Rabies for my Birthday

Two and a half weeks ago I celebrated my 25^th birthday in Phnom Penh.

Happy birthday to me.

    Coming on the heels of my epic vacation to America, I wasn’t especially looking forward to this birthday.  Last year we had a big boat cruise down the Tonle Sap for January birthdays among Volunteers which helped  take the edge off of any homesickness and this year a lot of Volunteers, myself included, are busy with projects-starting and continuing with likely our last ones before we leave.  Plus, after being away from my Khmer family for so long, I was looking forward to holing up and playing with Avengers action figures for a little while before heading back into the city where I kept getting robbed and scared.  Looking back and now forward again, I realize that there is another, purely “Peace Corps Volunteer” reason that I almost skipped celebrating living a quarter of a century thus far: my work.

    Birthdays, if nothing else, mark the passage of time and hitting a second one here caused  me to look closer at the work I am doing more, perhaps, than the half-way mark did.  Peace Corps is a “grassroots organization” and works “from the ground up” placing Volunteers in the places where we are supposed to have the most impact: directly in villages for person-to-person contact.  During training when I first arrived, I often heard that a difficult part of being a Volunteer was that we wouldn’t necessarily get to see the fruits of our labors bloom, because it takes a long time for this direct contact that we have to make an impact we can identify with the naked eye.  I sit here day after day, doing my best to educate on health, eat rice with local people, and speak their language so to me this is just routine.  I guess I might compare it to looking at my own face every day in the mirror.  I don’t notice little changes because time is going too slowly, but if I meet up with a college friend after returning home they might notice something that I miss. 

It’s amusing and frustrating to me that getting to know people, learning their language and eating meals with them in such a way that I am supposed to have a large impact on them, gets work done so slowly that I might not be able to see it at all.   

So maybe I am getting a little too introspective for a mid-20s American woman – but in the spirit of being a person and making my mark on the world, this birthday makes me wonder if all of my planning and project-ing is worth it.  Am I providing a solution? Am I fixing a problem? Am I adding to a problem? And worst of all possibilities imagined: am I creating a problem?  There is nothing worse than nearing the completion of a contract with which my trade was two years of my American ambition and looking around to see if that two years has made a difference to anyone but me-not that it wasn’t worth it for that reason alone. 

The Friday morning before my birthday I was bitten by a dog in the village during my morning jog.  When the run had been completed, and I returned back to my ptaya, my host mom asked me if I was tired.  I told her no, but that a dog had bitten me.  She had a rather unencouraging response: with a gasp, she said something about shots, and two minutes later asked me if I had called my doctor yet.  It was about 6am.  I texted the doctor and washed and bandaged the bite and then got to work on the weeks laundry before getting a call from the great doctor herself.  She told me I had to come into Phnom Penh for post-exposure rabies shots.  I sighed.  I’m going to get rabies for my birthday, I thought, and promptly informed my host mom who called the toury man to pick me up.  In order to not zombie-out, I needed two shots given three days apart. 

In the end my birthday was saved by the people who keep me sane: my amazing friends.  The ever energetic and enthusiastic Caitie got me excited to celebrate my decades passing, and met up with me in Phnom Penh along with Andrew and Evan and they, along with a few other Volunteers, went out for a birthday dinner and drinks, ringing in my 25^th in style. 

Caitie decorated our guesthouse room. She is bomb at making signs. 

Mexican food for birthday dinner!

I have the best friends. (Christin and Caitie)

Meghan and Kelly had birthdays immediately after mine.

And while I didn't zombie-out from the bite, it was a full moon that night...so I am not entirely sure werewolf-ing is out of the question.  Fingers crossed!

xo-Amanda