The way that
tourys and taxis work is that they stop for anyone standing on the side of the
road. Occasionally, they will stop after a few hours for some food and a
break. At one point within the first hour or so of the ride, a cute
little yeay with a face amidst wrinkles and a mini body curled up from age
sitting in front of me with a headscarf on turned to me and she asked softly in
Khmer, "where are you going?" I told her I was heading to Kampot, and
she asked why. I responded that I was going to see my friends and she
smiled at me and turned back towards the front. Then she turned to the
man next to her and told him that I lived in her village and understood Khmer.
She smiled at me again and I wondered how many people I would meet who
already knew of me. "Yeay," by the way, is the Khmer word for
"grandmother" and I use it to describe any grandmotherly-looking
Khmer woman here...but they are called "Ohm" if they are not actually
your grandmother - like I would describe her as a "Yeay", but call
her "Ohm."
Anyway, we
were on our way and I had made another friend, when we stopped about halfway
through the trip for some fruit or coffee on a roadside stand. I got out
of the toury and headed over to a stand to purchase some minooah (pineapple). "How much?" I asked the man after he had handed me a plastic bag with the
juicy fruit. "Two dollars" he told me and I stared at him.
"T'lei naa" I said to him, too expensive. Two dollars is
an outrageous price for roadside pineapple, 50 cents is more likely and he
probably gave me an inflated foreigners price thinking that I am made of money.
I started to argue with him in Khmer, holding the pineapple in one hand
and some bills in the other, waving my hands and trying my best to pronounce
the right words in the right order when all of the sudden I heard a harsh nasal
voice next to me and I turn to find the yeay from the toury giving the
pineapple man the lowdown. She waved her hands and spat some Khmer I
think I'm glad that I didn't understand, while he just looked at her with a
sour face, gesturing to me occasionally but not pointing which I thought must
be a good sign. It’s considered very
rude to point with just a finger in Khmer, so if you want to gesture to
something you use your whole hands. I’ve
heard that fights have been started with a simple point. I was completely
astounded by this yeay, she was incredible. She scolded him. And he was ashamed. Grumbling, he handed me some bills and waved me away
and I picked at the sweet treat in my plastic bag with a toothpick. Who
runs the world? Yeays. Yeays run the world. And if I had the support of all the Yeays, I could run the world too. She just turned to me and
smiled and a few minutes into our continued ride, in a warm voice I could
barely hear, said goodbye and exited the toury. Goodbye, guardian angel,
I thought to myself.
For the
rest of the ride, an hour or so, I sat squished against the side of the van
with open windows in front of me and behind me, thankful for the breeze that
comes with a speeding maniac Khmer driver, staring out the window. It
looked to me like mayk jong plee-ung (the sky wanted to rain) and I started
throwing up prayers to whatever deity might be listening. Side note:
I'm fairly certain that whenever the gods get bored they look over the
earth and come to rest their all-seeing eyes on Kampong Saom.
"Amanda!" I know they think to themselves, "let's throw some
random shit her way, she always puts on a good show" and thus my life here
is a ballgame with consecutive curve balls that I commit to memory for your
entertainment on this blog. But I digress - back to my prayers: with 32 people
in the toury (remember it's the size of a van), not too many things could have been worse than closed windows.
I think I may have developed claustrophobia in that toury and if not it's
because some jerk deity up on Mount Olympus decided it would be more fun to
pack me into another toury or like situation down the road, or that a
psychological breakdown on my part in said toury ride would ruin their fun.
Not to point fingers, because that would start a fight, but it was
probably Hermes. To end this little aside, it didn't rain, and 32 was the limit
on the bodies inside. Soon enough people started to de-toury. When I started to see signs for Kampot town I
called a fellow PCV who resides in Kampot province and asked her where I should
be let off. Not entirely sure where the
toury ended, I tried to describe my surroundings. There were some road stands…a road…Khmer
people…Khmer people selling rice and other food…aaaannndddd pretty much
everything else that is in every single village in the country. When I travel I like to think that I would be
able to pick out places near my village and recognize them due to singular
characteristics but the truth is that each village looks more or less just like
every other village and I would probably mistake a road in the far north for my
own if I were traveling alone and didn't speak Khmer. And forgot where I was
going.
She told me to
get off at the market and I prayed that the toury would end up at a market and
that it would look like every other market I had seen so I would know when to
de-toury. It eventually stopped at what
looked like a market and everyone got off so I followed suit, confident that I
could at least get lost if nothing else and do so in a town that I had never
been to. After spending a little more
time on the phone with my PCVbff, I was told to get a tuktuk or walk towards
the river and there I would be able to find everyone. She told me the word for river was
“dtoon-lay” which is what I repeated over and over to myself as I was approached
by some moto drivers asking if I wanted a ride anywhere. “Dtoon-lay no eina?” I asked them, where is
the river? They looked at me with a
rather blank look that I am quite familiar with by now so I pulled out my dictionary
and looked up “river”. It literally said
“dtoon-lay” so I repeated my question: Where is the river? After some silence and shaking heads, I
walked toward the market and repeated my question to another group of Khmer
people and received the same blank stares.
So I turned the dictionary towards them and pointed to the Khmer word
printed next to the English word for “river” and they shook their heads at
me. “Awt yull” they said to me, I don’t
understand. I pointed, using all of my
fingers together, to the word on the page.
