 2:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 11, 2008

If you whistle and hum at the same time...

...You can create overtones like Tuvan throat singers do, incidentally making a sound strangely like a radio tuning or a strong winter wind.

The blog presents me with a great place to put down my thoughts a couple months before I go, and as I stand today, I'm musing over the challenge of finding the middle-range expectation. I don't want to be the stereotypical naive white liberal/Quiet American, thinking they're coming in to enlighten everyone, while ignoring what the students realistically need and what I can realistically provide, which is English instruction and basic cultural fluency. The other benefits of intercultural interaction will come, but I'm being paid to for a job. Completely ignoring that job in favor of high-minded and impossible ideals would be a bad thing.
At the same time, though, I don't want to fall into a cynical resignation before I even begin. I hope to make authentic connections with people, and being hard-minded doesn't mean I can't be open for opportunities to help. Societal change is hard to notice and it takes a long time to build to a point where it actually is noticeable. The best that I can hope for is that my year in Cambodia, if it does have effects, will probably affect people in ways that I might little note nor long remember, but will add up in the long run.

During the elapsed chunk of my time on this sweet swinging sphere, I've figured a few things out about myself. I know that I'm comfortable both leading and following. I know that I enjoy the aquisition of random knowledge via Wikipedia far more than I should. I know that I'm a sucker for big eyes and bright smiles. Most importantly, though, I know that I'm given to grand gestures and big-hearted actions. As nice as that can be sometimes, it can drag after a while if one doesn't develop the requisite hard-heartedness necessary for urban life and its discontents. I had the good fortune to get to talk to my soon-to-be predecessor Andrew Turco at reunions a few weeks ago, and he talked about how draining the entire experience can be. He wasn't even aware of its effects until he took a vacation for a few days, and realized how much he needed it, how much relief he got out of it.

I've been rambling a bit here, and I'm still very much in the early stages of figuring out how I ought to orient myself to my impending experience. I think my watchword should probably be, "Striking a balance." The balance between playing it safe and swinging for the fences, the balance between the naive worldsaver and the snotty expat. The balance of expectations, the balance of preparedness (I don't want to over-plan to the point that I'm too busy to embrace strange opportunities that come my way.)

Bah, I'm getting fuzzy and abstract now. That's a good sign it's time to stop writing. On the plus side, I did try to put in a link.

Posted by flynn at 5:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

The Rudimentary Beginnings of a Highly Rudimentary Endeavor

My name is Adam Flynn and I get to contemplate the possibility of being the biggest person in the entire country of Cambodia.

Oooh, I get to have a jump. More after the Jump.

I am going to Cambodia to teach at the Royal University of Phnom Penh as part of the Princeton in Asia program. It's a great side-step after college, because it gives me a good answer to the question, "So, what are you doing after graduation?" More importantly, however, dropping onself into a foreign culture delivers a badly-needed jolt to your perceptions of human nature, the all-important torquing of perspective that only deep travel can really bring.

While I am very enthusiastic about jumping into the great wide world of the Khmer, I'm still feeling out this whole internet thing. It's probably going to be a learning process, so bear with me as I figure out the whole blogging thing. I expect by the end of the year I'll have all sorts of sweet stuff piled up on here in a tasteful but functional design that maximizes my effectiveness while minimizing my hassle. But that's in a year from now. I do have a twitter, however, and am endeavoring to figure out how to plug that sucker into my bloggaria. Right now I'm just hoping to get this entry to appear. Wait, I need to have links, right? All good blog entries are filled with links, creating a sort of intertextual hypertext. Well, maybe that's my objective for next entry. Right now I just need to enter words that seem interesting to me. Trappings and fixin's are to follow, along with a more definite answer to the question of "who does this jerk think he is, anyway?"

Posted by flynn at 2:53 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack