Phnom Chisor (aka ភ្នំជីសូរ)

Amidst all of the hustle and bustle of classes each week, our Saturday excursions are a welcome break from classes, though I'm still constantly processing (or at least attempting to) in Khmer because all of the explanations or information given about a place is stated in Khmer. Needless to say it's exhausting, but at least I'm getting better at understanding! That stuff aside, last Saturday's excursion was to Phnom Chisor about an hour drive South of Phnom Penh in Takeo Province.

It's a popular site for Cambodian students to visit on school trips as I found out while I was there. There weren't many foreign tourists there, but at its top was a spectacular view of the rice and watermelon fields below. Also at the top is a temple built in the 11th century but bombed during the Lon Nol regime in the early 1970s as the Vietnam War was raging and the Khmer Rouge was beginning to build momentum. But words cannot really do it justice, so I'll let the pictures speak for themselves :) You can find them here.

After the trip up the mountain, we stopped by the house of a family who farms watermelon and rice as well as weaves silk cloth to make skirts and the traditional pants/bottoms for Apsara (Khmer Ballet) dancers wear for their performances and to practice. The cloth they made is done by hand on a loom very similar to the one my sister wove on, but instead of petals, there are pieces of wood that you press on to make the different patterns with the base fabric. Yet, unlike the fabric made by my sister, which was done with wool, this fabric is entirely silk including the base. The string is so thin that it takes roughly 2,000 strands to make fabric that is one meter wide. The weavers said that it took them two days to set up the strands and get them threaded through correctly so that they could begin weaving. The actual weaving process for a piece of fabric that was about 104 meters long took them about 9 or 10 months to complete. As one of my classmates said, "it's like having a baby!" or something like that... The results are pretty spectacular either way! [I'll post more photos of the weaving to the same Flicker album soon!]

Back in Phnom Penh and Down the Street

That's where I ended up this time: back in my old neighborhood with a host family that I met and who lived down the street from my old host family near the Russian Market (Tuol Tompong). Everything is old and new again! In the two years since my last stay in this neighborhood, I've now noticed a new international school crop up a street away. I can't even imagine how many there could be within the entire city! But that's one of my jobs in my ethnographic work this summer: to map and describe, as best as I can, the international schools that currently exist in Phnom Penh. On that note, I did notice that my host siblings, a girl in primary and a boy in high school, did not don the uniforms of the state schools in the afternoons, which is apparently when they go to school at this time of year. I'll save the rest of those observations for my field notes...

In the meantime, I am safely and happily settled into my room in my host family's house. I do have AC and a private bathroom in my room, however, the thought of using the AC for long periods of time makes me cringe due to the extraordinarily high price of electricity here. So on nights like last night, I try to take advantage of the cooling effects of the rain, which there was a lot of last night along with some spectacular thunder and lightning. In other news, we had part of our cultural orientation yesterday morning, and though it was mostly in Khmer, I was able to pick up a fair amount of it. We also had our placement tests, both in oral and written form, and I think I did surprisingly well considering how long it has been since I took a Khmer class! However, given that I'm in a program with many near native speakers and very advanced students, I think I have a lot of catching up to do even now! But in the meantime, I'll just keep reading aloud out of my host sister's primary reader and doing the best I can. I think it's back to Khmer third grade for me...

Welcome Back!

A lot has been happening since my last post! This summer I find myself heading back to Cambodia to pickup where I left off with my Khmer language study and to embark on a new project for the masters that I've been fortunate enough to begin at Teachers College, Columbia (TC) this past fall. I've been studying and practicing my Khmer typing skills, though I'm sure they're still going to need some additional help in the couple weeks before classes begin. The first couple days I am in Cambodia I will need to take the dreaded pretest telling me how much, or little, I remember (yikes!). Not only that, but I've also been working with the Institutional Review Board (IRB) at TC to be permitted to start my research for my masters thesis. Some of you may be asking what this acronym, IRB, means and what it has to do with me, so I'll take a second to explain.

The IRB is group of people at any college, university, or research organization in the U.S. that is designed to evaluate any and all proposed studies involving human beings. The idea is to prevent research atrocities like the Tuskegee Study and the events that created the Nuremberg Code. Sometimes what anthropologists, and many other researchers, do in the course of their qualitative research could potentially compromise the status, reputation, or livelihood of the people who participate in their studies, and these impacts may not even be known during the course of the research or after. Thus, the IRB process, which asks the researcher to describe who will be involved and what types of methods (e.g. interviews, focus groups, observation, etc.) will be used to collect data are important to reflecting on how the researcher's actions and even presence could effect the people they work with. My research will involve how families in Phnom Penh make schooling choices for their children, which also needs to go through this process. So right now, I'm working with a former Khmer teacher to help get the informed consent forms my participants will need to sign into their native language. The informed consent forms, though sometimes seem like a bureaucratic hurdle, are an important part of the beginning research process as it describes saying that they understand the study I'm doing and giving me permission to write about their experiences in my thesis or any future publications.  So while I get my physical self prepared with the updates on my vaccines and get all of my stuff together, I also need to take a minute to reflect on what I'm about to do, which is another reason I've decided to take up my blog again (not that it's not an excellent way to communicate with my family and friends ;) ). On that note, let the preparations continue, and I'll be writing more as my journey this summer begins!