This is a final post just to let any of you who are following this blog know that I am home, safe and sound...and even somewhat rested. I flew home via Seoul, though there was such thick fog there that my plane was diverted to Busan, a city further south in Korea. We spent several hours on the tarmac there before flying into Seoul, with just barely enough time to make my connection to the NY flight. (One of my bags didn't make the quick transfer, but I'm assured it will be delivered to my door tomorrow.)
This is the first time I've flown back from Asia by leaving there at midnight, rather than at midday. That meant that it was daylight when we flew across Japan, and then (after a night shortened by the direction we were traveling) it was daytime again as we flew across much of northeastern Canada. I had a window seat and was able to see a Japanese volcano with partly collapsed cone, and later, vast stretches of Canada's northcountry, with ice covering all the rivers and inlets. It's astonishing how far north evidence of human habitation is visible from the air.
I had treated myself to a massage the day I left Phnom Penh, and perhaps that explains why I am less knotted up physically than I've felt in the past after these long transits. It takes more than 18 hours IN THE AIR to do this trip, so of course from arriving at the departure airport to clearing customs at the final airport takes something like 30 hours. I find it hard to keep track of time, especially given the international date line between Asia and North America. Though I spent all that time in transit, I left Phnom Penh just before midnight on Tuesday February 3 and I arrived in NY just before noon on Wednesday February 4. It's very Alice in Wonderland.
I write this morning after a chance to sleep in my own bed for something like normal hours. And I feel quite content with my adventure. Certainly I have given myself the great gift of a break from routine. My decision to return to SE Asia and build some on my knowledge of language and culture there, rather than exploring a totally new piece of the global landscape, feels right. My instinct to do some volunteer work but NOT teach also seems sound. For the first two weeks, while I was on the Earthwatch dig, the biggest decision I faced each day was whether to have fried rice or toast and yogurt for breakfast. Otherwise, everything was taken care of for me, and I didn't bear any responsibility for helping the personalities on the team integrate or see that everyone was content enough or monitor progress toward the overall scholarly goals of the dig. It was a great treat not to be in charge, and this opened up room for me to just be with myself and offer appreciation to those who were carrying those responsibilities.
Living on CLA street in Phnom Penh allowed me to feel the rhythm of an urban neighborhood in a developing country in a way that living in a guest house never would have. The aural landscape was continuous from 6am until 10:30pm...live music (some traditional instruments being played at the orphanage just feet away from my balcony and a girl learning violin at an apartment two doors from mine), lots of recorded Cambodian pop music and plenty of radio, including Western classics (House of the Rising Sun and the theme from TITANIC are both popular), sounds of babies and children playing, sounds and smells of cooking from the 8 households within 20 feet of my 3 rooms in one direction or another, dishwashing, laundry and so forth. I watched a neighbor repot all his outdoor plants for Chinese New Year, breaking them out of their pots to do so. I watched the way the street keeps an eye on its children. I got the elderly lady with some form of dementia who spent hours sitting listlessly outside her daughter's house on the block to smile at me on her good days, because I made a point of making eye contact and nodding or smiling to her every time I passed. I used every trip up and down the uneven concrete stairs to my apartment as an opportunity to stop and be mindful--one of the benefits of my fall down a flight of stairs two years ago, when I was lucky to break only an ankle.
I made inroads in understanding family culture a bit and in being able to speak. One of the small highs of my final day in Cambodia was the tuk-tuk driver who thanked me when I paid him by calling me "borng s'ray" or big sister...which I chose to understand as testimony to the fact that though I was clearly a westerner I had spoken to him all in Khmer and been able to give directions and had known what the fair price for the distance he was taking me was. In response he used the same nomenclature for me he would for a Khmer woman my age in relation to his. A small victory of cultural literacy, which is something I care about.
My thanks to all of you who have supported me in this venture, whether by making it possible for me to have a leave from teaching, or by covering what I would ordinarily be doing, or by your encouragement, or by following this blog. I have a few more weeks of relatively open time before I go back to a full schedule of teaching and directing, around March 1. I am awake to how lucky I am.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
Monday, February 2, 2009
Cooking Class
It's another gorgeous 80 degree day here in Phnom Penh. On the next to last day of my adventure, I decided to take a Cambodian cooking class, sponsored by a restaurant here. As promised, it began at 9am with a trip to the market. I finally learned what the mystery ingredient galangal actually looks like. It's similar to ginger but a larger and more yellow root, and the two can't be substituted for one another. It's listed in a number of the recipes I have in cookbooks at home, and since I haven't known what to look for in Asian markets, I've been stumped.
After the market trip, I climbed two sets of very steep metal stairs to a rooftop cooking school with two companions (a young Australian couple just finished with a 2-week volunteer tour of Thailand, and about to connect with their Cambodian tour group) and our teacher. The breeze was lovely, and there were 10 stations with gas cook tops and cutting boards and large wooden mortar and pestles waiting for us there. Plus a skillful and shy young woman who did all the washing up and had our ingredients prepped for us as we worked through the day.
