This is so great! Jaz is doing all the writing and I'm off the hook.

(Photo courtesy of an email from Bill Lowell, to which Steve responded: 

"Hey no need to be abusive to the kid.  Give him his hat back.")

Click here: The Adventure Begins

Read and enjoy.

Our nest empties once again

     For those who are wondering, Jaz and Sovann left yesterday morning for Bangkok, and right now they're somewhere between Kuwait and New York. It was an intense week, and perhaps someday I'll write about it, but while I still suffer from an inability to construct an interesting sentence, you should catch up on Jaz's blog here if you haven't already. I'm hoping jet lag won't stop her from writing again soon.

      Enjoy!

January 2012

     I hate to let the whole month go by without at least one post, but none of what I've written this month is worthy of your time.

     Instead, I'll let Jaz tell you what's on her mind. Leave it to her to write an intriguingly-titled first post: Jaz and Sovann's Excellent Adventure to America: Read About My Feelings Or Fuck You..

That's my girl...

Wherever you go...

     As the year comes to a close, I feel compelled to write something. My head is full of thoughts, but I can't seem to put them in words. No surprise - this happens to me all the time lately.

     It's been an interesting year, that's for sure. Never a dull moment, even when I desperately wanted one. While the scenery of my life has changed over the last year and a half, I'm still who I've always been. I still have a tendency to gain weight too easily, to talk too loudly, and to succumb too easily to inertia. I still want to feel useful, and still struggle to decide if I am. I still worry about money at odd times. I have tested all my social skills more than ever - trying to find a balance between my inner introvert and my bouts of extroversion, like I have some kind of social bipolar condition.

     Because wherever you go, there you are. And here I am, still struggling with the same things I've always struggled with, still changing my mind from one day to the next about whether I'm meeting those challenges successfully.

     In our early months here, I sometimes felt lonely for people who really knew me. Not necessarily anyone in particular, just people who knew I was reasonably competent at something, people with whom I had a history that allowed us to make references to past shared experiences, people who knew my kids, people who knew my shortcomings and still chose to be my friends. And people my own age. At 49, it's easy to feel old here, because I am easily 15+ years older than most of the people in my current social group. They're very tolerant of my advanced age, but still, there's no one to commiserate with about menopause. In any case, there are now people here who know me, and I like that a lot.

     As 2011 draws to a close, I spent part of the day organizing - putting away the few Christmas decorations we have, straightening out my desk and rearranging things in the guest room. It's my default coping mechanism for feeling like my internal life is a little too chaotic: make order on the outside, and hope it seeps in. But as usual, making orderly piles of paper and stacking books and towels doesn't really touch the jumble of emotions that swirl in my head and my heart. I am so grateful to be here, and sometimes so frustrated by being here. I love that our kids are all grown up enough that we can be so far away and know that they are fine, and I feel guilty for being so far away from them. I think about all the things I thought I would have accomplished by now but haven't and I feel like a failure, and then I remember the things I have learned and have done and I feel some satisfaction, possibly even some pride. I sometimes think about the things we sacrifice by living here, and then I am quickly reminded of all the great joys and privileges that come with this life we chose.

     So I'm feeling something, but can't easily label it. Maybe I'm feeling everything. Maybe I'll stop trying to organize my thoughts and just let them be.

     Resolutions? I usually avoid them, unless they're general and vague. One year, my resolutions were to "exercise, moisturize, and economize." I felt pretty successful at those, at least for a good long while. This year, perhaps I should aim for some structure and self-discipline, however I want to implement that. I know what kinds of things make me feel better: getting enough sleep, getting some exercise, reading and writing, learning new things. I just don't do those things often enough. Why is so hard to start doing the right things? Once I get started and have some momentum, it's not that hard to keep going, but starting is the tough part. And if a new year isn't a good excuse for starting things, I don't know what is.

     So, no promises, people, other than to give it a good shot. To wake up every day and take a few minutes to think about what will make my day feel worthwhile in the end.
   
     As for this evening, we will enjoy Cambodia's last 2011 sunset from our balcony and spend the evening with friends, doing our best to avoid the mayhem of all the drunken backpackers downtown. And when I wake up in the morning, I'll think about how I'd like to spend the first day of 2012.

     Wishing you all the best in the year ahead. Who knows what adventures it may bring?
     

All I want for Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa/Solstice/Festivus...

     Never mind all the time I spend window-shopping on Amazon.com, creating ridiculous wish lists like a little kid - what I really want are emails from folks at home. And I realize that's asking a lot. You're all busy and stressed with holiday preparations of your own, so I don't care if those emails come now or in February or whenever you have the time to sit and write something. Every one of those emails, like every single one we have already received since we got here, will be a gift. A wonderful, heart-warming gift.

