I excel at starting blog posts. I kinda suck at finishing them. (Another unpolished update.)

     I have about five half-written drafts of blog posts. I write a little about my job, then I start over and write a little about my Khmer lessons, then I start another post and write about my everyday life and observations. Sometimes I want to write about the bigger lessons I think I'm learning, and sometimes I want to write about the ridiculous and hysterically amusing moments that happen every single day.


     I'm busier than I thought I would be. I had fantasies about long expanses of free time - and I had that free time for 6 weeks before we moved, but I'm not having any now. The days fly by, and I find that I'm working or studying or stomping on laundry or doing what I used to do at home: spending time online. (Having decent internet at home is both a blessing and a curse, but more of the former than the latter. Feeling connected to people at home is part of what feeds my soul.)


     Every day there are challenges. Every day there are moments of joy and discovery, moments of amusement and delight, and moments of doubt and crisis of confidence. Every day is filled with moral, financial, and interpersonal dilemmas. The soundtrack and background scenery of my life has been transformed, and yet the internal methods of processing what goes on around me remain familiar.


     Sometimes, I celebrate small victories, like being able to ask how much something costs at the market and being able to understand the answer. (It happens rarely, but it happens.) Sometimes I suffer complete and utter confusion and uncertainty.


     I commute to work on a bicycle, passing everyday scenes that I couldn't have imagined a couple of years ago, and sometimes listening to This American Life or Fresh Air on my iPod. Worlds collide between my ears.


     I study Khmer with a young man of 24, who was a monk for 6 years, whose 10-year-old brother died of dengue fever in May, whose father threw him out at the age of 16 because he wanted to go to school beyond the 6th grade, who went to school with no breakfast or lunch, whose mother was a "crazy woman" who wandered from village to village through most of his childhood. I pay him $50/month for nightly lessons, which may be more than he's ever made in his life.


      I love my job, but I fear being the bull in the china shop, barging in to make changes and "improvements." I vacillate between being sure I know how I might help, and being sure that I'm fooling myself. I struggle with the constant tendency in my head to think about how I've done things in the past and to wipe the slate clean and start all over again. What skills do I bring with me that are useful, and when am I being an imperialistic bitch?


     We get text messages like "I think on sunday at 7 o'clock we will can meet and can talk for 3 or 4 hour it's OK."  Everyone wants to come over and be our friend, but I'm never sure exactly why - I hardly feel worthy of so much attention just because my skin is white.


     There's an old woman who comes to the clinic and latches on to me as if I'm her long-lost daughter. She holds my hand, hugs me around the waist, strokes my arm, all the while making intense eye contact and speaking in Khmer, which I don't understand a bit. I respond by hugging her back, holding her hand, and speaking back to her in English, which she doesn't understand a bit. Today, I finally had a translator available and asked what she was saying to me. "She wants $3 to buy food," was the answer. 


     How do I turn down a request for pocket change that I'll never miss? But how do I grant one request and then ignore the thousand more that will follow from everyone who hears that the barang lady at the clinic is giving away money? How do I live with myself when we go out to dinner one night and spend $11, and a mother has come into the clinic that day with a 2-year-old who weighs 14 pounds due to severe malnutrition? It's hard enough to do that when the starving children are 8,000 miles away and you can change the channel when they show up on TV, but how do we do that here? 


     I don't know how, but we do it. On a regular basis.


     How would you do it?