The teacher is a young chef, just 22, with good English. He is a graduate of Friends, the NGO program that runs two restaurants (and a souvenir shop and now also a tailor shop) in Phnom Penh that are entirely staffed by former street kids. They learn to be servers and kitchen staff, and eventually graduate to jobs in other restaurants around the city. This young man came from the provinces near Viet Nam and spent two years on the streets in PP before he started at Friends, where he trained for 6 years. He's now designed the menu for the restaurant that runs the cooking school (owned by a Dutch national) and is in university nights after teaching cooking classes for tourists 6 days a week.
By 10:30 am we had started to cook. We finished up at about 3pm, stuffed--having made spring rolls with taro and carrot, sweet and sour dipping sauce, banana blossom salad, fish amok (in a banana leaf bowl, which we also learned how to make) and sticky rice with mango and palm sugar caramel sauce for dessert.
The biggest surprise might have been seeing turmeric root. It's very skinny and you peel off a thin brown skin to reveal a deep orange color. Wherever you touch it it stains your fingers bright yellow. We mashed it up in the mortar and pestle with shallots, garlic, kaffir lime peel (very bumpy!), galangal, salt, minced lemongrass stalk, red chili paste, and julienned nhor leaves to make the basic herb paste which is then thinned with coconut milk, egg, and fish sauce. We added some crushed peanuts and slices of raw white fish and put this whole mixture into our banana leaf bowls. These then steam for 20 minutes. The fish cooks as the milky sauce turns into a kind of custard, which you garnish with julienned red sweet pepper and kaffir lime leaves, and eat with (of course) white rice.
Partly because there were just three of us in class today, but partly because it is the Khmer way, the pace of the day was leisurely and fun with plenty of time to sit and chat while we ate or while things were cooking. Altogether satisfying! If we ever run out of things to do when we're in Phnom Penh with students in the summer--an unlikely prospect--this would be a different way to spend time. They'll work up half day courses for groups, which make just two dishes, on request.
Price of this whole experience, including ingredients and instruction and more food than I could eat and a cook book with 12 recipes and step-by-step directions: $20. Quite a bargain!
After the market trip, I climbed two sets of very steep metal stairs to a rooftop cooking school with two companions (a young Australian couple just finished with a 2-week volunteer tour of Thailand, and about to connect with their Cambodian tour group) and our teacher. The breeze was lovely, and there were 10 stations with gas cook tops and cutting boards and large wooden mortar and pestles waiting for us there. Plus a skillful and shy young woman who did all the washing up and had our ingredients prepped for us as we worked through the day.
The teacher is a young chef, just 22, with good English. He is a graduate of Friends, the NGO program that runs two restaurants (and a souvenir shop and now also a tailor shop) in Phnom Penh that are entirely staffed by former street kids. They learn to be servers and kitchen staff, and eventually graduate to jobs in other restaurants around the city. This young man came from the provinces near Viet Nam and spent two years on the streets in PP before he started at Friends, where he trained for 6 years. He's now designed the menu for the restaurant that runs the cooking school (owned by a Dutch national) and is in university nights after teaching cooking classes for tourists 6 days a week.
By 10:30 am we had started to cook. We finished up at about 3pm, stuffed--having made spring rolls with taro and carrot, sweet and sour dipping sauce, banana blossom salad, fish amok (in a banana leaf bowl, which we also learned how to make) and sticky rice with mango and palm sugar caramel sauce for dessert.
The biggest surprise might have been seeing turmeric root. It's very skinny and you peel off a thin brown skin to reveal a deep orange color. Wherever you touch it it stains your fingers bright yellow. We mashed it up in the mortar and pestle with shallots, garlic, kaffir lime peel (very bumpy!), galangal, salt, minced lemongrass stalk, red chili paste, and julienned nhor leaves to make the basic herb paste which is then thinned with coconut milk, egg, and fish sauce. We added some crushed peanuts and slices of raw white fish and put this whole mixture into our banana leaf bowls. These then steam for 20 minutes. The fish cooks as the milky sauce turns into a kind of custard, which you garnish with julienned red sweet pepper and kaffir lime leaves, and eat with (of course) white rice.
Partly because there were just three of us in class today, but partly because it is the Khmer way, the pace of the day was leisurely and fun with plenty of time to sit and chat while we ate or while things were cooking. Altogether satisfying! If we ever run out of things to do when we're in Phnom Penh with students in the summer--an unlikely prospect--this would be a different way to spend time. They'll work up half day courses for groups, which make just two dishes, on request.
Price of this whole experience, including ingredients and instruction and more food than I could eat and a cook book with 12 recipes and step-by-step directions: $20. Quite a bargain!
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Khmer Lessons
One of my hopes has been that I could study the language while I'm here--in a formal way beyond the inevitable practice that comes telling tuk-tuk drivers where I want to go, and so on.
Charley introduced me to the teacher he studied with in Wisconsin, who is a native of Phnom Penh. She's been tutoring me privately at my apartment. Altogether we will have 5 two hour lessons together. My final lesson is tomorrow, in the afternoon before I fly back to the States.
