Just Keep Biking...

Picture this: sitting in a sarong after a cold bucket shower listening to the geckos and beetles prey on mosquitoes and the flies run into the ceiling from the comfortable confines of your mosquito net... This is my life in Cambodia. Since arriving at my training host family’s home last Sunday, this is exactly how I spend my nights after dinner and following about an hour of extra-help language class with my younger sister. I go to bed between 9 and 10 and wake up to the dogs barking between 5 and 6. And then the day begins with 4 hours each of technical training and language training. This schedule means that the days are long, but the weeks fly by. Today marked the end of my 2^nd week since I met the other PCTs in DC for staging.

My host family is absolutely wonderful! I have a dad, mom, grandmother, and two sister (older and younger). My house is quite big with an open-air downstairs equipped with 3 hammocks, and upstairs bedrooms. My parents are farmers and my older sister teaches high school Khmer. We have 2 cows, 3 dogs, 4 pigs, and more chickens (here they have few feathers to speak of) than I can count. For the first few days I thought that I had a younger brother too, but it turns out that he is just a neighborhood kid that comes over all the time and likes to record me singing American pop songs with my sister on his phone without me knowing. Embarrassing…


I live about a 3 mile bike ride from the center of town - one of the, if not THE farthest CHE trainee houses. Definitely good exercise… Here is my beautiful mountain bike that helps with the dirt roads and washed out paths (because of the monsoon rains) between the rice paddies that I have to navigate on my way to language class at my Language and Cross-Culture Facilitator's (LCF) home everyday. 

Motor-bikes, taxis, and tuk-tuks got nothin' on me!

My Khmer is… coming along. The structure is not too bad (i.e. there are no verb conjugations!), but pronunciation has been hard to pick out thus far. Hopefully with time I will start to pick up more and more. My sister says that I am doing well, I say that I am trying…   

Until next time! Joom reap leah!
(I will post pictures later.)