     Because absence DOES make the heart grow fonder, and I feel better every time I hear news from home about how life goes on like we remember it. Knowing that those of you back home are still doing what you do and being who you are somehow makes it possible for me to be here.

     So, what are you up to these days???

"How long will you stay in Cambodia?"

     I am shocked to realize that I haven't posted anything in almost over a month, but considering how busy it's been and how much time it takes me to write a post, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised. There's so much to write about that I think the best I can manage are some bullet points, in no particular order. And because I've written this over the course of a week or two, I've added some updates to my update in italics where needed.

• The weather has made the full transition from rainy season to dry season. In fact, we are just now enjoying the beginning of "cold season" when we wake up to temperatures in the 70's. No more air conditioning needed at night, no more puddles to splash through when driving around town, no more worries about leaving the windows open when we leave the house and risking the rain coming in. Instead, we have to remember to water the plants on the balcony every day and sweep a bit more often as the road dust settles everywhere, but for now, the raincoats can be safely packed away for another six months. (Update: This morning it was 64 degrees and still only 68 at 10:30 am. Crazy! On the other hand, we had two days with rain last week, completely out of the blue.)
• It is interesting to notice that even though the length of the day here doesn't change nearly as much from season to season as it does back home, there is a noticeable difference. Darkness sets in completely by 6:00 pm, when it used to be still dusky at 6:30. Also the angle of the sun as it sets is different and the giant sun shade we hang on the balcony in the afternoon no longer blocks it completely.
• I ended back in Phnom Penh twice more since the first trip when we took two children for surgery. The first return trip was unplanned. One of the children had problems develop about ten days after surgery - it turned out he had a tear in the artery behind his knee. We had moved him to a guest house in Siem Reap (from his village about 90 minutes outside of town) to be near the local children's hospital while they tried to figure out what was causing his pain and swelling, and one day when I went to change his bandages, he started bleeding more than I have ever seen in my life. We were very glad to be in town, and after a couple of days staying at the local hospital, we determined that he needed to go back to Phnom Penh for the repair. It made for a crazy week, having to drop everything else to go and making last-minute travel arrangements, but everything went well for him and he is now happily back home, though drastically more anemic, despite his several blood transfusions. (I am very happy to be blood type O, so I can donate to anyone who needs it.) We returned to Phnom Penh again last week, as scheduled, to return the other child for her second surgery. Things went as expected, and I was able to observe interesting surgeries and help out at the hospital a bit. If all goes as planned in the next few months, we won't need to go back to Phnom Penh again for a long time, and while I grew to enjoy the city more over time, I won't miss it.
• In the middle of all this running back and forth, Marissa came to visit from Portland. Her trip was planned very suddenly - she booked on a Sunday and left that Wednesday - and she stayed about two weeks. I think the lesson we took from her trip was that as much as we love Cambodia, we cannot assume that everyone will. We promise not to try to convince anyone else to come who isn't already chomping at the bit to buy a ticket. 
• And speaking of visits, the next month or so promises to be full of people returning to visit Siem Reap. Our friend Richard from London, who was my co-worker and our housemate for a few months last year is arriving later today. (Richard is here, and we are as thrilled as ever to have him.) Other friends and acquaintances are returning, among them our friends Mark and Nora, who were here for a few months and now live in Canada and Korea, who are coming on Christmas Eve for a week. My friend Karen, a Cambodia veteran whose company I enjoyed so thoroughly back in July will be back here in time to ring in the new year with us. And to top it all off, my dearest friend Miriam is coming to visit in early January. (Miriam came here with us in 2009, so she knows what she's getting into.) My hope is to work less and play more over the next few weeks and enjoy time with all these amazing and amusing people.
• Soon after the floods receded for good in Siem Reap, there was a huge fire just a couple of blocks from our house. There is an area along the river where people have built dozens of stilted houses perched over the water, living in the back and running small businesses in the front. They are all there illegally, and the government has been trying to move them out for a while, so when they started to go up in flames one night, there were lots of theories about how the fire may have started. As far as I know, there was no foul play and no one was hurt, but those people lost every single thing they owned and nothing was left of their houses but the charred remains of stilts reaching up out of the river. In a show of typical Cambodian resilience, people began rebuilding the very next day, and within a week, you could hardly tell what had happened there except for one spot where a charred pile of wood remained. One of the scary things about the fire was how well it illustrated the lack of emergency services here. There is no central fire department, and no 911 to call in case of emergency. When the fire started, people were posting on the Siem Reap Ex-Pat Facebook page asking how to call a fire department. When one department was called, they demanded $400 before they would even show up. Luckily, there is a very posh hotel quite close the fire and that place has its own fire truck, so they were quickly on the scene. It's amazing that even more houses didn't burn down, considering they're essentially made of dry kindling materials (bamboo, wood scraps, and thatch, for the most part) and packed in tightly together. I still don't know how to call a fire department, but our house is concrete and tile and there isn't much in it that could burn, so I don't worry too much.  