Sokhary is 5-10 years younger than I am and a bundle of energy. Fortunately, she's also very patient and very positive. Sokhary was studying French in high school when the Khmer Rouge took over. She hid her knowledge (necessary to survive, since anyone who spoke foreign languages, or wore glasses, or seemed educated, was executed) and survived by virtue of luck and a tough constitution. She was sick enough to be excused from work and put in a hospital at one point, where she was given an IV drip of coconut water....and she's still here. After the war, she couldn't resume study of French for political reasons, so she took up Russian, and spent a year studying in Moscow. She teaches in the States every summer, and has for about 10 years. One of her daughters is an English teacher in PP who trains ex-pats who are here helping with mine clearance how to speak to Khmer villagers.
Sokhary started by telling me that if I learned about 80 verbs and 1000 words and a few structures, I should be able to communicate pretty well. That seemed doable. I have strategies for acquiring vocabulary--many of which I invented when I was 17 and had to learn German by immersion as an exchange student in a small village of 5,000 people where I lived for a year--but stringing words together into sensible sentences requires gears to whir in my brain at a speed they don't seem to like.
I can see that I am making progress, certainly. And people here (in the markets, the tuk tuk drivers, the servers in restaurants) are consistent and sometimes florid in their praise. This says more about the generosity of the Cambodian people than it does about my proficiency. In one foray to the Russian market where I was helping another volunteer bargain for stuff, a vendor actually GAVE us things for free because I was speaking Khmer (haltingly). But the truth is, the second two native speakers start talking to each other, I'm lost. If I'm lucky, I recognize a word here or there.
I've had the kind of time I don't have at home, or when I'm here as a chaperone, to study how Khmer is written, too. Learning to read (much less write) would take me a whole lot more time, but I can at least recognize the most common consonants and occasionally I get a common word right. There are 33 consonants, each of which can be written in three ways--ornate script for signs on buildings, slanted script for books and newspapers, and subscript. There are also, depending on how you count, more than 20 vowels, which are written above, below, in front of, or behind the consonant (or consonant cluster, if there are two consonants together, one in subscript). Most of these vowels can be pronounced two different ways, depending on whether the consonant they modify is 'first series' or 'second series.' So the sheer number of marks that one needs to be able to distinguish among is well over 100, and many are quite similar. And then there's all the variation in handwritten Khmer.....
I am trying to use the energy that I ordinarily employ on sudoku and other such finite puzzles to work on the language. Decoding the visuals is, arguably, a finite puzzle--just of a magnitude that beggars even the most fiendish multiple overlapped sudoku.
But I'm not a language whiz, so I'm going easy on myself for how much Khmer I can take in at this point in my life. I think it helps that I learned a language by immersion once in the past, but of course my brain is well past the age when language acquisition comes easy. I bow to those who have the real gift. There's a volunteer I've met here in the past, college age (Trent, for those of you who know him), who is such a person: he now speaks, reads, and writes Khmer quite fluently. He can do simultaneous verbal translation. He also is fairly well along in his study of Sanskrit and Pali--the ancestors of written Khmer. And, last he was here, he began studying Chinese. It's a grand thing there are such people in the world.
Me, all I hope to do is move closer to functional Khmer for everyday purposes, and give people a good excuse to laugh at me. That's probably the best I can do toward bridging the linguistic divide and healing the human wounds brought about by so much suffering in this land, some of which, of course, relate directly to US policies in the past. So be it!
Charley introduced me to the teacher he studied with in Wisconsin, who is a native of Phnom Penh. She's been tutoring me privately at my apartment. Altogether we will have 5 two hour lessons together. My final lesson is tomorrow, in the afternoon before I fly back to the States.
Sokhary is 5-10 years younger than I am and a bundle of energy. Fortunately, she's also very patient and very positive. Sokhary was studying French in high school when the Khmer Rouge took over. She hid her knowledge (necessary to survive, since anyone who spoke foreign languages, or wore glasses, or seemed educated, was executed) and survived by virtue of luck and a tough constitution. She was sick enough to be excused from work and put in a hospital at one point, where she was given an IV drip of coconut water....and she's still here. After the war, she couldn't resume study of French for political reasons, so she took up Russian, and spent a year studying in Moscow. She teaches in the States every summer, and has for about 10 years. One of her daughters is an English teacher in PP who trains ex-pats who are here helping with mine clearance how to speak to Khmer villagers.
Sokhary started by telling me that if I learned about 80 verbs and 1000 words and a few structures, I should be able to communicate pretty well. That seemed doable. I have strategies for acquiring vocabulary--many of which I invented when I was 17 and had to learn German by immersion as an exchange student in a small village of 5,000 people where I lived for a year--but stringing words together into sensible sentences requires gears to whir in my brain at a speed they don't seem to like.
I can see that I am making progress, certainly. And people here (in the markets, the tuk tuk drivers, the servers in restaurants) are consistent and sometimes florid in their praise. This says more about the generosity of the Cambodian people than it does about my proficiency. In one foray to the Russian market where I was helping another volunteer bargain for stuff, a vendor actually GAVE us things for free because I was speaking Khmer (haltingly). But the truth is, the second two native speakers start talking to each other, I'm lost. If I'm lucky, I recognize a word here or there.