“No ei-na” I said slowly, where is that.
They handed the book back to me and I turned to walk down the
street. There had to be a person in this
town who understood my accent, read Khmer, or in general got the gist of what I
wanted to do. At that point a moto
driver came up to me “moto?” he asked me, and I shook my head. “dtoon-lay no eina?” I asked him back. He pointed down a street. “Go straight and turn left” he said to me in
Khmer. I asked him how many kilometers
and he said probably about 1 so I thanked him and began down the road. What an idea.
It turns out that there isn’t a road that leads straight to the water,
there are a few different places one can turn left. So I turned left at random and figured that
if I just kept turning left and going straight I would eventually make it to
the water. Down one side street I came
to a guesthouse and figuring that it might cater to tourists and someone might
speak English, I wandered in to find a little girl playing in the front of the
guesthouse. She looked at me with no
particular interest and I looked back at her, thinking about a major difference
between America and Cambodia, this child being exhibit A. O well, with a shrug
I asked her if she knew where the river was in Khmer. She looked at me again and then went into
hallway to the back, presumably to find someone older who maybe understood the
foreigner in front of her. I stood alone
in the room. She came back and looked at me again, shaking her head. “Dtoon-lay
no eina?” I asked again and she turned around and went to the back again. After five minutes or so, she came back again
and stood in front of me, silently staring at me. I asked her again and she made no motions, so
I mimed writing and she went to a side of the room. Out of her pink mini backpack, she pulled a
pencil and notebook, and I drew the curvy lines of water on it. She nodded at me, put her writing materials
back, and motioned for me to follow her outside. Once outside she pointed down the street,
made a motion to turn left, then right, then left again. I tried to repeat all of this back to her in
Khmer and she nodded, and then started walking forward, motioning to me again
to follow her.
What could I do? A silent
four year old who had left her shoes behind had taken it upon herself to ensure
that I arrived at the river, which apparently I couldn't even say in
Khmer. Clearly she thought very little
of my ability to survive alone, and even though she wasn't talking to a stranger...she was leading one around her town. In hindsight...maybe I should be thinking about who I follow around strange towns...
At one point I asked her name, and she told me
a clearly what it was in Khmer which I promptly forgot (I am very bad at Khmer
names) so I know she could talk. Three
turns and about 4 minutes later, we arrived a block away from the river and she
stopped. “Akoon jaran” I said to her,
thank you very much, and I put my hands together and gave her a sompeah (a
little bow of respect). She put her hands
together and turned around, walking back the way she came to the
guesthouse. I looked around, wondering
if anyone else had seen that, if it was strange, if I was going crazy, and then
got a call from someone wondering where I was.
“I was just escorted to the river by a four-year-old who was concerned
for my safety” I told the person on the line.
“Where am I?!”
Two days later
it was time to get back to site. A PCV
came with me to help me get a toury back to my house, or at least my road. We arrived back at the market and started
asking around for tourys that went to Kampong Saom (my province) until we were
directed to a particularly dusty blue one that was already full. I headed to the van and turned towards a
group of men sitting nearby who looked like they were associated with it. “Where are you going?” I asked. The driver
sauntered towards me. “Where do you want to go?” he responded, and I grimaced.
If this toury was my only travel option, it was going to be a long ride. I gave him the name of my village and then my
stop and he nodded. I asked him how much
it would be and he gave me an outrageous price which I began, with the help of
the other PCV, to argue about. Finally
finding a price we agreed on, I climbed into the van.
It was completely packed full of bodies. Young, old, male, female, everyone who needed to get anywhere from Kampot to Kampong Saom was on that toury, including a young baby and her mother who caught my attention very shortly in the ride. The reason? The crying.
There are babies in almost every toury, and I've noticed that many babies tend to cry. Usually I don't bother to find out the reasons because they stop. This one started...and then kept going. After ten
minutes I was astonished at this baby's resolution. Surely it would tire sooner
or later. It must have heard me think that because in what was obviously
blatant disregard for my ears and nerves, it continued to cry. And cry. And
cry. I ventured a few looks around the toury, knowing I couldn't possibly be
the only one affected. The man next to me felt my pain at least- he had
started to make cooing noises in the direction of the baby and faces in a vain
attempt to elicit laughter or a smile, but at the very least, a cease in the
tears. Once, it stopped just long enough to give him a toothless smile
but then realizing that the sound of wailing came from its own mouth, started
up again. The pause was long enough for me to see that it wasn't even crying. It was just scrunching up its face and
wailing. What?! Why would it do that?! What an attention whore. Nobody was
bothering it, all of this crying drama was just unnecessary. Sure, the
toury was a little hot, but so is the rest of Cambodia. I tried to be sympathetic
to the child - after all, this toury was what it had to look forward to, but
the constant noise drowned out my empathy.
Thankfully,
the mother and child got off and I tossed up a quick thanks in the direction of
the heavens. This one was directed at Allah - I hadn't talked to him in a
while, but that's because my Arabic isn't really coming along (now that's a
tough language) and I don't want him to misinterpret my prayers. You should see
the stuff Buddha gets confused.
I made it back
just fine though, and am currently reclining in my hammock, planning a few
projects and translating some Khmer. Did
I mention that I can read it?! Very exciting for me. Before you know it, I’ll be writing the best
of Khmer poetry. I am, after all, Amanda
Arand, woman of letters.
Xo-Amanda