• Speaking of emergencies and lack of services, there was another scary example of that sandwiched in between my last two trips to Phnom Penh. An American guy who had arrived in town about ten days earlier went missing one night when he was supposed to be riding a motorbike between Siem Reap town and an area about 25 minutes away. The guy he had been staying with (but had only known for a few days), Joel, started calling and looking around town for him. About 36 hours after his disappearance, he was found at the local government hospital, with an obviously serious head injury that they were completely unqualified to treat. He was found lying there with a IV of tylenol, barely able to be roused and unable to tell you his name or even what country he was in. I ended up spending several hours that day trying to help Joel figure out what should be done with him. The International Hospital was the obvious choice, except for the fact that all they would want to do would be to airlift him to Bangkok (at the cost of $10,000 or so), and we were pretty sure this guy had no insurance and probably not much money. We got him out of the government hospital as fast as we could, taking him to a private clinic for a rudimentary CT scan, and I started calling every doctor I know in town who might be able to offer advice, while Joel got busy calling the embassy. Many, many calls later, having cashed in a lot of favors and asking for help from a variety of sources, we arranged to take him to a hospital in Phnom Penh that most people agreed would be the best choice. The clinic that did the CT scan wanted us to pay $400 to hire an "ambulance" to take him there, but since an ambulance here has no equipment, no medicine, and no trained staff, we just hired a van to make the drive. Joel dropped everything he had going on here in town at his business and went along to Phnom Penh. When Joel came back to Siem Reap a few days later, I was getting ready to go to Phnom Penh for my next work trip, so I visited daily and brought food. (Hospitals here don't feed you, or do much else, for that matter.) While we were genuinely afraid for this guy's life in the beginning, he is recovering slowly but surely and is now back in Siem Reap. The interesting thing has been watching his brain function start to return, and without having known him at all before his accident, I have no idea whether the personality traits that are most obvious are pre-existing or still a function of his brain injury. I suppose time will tell. He is, without a doubt, an interesting guy. The lesson in all of this is that travel medical insurance is a good idea and no one should come here without it. (Don't worry; we have it.
• Probably the biggest news of the month is Jaz and Sovann's plan to leave Cambodia and go to Vermont. After an expensive eight-month process of applying for visas and filling out forms and collecting appropriate documents, Sovann was approved in early December for a visa. For those who don't know (as I didn't know just a few years ago), the US is very reluctant to grant even tourist visas to brown-skinned people from poor countries. Most Cambodians we know who have ever tried to get a tourist visa have been declined, even after paying exorbitant fees for the privilege of applying. Knowing all of this, Jaz and Sovann went another route and applied for a fiance visa, which means that for him to be able to stay in the US, they will need to get married within three months of arrival. While that's certainly not what we would have chosen for them to do if given any alternative, Jaz has always marched to the beat of her own drummer and found a way around the limitations that the world tries to place upon her, and this is yet another example. So off they go in February - February in Vermont! Poor Sovann. Despite countless conversations to prepare him for this weather shock (let alone culture shock) I can't imagine that he can really conjure up a clear picture of what he's in for. But an American visa is still the dream of many around the world, and this is his shot at it. Family and friends back home have been supportive and welcoming, and they have a place to stay (with my very generous aunt, Sara.) Jaz will transfer to UVM in time for summer semester, and Skyler is working on finding Sovann restaurant work as soon as he can get his green card and is legal to work. While he waits for that legal work status, I'm hoping someone will teach him how to use a snow shovel and a dishwasher so he can make himself useful around Sara's house. (He certainly can cook - he made an excellent French onion soup last night!) To those back home, I ask you to please make him feel welcome and buy him some long underwear and some rice...
• That will leave Steve and me here all on our own for the first time, which means we're starting to plan our next trip home, probably in June. It will be strange to be here without Jaz, and without Sovann - they've both been a huge part of our lives here. In preparation, I'm starting to learn how to deal with some of the details of everyday life that Sovann has always taken care of for us - how to buy the giant bottles of water and transport it home on my motorbike, how to call the gas company to bring over a new tank when ours runs out, etc. We'll figure all that stuff out, I'm sure, but we will miss them terribly.
• We miss everyone at home, some days more than others. People often ask us, "How long will you stay in Cambodia?" We get the question from local people here and also from family and friends at home, and it's odd not to have a definitive answer. When we first hatched the plan to come to Cambodia, we planned to stay "a year, maybe longer." That quickly morphed into "a year or two, maybe longer." Now I answer by saying, "We'll stay as long as it works for us, and when there's a reason to go home, we will." But what will the reason be? When we run out of money? When our kids start having kids and we can't bear to be so far away? When the everyday annoyances and frustrations of life here overwhelm the sense of privilege of being here? When we no longer feel we have something to offer and contribute here? I think that having at least one of our kids around has been a part of the equation of what works about being here, even if we missed the other three so much. When they're all half a world away, then what? Living abroad (and maybe particularly in a developing country) requires asking questions of oneself about motivation and priorities and purpose on a regular basis. There are so many things about living here that are delightful and interesting and affordable and satisfying, and there are also so many day-to-day challenges and frustrations and unmet longings for familiar friend and family and food. I try to remember that quote I love so much, and just try to live the questions and wait for the answers to reveal themselves in due time. (And what the hell would we do if we went home? I'm pretty sure I would have to give up afternoon naps and get a real job...)
• I know there was much more than this that I wanted to say when I started writing this entry a week ago, but if I wait until I remember it all, I'll never post anything. That probably wouldn't be such a terrible thing, except that occasionally I get reminders from people that they're awaiting the next blog entry, and I hate to disappoint. I still have multiple half-finished blog entries and random scraps of paper with prompts for things I intend to write about - everything from exorcisms to Khmer body-building extravaganzas - and maybe someday I'll get to those. Or maybe (if you're just dying for an excuse to buy a plane ticket) you should just come over here and hear about them in person. We could show you a good time. :)