I've had the kind of time I don't have at home, or when I'm here as a chaperone, to study how Khmer is written, too. Learning to read (much less write) would take me a whole lot more time, but I can at least recognize the most common consonants and occasionally I get a common word right. There are 33 consonants, each of which can be written in three ways--ornate script for signs on buildings, slanted script for books and newspapers, and subscript. There are also, depending on how you count, more than 20 vowels, which are written above, below, in front of, or behind the consonant (or consonant cluster, if there are two consonants together, one in subscript). Most of these vowels can be pronounced two different ways, depending on whether the consonant they modify is 'first series' or 'second series.' So the sheer number of marks that one needs to be able to distinguish among is well over 100, and many are quite similar. And then there's all the variation in handwritten Khmer.....
I am trying to use the energy that I ordinarily employ on sudoku and other such finite puzzles to work on the language. Decoding the visuals is, arguably, a finite puzzle--just of a magnitude that beggars even the most fiendish multiple overlapped sudoku.
But I'm not a language whiz, so I'm going easy on myself for how much Khmer I can take in at this point in my life. I think it helps that I learned a language by immersion once in the past, but of course my brain is well past the age when language acquisition comes easy. I bow to those who have the real gift. There's a volunteer I've met here in the past, college age (Trent, for those of you who know him), who is such a person: he now speaks, reads, and writes Khmer quite fluently. He can do simultaneous verbal translation. He also is fairly well along in his study of Sanskrit and Pali--the ancestors of written Khmer. And, last he was here, he began studying Chinese. It's a grand thing there are such people in the world.
Me, all I hope to do is move closer to functional Khmer for everyday purposes, and give people a good excuse to laugh at me. That's probably the best I can do toward bridging the linguistic divide and healing the human wounds brought about by so much suffering in this land, some of which, of course, relate directly to US policies in the past. So be it!
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Protocols in Cambodia
This entry is about the work that I've been doing for Cambodian Living Arts here in Phnom Penh--lest you think that I'm all about play and no work for this month-long adventure. I admit that the balance has tilted toward play from my usual day, by quite a bit....but perhaps that's really because the novelty of what I've been doing here shifts what might be thought of as work if I did it all the time (e.g., digging in the dirt, washing endless pottery sherds) into play.
In any case, I was invited to Cambodia to help the core staff of CLA kick off the planning process of the next big summer youth arts festival they will sponsor, in summer 2010. They've done four of these in the past. I was lucky enough to attend the Mohaosrop 2006 with a group of Creative Arts Program students from Watkinson. That festival, and the one in 2007, were held in Battambang, a regional city in the NW of the country, near the Thai border.
Here in Phnom Penh we've held five meetings. The first two were me and Charley and 3 core staff members here: Phany, Seng, and Vithur, all of whom are bilingual. So these meetings could be conducted in English. At the first meeting, I asked each person to talk about their vision for what the Mohaosrop 2010 is: How would they know, when it was over, that it had been a real success? I put these ideas together into a goals statement, which I shared with them at our second meeting, where I also introduced the Tuning Protocol designed by the National School Reform Faculty in the US.
Protocols, for those of you who aren't my colleagues at Watkinson or working in schools associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools, are structured ways of holding a conversation with a group of people so that all voices can be heard and so that clear feedback or outcomes or action plans are generated in a way that is transparent and democratic. Protocols are meant to increase ownership and promote a sense that progress is really happening toward the implementation of a complex purpose.
There are different protocols designed for different purposes. The tuning protocol is used to examine a plan in draft form with an eye to making it better. This method was very new to the staff, and I introduced it as a tool they might want to use. They agreed to try it at our next two meetings, which would include some assistant master teachers and some lead students.
Since those meetings would be in Khmer, and since the process needs to be owned by CLA staff, they had to take on the roles of facilitators and presenters in those meetings. Charley and I sat by. I'm not sure how much of the Khmer Charley understood, but I was left reading body language almost entirely.
The first time we met with the larger group, they tuned two parts of the goals statement I had written and then revised with the staff, and which Vithur had skillfully translated into Khmer. The second time we met with the larger group, they tuned a very preliminary draft of a schedule for an 8-day Mohaosrop 2010, which I had designed based on existing models and which Vithur, bless him, had again translated into Khmer.
The hope is to hold M2010 in Phnom Penh. This is, in itself, a huge logistical challenge: where can some 500 people be housed, cooked for, and fed? Where can workshops of some 30 - 60 people each, about 8 running simultaneously, be held? Where is there a performance space where all 500 could come together for performances, film screenings, and demonstrations of as many as 15 different art forms?
