Greetings from Southeast Asia!

Submitted By Jess Emory

 

 

Last I wrote it was the midst of the holidays. For New Years Eve, I was still in Ho Chi Minh City and headed downtown to see the lights and what the city had to offer for the big night. Arriving in District 1 around 6 pm, all the streets were lit by plastic lotus flowers strung between the trees. Already the streets were so crammed with motorbikes that you couldn’t cross the street; not because there wasn’t a break in the traffic but because the bikes were so packed together and sitting there that you couldn’t clamber over them all. The midnight countdown was at some strange pace so that all the people in the streets missed the beat and at midnight there were people screaming 3 or 2 or 1 in a whole handful of different languages. Happy New Year!

 

In early January, I left Ho Chi Minh City and took a bus to Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The city is so alive. Women sit beneath huge hats in the lowest of Asian squats, fish flop in bowls in the shade, stomachs, intestines and livers waiting to be chosen and taken home for dinner. Monks with cellphones sit sidesaddle on motorbikes and ride through traffic beneath golden umbrellas. There are westerners everywhere, both as tourists and as ‘do gooders.’

 

Cambodia is the land of NGOs. Whatever disadvantage plucks your heart strings, there is an NGO that is trying to fix it - women, HIV, children, sex workers, rape survivors, amputees, rural folk, city-dwellers, everyone has a cause and wants to help. There is more funding, more experts circulating trying to make change. I had arranged to work with an NGO called Modern Dress Sewing Factory; a group that works with women living with HIV to both employ them and generate revenue that will pay for their children’s education. My contact was a man named Mr. Bunny and he picked me up from the bus on his motorbike and drove me to my new Cambodian home.

 

I expected there to be cultural differences, obviously Cambodia is not a little America (despite the fact that dollars are the major currency). What I didn’t expect is to find an organization with no direction or business sense, and no desire to get on top of their project. Daily, I struggle against my cultural American self to get over what I think of as being the ideal way of doing things and try and immerse myself in this culture, try to see things the ‘Cambodian’ way and to function within this society in a productive and positive way. There is only so much I can do and realizing this has been a struggle.

 

While here, I explored Ankgor Wat. It is as old and fantastic as you imagine- huge stones and intricate carving, moss growing on the stones, trees weaving their roots in and out of piles of stones that were constructed into temples at the same time that Iceland was three hundred years into its development and America was awaiting Columbus’ arrival. Ancient. Monstrous. Wonderful.

 

Next I am off to New Zealand to work on sheep farms, explore, and speak some English. It will be sad to leave southeast Asia, I’ve lived here now for three months. But the adventure continues.

 

Bits and Bobs, Cambodia style:

ATMs only spit out US dollars, all bills are given in US dollars, and when you ask the price of something, you will be told in dollars. Drinks often come in small plastic shopping bags and you drink them, out of the bag, with a straw. Ice coffees come in plastic cups with plastic slings so you can hang the drink from just about anywhere. Tuk tuks are everywhere (rickshaws that will hold six or fifteen people) and will accost you every time you step out your front door. Monks are everywhere, try not to stare when they whip out their cellphones or start smoking as they walk down the street. There are stands of Johnnie Walker bottles filled with yellow liquid on stands by the roadside. It’s gasoline by the liter for the motorbikes. Before a movie in a theater, they show the Cambodian flag and ask you to rise while they play the national anthem. You will be awakened to the sound of a squeaky toy; it is the recyclers that walk the street with carts collecting bottles and cardboard.