Community Activities

Hello, avid readers.

            I’m somewhat falling behind with things I want to write about. Training is coming to a screeching halt soon. We will be celebrating Pchum Ben, finishing up classes, and saying goodbye to our training host families by this Thursday. I’ll talk more about that in a future post.

            One of the tasks of training is a community activity. We were told to get into groups of about 3, and plan a project we could do with our community with a budget of 10 dollars for each group. Well, because of the small amount of money, and the lack of time to really plan a lot, my training village decided to pool our money for just two major projects.

            Our first project was a School Beautification project. Literally, we just went with a bunch of garbage bags, and just picked up garbage all around the school for a few hours. Garbage in Cambodia is treated very differently here than in America. Throwing an empty wrapper on the side of the road is completely acceptable. Sometimes people clean it up. Usually people don’t. At schools, there is usually a rotation system where students clean up the school grounds once a week. But they don’t really RAKE the school free of trash like we did. When the trash is picked up, it is brought to a larger pile of trash to e burned. These piles can be pretty big, and if you know anything about fire, you would know that it would take a lot to burn through the trash completely. You can burn those piles of trash for hours, and still only get rid of about 1% of the pile. That is because the pile is often wet, has non-flammable material, and oxygen can’t get in through the pile.

            In addition to picking up the garbage, we also built 3 large cement bins- 1 for recycling, 1 for compost, and 1 for burning. We invited all the students to come help, and they all came, but most left within the hour once they saw what we were doing lol. Cleaning up the trash is just a foreign idea to them. They don’t see the trash as a health issue, but rather just as a beauty issue, so they don’t care as much. There were some students however who stayed the whole time and really worked hard! But we learned that in the future if we were to do another project like this, we would add an education section of it, to explain why we are cleaning the school, and why the cleanliness should sustain.

            I was more involved in planning our second project, which was a gender empowerment workshop. We had 20 boys and 20 girls show up. We separated them, and had the boys lead the boys and the girls lead the girls. In the girls room, we started with modeling a T-chart talking about men and women in America. We listed all kinds of things, such as that both are expected to go to college, but only men are expected to be good at sports. Then we had the girls make their own T-chart about Cambodia. Cambodian students are very shy, especially the girls, so sometimes it was hard to get them to participate, but all in all it went very well.

            I know in the boys’ room they had guest speakers who were exemplary Khmer men. One talked about his relationship with his wife and kids, another talked about relating with women in the workplace, and the last one talked about his mother.

            The second half of the workshop was about relationships- having healthy ones and avoiding abusive ones. This was tricky because Khmer people don’t really have relationships like we do in America. They rarely date, and if they do, they are expected to marry that person. I think this maybe just makes it even more important to tell them about having good relationships, because they have never heard it before, and it’s not something they talk about ever. That is not for  lack of abusive relationships existing, but more because it is pretty much socially acceptable.

            So for the second half, both groups heard from two presenters, myself and another volunteer. I talked first hand about my experience in an abusive relationship and my teacher translated. It was actually very difficult to talk about and I was very nervous and shaky. I of course didn’t share everything, because a lot of it wouldn’t culturally translate, but I shared enough. Both the boys and the girls were fixed on listening to my story. After I shared with the groups (separately, girls then boys), I shared with them a chart about the four different types of abuse- emotional, verbal, physical, and sexual. We talked about examples of abuse from my story, which included the first three. I could tell that this information was so new and foreign to the boys and girls. They are not taught about this in a health class like we are in America. My teacher was even finding it hard to find words that would translate from abuse and other key words.

            The chart included the types of abuse, and the kinds of things that it represents. My teacher told me that she learned a lot from the whole presentation, and even wrote it all down for her future reference. I made sure to stress to everyone that abuse does not just come in the form of physical as many people believe, and it also does not just happen to women.

            After I spoke, another volunteer shared a story that was very powerful. I won’t share here because it is not my place to. But overall it was a very emotional and powerful day. The presenters especially felt it. I know for a fact that we at least got the students thinking about abuse, which is a huge step forward.

            For me, I feel like this project was a success because I know I really got through to my teacher and another Khmer Peace Corps staff member. She came to me afterwards and thanked me for sharing my story. She told me that our stories are the same, and she had a man just like I did. She told me that I was lucky because I did not marry him- and she did. Now she is divorced, but she put up with it all for a long long time, and her life will never be the same. She told me it was somehow comforting to know that even in a developed country like America, things like this still happen, and we are all in this together.

            The first two pictures are of the trash bins we made. Those are some of my favorite Khmer students helping. The third picture is from the Gender Empowerment workshop. The fourth is of my mom chopping open a coconut. Usually she uses a bigger machete lol. Oh, and don’t tell her but… I actually don’t like coconut! The next one is of my mom cooking. Usually she cooks in the little wooden building behind the house, but this day she let me watch her cook. The last one is pretty self explanatory- fish in the market.