Our larger group meetings--with 2 assistant masters, 5 students, 3 core staff, Charley and me--weren't designed to answer these logistical questions. The necessity for doing so soon has been brought to the fore, though, and work has begun to discover options. This may involve multiple guest houses and two or three other locations as there does not seem to be any space where all necessary functions could happen on one 'campus', as in Battambang. Core staff hope to settle on locations and a budget--clearly tightly linked to the question of locations--by April's board meeting. No small feat! There is always the possibility of returning to Battambang, but as part of the vision is to increase awareness of Khmer arts throughout Cambodia (and the work that CLA and partner organizations like Epic Arts are doing), having the festival in the capital makes good sense.
At each of the larger meetings we held this week, the group went through a timed and structured process to generate warm and cool feedback aimed at improving first the goals statement and then the preliminary schedule with which they were presented. What I liked was seeing how much engagement there was. All the students (both male and female) spoke up. There was both laughter and disagreement. There was pretty easy give and take between the assistant teachers--both people in their 30s or 40s--and the students. I'm not sure this would have been so if Masters had been there. The gap in ages might make it hard, as most Masters are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. The respect that is to be accorded them might also make voicing alternate points of view difficult. But in this group, the conversation was quite lively. There certainly was discussion around complex issues of long-range importance, such as how and whether it is possible to create new work, to innovate, without damaging or disrespecting traditional forms. There were also predictable pleas for "more free time!" from the students when we looked at the schedule. More extensive feedback was generated--but since I can't follow most conversation in Khmer, I don't know the particulars.
Charley and I had another meeting with core staff this morning to wrap up this phase of the work. It's a first to be 18 months out ahead of a planned event, so this by itself is a good step. By the time we finished talking this morning, we had a lead on a promising site in PP, a timetable for next steps, some preliminary budget estimates, and a preliminary agenda for a gathering of about 75 stakeholders in August of this year to work together on planning M2010. It may be that the participants in our exercises these past ten days will become facilitators of protocols with smaller break out groups this summer. This would give students real practice in leadership roles...an interesting challenge, and one that could be tied to another major initiative underway, which is to write a clear curriculum for all the classes.
All along, I've worried about whether what I could bring to CLA would really be useful. Coming in as an outsider who doesn't know the inside issues and stresses of an organization, or its ethos, and offering to 'help', smacks of arrogance and a kind of well-meant liberal do-gooderism that I hate to embody. Having helped to run a large non-profit youth theater company for years, I know that oft times volunteers, however good their intentions, can make more work than they are worth. In my experience on the receiving end of educational consultation, I have sometimes been underwhelmed. On top of all that, I'm culturally only semi-literate, despite some ten weeks spent in country now over three years, and I don't speak the language. Yikes!
What is, is. I do believe that consciousness matters, and so I reassure myself that the fact that I am AWARE of all these liabilities may mean that I have avoided embodying them to egregious degrees. And finally, of course, it is so thoroughly not about me. I'm relatively sure that my mere presence attached to the project of planning M2010 has propelled that project to the top of the agenda this week. Since the project is so complex, giving core staff an earlier headstart than they might have been able to generate on their own in the face of so many other pressing items--the eviction of their students from the Tonle Bassac slum, the board meeting that will happen the day after tomorrow, the many ongoing projects--is a gift in itself. If some of the process we used is something they choose to adapt and continue to use from time to time, that will be gravy.
In the meantime, people seem pleased. Protocols end with a chance to debrief the process. As can happen, that part of the process was somewhat truncated in our meetings, but the students were very clear that they liked being involved this early and in such a direct way, and the staff has voiced appreciation and relief that a road map is in place. Perhaps the tool of a protocol that generates active discussion rather than passive acquiescence will be useful. In any case, I've done what I can, and I'm at peace with that.
In any case, I was invited to Cambodia to help the core staff of CLA kick off the planning process of the next big summer youth arts festival they will sponsor, in summer 2010. They've done four of these in the past. I was lucky enough to attend the Mohaosrop 2006 with a group of Creative Arts Program students from Watkinson. That festival, and the one in 2007, were held in Battambang, a regional city in the NW of the country, near the Thai border.
Here in Phnom Penh we've held five meetings. The first two were me and Charley and 3 core staff members here: Phany, Seng, and Vithur, all of whom are bilingual. So these meetings could be conducted in English. At the first meeting, I asked each person to talk about their vision for what the Mohaosrop 2010 is: How would they know, when it was over, that it had been a real success? I put these ideas together into a goals statement, which I shared with them at our second meeting, where I also introduced the Tuning Protocol designed by the National School Reform Faculty in the US.
Protocols, for those of you who aren't my colleagues at Watkinson or working in schools associated with the Coalition of Essential Schools, are structured ways of holding a conversation with a group of people so that all voices can be heard and so that clear feedback or outcomes or action plans are generated in a way that is transparent and democratic. Protocols are meant to increase ownership and promote a sense that progress is really happening toward the implementation of a complex purpose.
There are different protocols designed for different purposes. The tuning protocol is used to examine a plan in draft form with an eye to making it better. This method was very new to the staff, and I introduced it as a tool they might want to use. They agreed to try it at our next two meetings, which would include some assistant master teachers and some lead students.
Since those meetings would be in Khmer, and since the process needs to be owned by CLA staff, they had to take on the roles of facilitators and presenters in those meetings. Charley and I sat by. I'm not sure how much of the Khmer Charley understood, but I was left reading body language almost entirely.