     Thank you for slogging through this disjointed stream-of-consciousness I just wrote. I hope to do a better job of keeping up with these updates in the coming months. As I say every day, there is never a dull moment here...and I am hardly up to the challenge of documenting them all.

(And I know, photos are long overdue. I'll get to it, I promise.)

I wish someone had been there to see this

     Being a visiting nurse is what I did for a long time before I came here, so it feels familiar and comfortable.

     And I like familiar and comfortable, because so often in my life here, I'm not sure of things. I know what I would do back home, or I know what my past experience tells me makes sense, but this isn't back home and often things that make sense there don't make sense here. So even in that familiar role as a visiting nurse, there are countless challenges and moments of confusion and doubt.

     But some things are clear. When a child who has had surgery needs her bandages changed every couple of days, that's pretty straight-forward. There is room for improvisation within the general principles of what should be done, but there are those general principles, and they seem clear and obvious and without need for cultural considerations. Take off the old bandages, clean the wound, put on the new bandages. A simple, technical task.

     Back in in my VNA days, we all entertained ourselves and each other with tales of odd things that would happen in home visits. Everyone had stories of challenging situations, surreal environments, and general WTF moments. I have my share of stories. And now I can add to them. Here was my "only in Cambodia" moment of the week:

     I went with the translator to the home of one of our kids who had surgery last week. The first thing that caught my attention was his announcement that the girl would be at home waiting for us, but her parents wouldn't be there because they were out harvesting their rice crop. Which doesn't sound so odd, except when you realize that this meant she was home alone all day, unable to walk or move around. No neighbor or grandma standing by to take care of her or bring her food and drink or carry her somewhere when she had to pee.

     So we arrived that morning, and there she was, under the stilted house, lying on something that looks sort of like a very rustic dining room table, cobbled together out of random boards and bits of bamboo, with a few stray nails poking out here and there. I was relieved to see that she wasn't exactly alone: there were half a dozen other kids crowded around, admiring her new markers and coloring book from her hospital adventure. The kids all stared at me, as kids here so often do, particularly out in the countryside. A few smiled in response to my greeting, but some just stared open-mouthed.

     Our little patient was looking quite comfortable, but a bit dirtier than than when I had seen her 48 hours earlier. Both of her feet and ankles were still bandaged, but the outer layer, which was once white, was a serious shade of dirt. It was hard to imagine how it got that dirty so fast, especially since she can't move around at all, but then I saw that her legs were resting on a pillow that looked like it had never been washed in all its years of existence. But she actually had a pillow, which is a bit of a luxury item, so all was good.

     I went about setting up the supplies for the dressing change. This means pulling out all the gauze and scissors and tape and irrigating solution and gloves that I might need and laying them out on a clean surface where they were easily accessible. I had brought one of our clean bathroom towels just for this purpose, and in a couple of minutes, everything was arranged and  ready to go. I put on gloves and started to unwrap the bandages from her feet.

     At this point, a scrawny but very energetic chicken appeared from over my left shoulder, flapping and squawking and landing right in the middle of my supplies, sending a flurry of gauze and paper and gloves and saline flying in all directions.

     In my previous life, I learned to make sure that a client's dog or cat wasn't in the room when I did dressing changes. I figured out how to change a C-section dressing while a mother was nursing her newborn. I've worked where the lighting is poor or the room is cramped or a nervous parent was watching. I know how to handle a variety of situations. But nothing in my past experience had suggested I needed to chicken-proof my plan.

     Oh well. All in a day's work.

     I just wish someone who could appreciate the situation had been there to witness it - because, of course, no one who was actually there even batted an eyelash.