The first time we met with the larger group, they tuned two parts of the goals statement I had written and then revised with the staff, and which Vithur had skillfully translated into Khmer. The second time we met with the larger group, they tuned a very preliminary draft of a schedule for an 8-day Mohaosrop 2010, which I had designed based on existing models and which Vithur, bless him, had again translated into Khmer.
The hope is to hold M2010 in Phnom Penh. This is, in itself, a huge logistical challenge: where can some 500 people be housed, cooked for, and fed? Where can workshops of some 30 - 60 people each, about 8 running simultaneously, be held? Where is there a performance space where all 500 could come together for performances, film screenings, and demonstrations of as many as 15 different art forms?
Our larger group meetings--with 2 assistant masters, 5 students, 3 core staff, Charley and me--weren't designed to answer these logistical questions. The necessity for doing so soon has been brought to the fore, though, and work has begun to discover options. This may involve multiple guest houses and two or three other locations as there does not seem to be any space where all necessary functions could happen on one 'campus', as in Battambang. Core staff hope to settle on locations and a budget--clearly tightly linked to the question of locations--by April's board meeting. No small feat! There is always the possibility of returning to Battambang, but as part of the vision is to increase awareness of Khmer arts throughout Cambodia (and the work that CLA and partner organizations like Epic Arts are doing), having the festival in the capital makes good sense.
At each of the larger meetings we held this week, the group went through a timed and structured process to generate warm and cool feedback aimed at improving first the goals statement and then the preliminary schedule with which they were presented. What I liked was seeing how much engagement there was. All the students (both male and female) spoke up. There was both laughter and disagreement. There was pretty easy give and take between the assistant teachers--both people in their 30s or 40s--and the students. I'm not sure this would have been so if Masters had been there. The gap in ages might make it hard, as most Masters are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. The respect that is to be accorded them might also make voicing alternate points of view difficult. But in this group, the conversation was quite lively. There certainly was discussion around complex issues of long-range importance, such as how and whether it is possible to create new work, to innovate, without damaging or disrespecting traditional forms. There were also predictable pleas for "more free time!" from the students when we looked at the schedule. More extensive feedback was generated--but since I can't follow most conversation in Khmer, I don't know the particulars.
Charley and I had another meeting with core staff this morning to wrap up this phase of the work. It's a first to be 18 months out ahead of a planned event, so this by itself is a good step. By the time we finished talking this morning, we had a lead on a promising site in PP, a timetable for next steps, some preliminary budget estimates, and a preliminary agenda for a gathering of about 75 stakeholders in August of this year to work together on planning M2010. It may be that the participants in our exercises these past ten days will become facilitators of protocols with smaller break out groups this summer. This would give students real practice in leadership roles...an interesting challenge, and one that could be tied to another major initiative underway, which is to write a clear curriculum for all the classes.
All along, I've worried about whether what I could bring to CLA would really be useful. Coming in as an outsider who doesn't know the inside issues and stresses of an organization, or its ethos, and offering to 'help', smacks of arrogance and a kind of well-meant liberal do-gooderism that I hate to embody. Having helped to run a large non-profit youth theater company for years, I know that oft times volunteers, however good their intentions, can make more work than they are worth. In my experience on the receiving end of educational consultation, I have sometimes been underwhelmed. On top of all that, I'm culturally only semi-literate, despite some ten weeks spent in country now over three years, and I don't speak the language. Yikes!
What is, is. I do believe that consciousness matters, and so I reassure myself that the fact that I am AWARE of all these liabilities may mean that I have avoided embodying them to egregious degrees. And finally, of course, it is so thoroughly not about me. I'm relatively sure that my mere presence attached to the project of planning M2010 has propelled that project to the top of the agenda this week. Since the project is so complex, giving core staff an earlier headstart than they might have been able to generate on their own in the face of so many other pressing items--the eviction of their students from the Tonle Bassac slum, the board meeting that will happen the day after tomorrow, the many ongoing projects--is a gift in itself. If some of the process we used is something they choose to adapt and continue to use from time to time, that will be gravy.
In the meantime, people seem pleased. Protocols end with a chance to debrief the process. As can happen, that part of the process was somewhat truncated in our meetings, but the students were very clear that they liked being involved this early and in such a direct way, and the staff has voiced appreciation and relief that a road map is in place. Perhaps the tool of a protocol that generates active discussion rather than passive acquiescence will be useful. In any case, I've done what I can, and I'm at peace with that.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Chinese New Year
Phnom Penh is in the grip of Chinese New Year. It's not clear to me how long the celebrations will last. Even the Russian Market, a real landmark, is shut down for the next four days. Some school classes are closed. I thought that I might be awakened by fireworks at midnight one night, but not so; to date, the only fireworks I've seen were modest low ones on the other side of the river from the city.
The open areas in the city are very alive until 10pm or so each night, and then people seem to head home. At dusk Monday I strolled along the river front. There were more than the usual number of people sitting on the river wall. Boats with party lights were making leisurely trips up and down river; lots of Khmer were boarding these. It wasn't just a tourist thing. There were vendors selling peanuts and cheap toys and jewelry, as well as the folded lotus flowers and incense that are sold to people wanting to make offerings at the shrine.
I've been warned that all fresh fruit prices would double over these days since fruit is part of what is offered at to ancestors at this time of year. Guidebooks say that Wat Phnom is very busy through the night with families making offerings, but I haven't sacrificed my sleep to go see.
At one point military police stopped all traffic for a period of several minutes until a motorcade with siren accompaniment went screaming by.
After dinner Monday I walked home in the dark by a different route to see what was going on in a large square in front of the royal palace. Many families spread out mats on the ground for complex multi-course picnic dinners. There was a small dance party in one corner with 'tween' age girls doing most of the dancing to a boombox. Vendors were selling balloons and roasted ears of corn and soda and such. Young men were lounging around near their motos as they always do. There were lots of small children about. I suspect there is a carnival set up in another area where we've seen kite flying going on in the summer, but I didn't venture that far. The gathering seemed to be in full swing though it was very dark.
So--Happy New Year to all! Welcome to the year of the ox.
The open areas in the city are very alive until 10pm or so each night, and then people seem to head home. At dusk Monday I strolled along the river front. There were more than the usual number of people sitting on the river wall. Boats with party lights were making leisurely trips up and down river; lots of Khmer were boarding these. It wasn't just a tourist thing. There were vendors selling peanuts and cheap toys and jewelry, as well as the folded lotus flowers and incense that are sold to people wanting to make offerings at the shrine.
I've been warned that all fresh fruit prices would double over these days since fruit is part of what is offered at to ancestors at this time of year. Guidebooks say that Wat Phnom is very busy through the night with families making offerings, but I haven't sacrificed my sleep to go see.
At one point military police stopped all traffic for a period of several minutes until a motorcade with siren accompaniment went screaming by.
After dinner Monday I walked home in the dark by a different route to see what was going on in a large square in front of the royal palace. Many families spread out mats on the ground for complex multi-course picnic dinners. There was a small dance party in one corner with 'tween' age girls doing most of the dancing to a boombox. Vendors were selling balloons and roasted ears of corn and soda and such. Young men were lounging around near their motos as they always do. There were lots of small children about. I suspect there is a carnival set up in another area where we've seen kite flying going on in the summer, but I didn't venture that far. The gathering seemed to be in full swing though it was very dark.
So--Happy New Year to all! Welcome to the year of the ox.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
Breaking News: Slum Flattened
This is just a quick post to bring you up to date on yesterday's events here. At 2 am Saturday January 24 police and military began to secure the perimeter of the slum where Kung Nai lived until earlier in the week (see my prior post) and where many families--perhaps as many as 100--still were living. At daybreak a group of workers in red shirts moved in with heavy equipment to start knocking everything down. Here is a link to the article, with some pictures, in today's Phnom Penh Post, the English language daily. http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/200901
I did not see this personally. I wasn't up early enough to go along with Charley, who did go out to the site and try to find the CLA students who are still living there. Some have relocated temporarily to the CLA house, I think. He was kept out of the site along with other observers but could watch from the open stairs in the adjoining building that you see in the background of some of the pictures. Not sure of how violent the scene would be, I chose not to go out alone. Apparently violence was relatively minor--though not, I'm sure, to those directly in the line of it.
It's likely that the red shirted workers were men bussed in from the country side and paid a few dollars each and a bottle of water and the T shirt and then bussed back to their villages.
Land rights here are chaotic at best which leaves the poor vulnerable to this kind of action. Note that many of these people are the working poor, with jobs in PP, who don't have sufficient income to get to those jobs from the relocation site 16K outside the city. It seems too that the relocation site is not ready for occupation: no reliable water, for instance. There is also considerable debate as to what is legal, as you can tell from the accompanying article.
I believe the whole site is fenced off as of today.
Karen
I did not see this personally. I wasn't up early enough to go along with Charley, who did go out to the site and try to find the CLA students who are still living there. Some have relocated temporarily to the CLA house, I think. He was kept out of the site along with other observers but could watch from the open stairs in the adjoining building that you see in the background of some of the pictures. Not sure of how violent the scene would be, I chose not to go out alone. Apparently violence was relatively minor--though not, I'm sure, to those directly in the line of it.
It's likely that the red shirted workers were men bussed in from the country side and paid a few dollars each and a bottle of water and the T shirt and then bussed back to their villages.
Land rights here are chaotic at best which leaves the poor vulnerable to this kind of action. Note that many of these people are the working poor, with jobs in PP, who don't have sufficient income to get to those jobs from the relocation site 16K outside the city. It seems too that the relocation site is not ready for occupation: no reliable water, for instance. There is also considerable debate as to what is legal, as you can tell from the accompanying article.
I believe the whole site is fenced off as of today.
Karen
Thursday, January 22, 2009
News from Cambodia
I arrived yesterday in Phnom Penh. Charley T has made it possible for me to move into an upper level three room apartment on Cambodia Living Arts street right near the riverside. Next door is Charley's apartment, and downstairs are Studio CLA (where the recording for the CD of Man Men's class was done) and Charley's family: Sarun and his wife Ratanak and their sons Apiream (18 months) and Leeak (2 weeks). The CLA offices and some classroom spaces are on this street, too. All day I can hear the sounds of children. An orphanage has moved into a large space that backs onto this street, and Charley says the upper level where our little balconies are faces the back side of the boy's open dorm area, where some 40 boys sleep at night.
Yesterday was a full day. The big news, for those of you who have been to PP and know of CLA's work, is that Kung Nai, the blind chapey player ("Ray Charles of Cambodia"), has a new house. For years, he's been living in a squatter's community in a little shack with a tin roof, not far from CLA street. The community has been progressively squeezed by development. In the past several years, Kung Nai has toured in the States (to the Smithsonian) and in England (as Peter Gabriel's guest) and in Australia, to perform, but has always returned to this little place, which is physically pretty squalid.
But he was finally made an offer to good to refuse: he's been given a 3 story free standing house (costing about $50,000) and $10,000 additional in cash. Yesterday he was holding a housewarming party--lots of food and beer and Johnny Walker up on the open 3rd floor roofed terrace. Much of his extended family was there. (He and his wife have 11 children, 10 surviving, and 33 grandchildren.) Some of his former neighbors from the squatter's village took motos out to see the place, too; it remains to be seen how this will impact them. I can only imagine that there are some very understandable jealousies, though everything yesterday was celebratory and Kung Nai himself looked exuberant.
The house is on the edge of a swampy area (which we hope won't really flood) and quite some distance from CLA house, though still in PP. How this new commute will affect Kung Nai's teaching, if at all, remains to be seen.
Charley and I couldn't stay long because there was also an evening event Charley wanted to attend and that I much enjoyed. It was a reception and screening of a new full-length documentary movie about a young Cambodian dancer who was part of the dance troupe at Wat Bo in Siem Reap and who was 'adopted' by a wealthy American woman who had connections in the dance world. She brought him to the States at age 16 and put him through an intensive crash course, one-on-one with a renowned Russian teacher, to learn ballet technique. He was admitted then to the School of the American Ballet, where he trained for several years, going to the Professional Children's School, and learning English. He now dances internationally, based mostly out of the Northwest Ballet in Seattle, a very reputable company. He's been back to Cambodia to perform (at the opening of the American embassy when it moved into its new headquarters) and to visit the current students at Wat Bo.
The movie was directed by the woman who made all this possible, Anne Bass. She was also there. The screening was at the Centre du Culture Francais, in a lovely space, and the audience seemed to include many of the (Western) people who are in leadership roles with various cultural organizations in PP, and many Khmer dignitaries who work with the arts. Charley does know most everyone, of course, and there was also much talk of CLA's recent splash with the opera, Where Elephants Weep.
This morning we held the first planning session for the work I've been asked to facilitate, starting to plan for the big Mahoasrop (or National Youth Performing Arts Festival) which CLA plans to host in PP in summer 2010. Today I just worked with core staff, trying to elicit everyone's visions about what they want this to be. There's a terrific amount of work to be done, and some of it--like finding a location in PP where 500 students/guests might stay and multiple workshop rooms and a performing space that could hold everyone, ideally in walking distance of one another--I can't really do. But I'll try to do enough to make my presence worthwhile as more than just a catalyst to start the planning process, which it certainly is!
Tomorrow morning I meet my Khmer (Cambodian language) teacher for the first time. So, for now, it's back to the flash cards I've been making. I seem to forget an awful lot between trips. My hope is that if I can get much of the essential stuff down on flash cards I can review it on the LONG plane ride when I come back to Cambodia again this summer with students. Wish me luck!
Karen
Yesterday was a full day. The big news, for those of you who have been to PP and know of CLA's work, is that Kung Nai, the blind chapey player ("Ray Charles of Cambodia"), has a new house. For years, he's been living in a squatter's community in a little shack with a tin roof, not far from CLA street. The community has been progressively squeezed by development. In the past several years, Kung Nai has toured in the States (to the Smithsonian) and in England (as Peter Gabriel's guest) and in Australia, to perform, but has always returned to this little place, which is physically pretty squalid.
But he was finally made an offer to good to refuse: he's been given a 3 story free standing house (costing about $50,000) and $10,000 additional in cash. Yesterday he was holding a housewarming party--lots of food and beer and Johnny Walker up on the open 3rd floor roofed terrace. Much of his extended family was there. (He and his wife have 11 children, 10 surviving, and 33 grandchildren.) Some of his former neighbors from the squatter's village took motos out to see the place, too; it remains to be seen how this will impact them. I can only imagine that there are some very understandable jealousies, though everything yesterday was celebratory and Kung Nai himself looked exuberant.
The house is on the edge of a swampy area (which we hope won't really flood) and quite some distance from CLA house, though still in PP. How this new commute will affect Kung Nai's teaching, if at all, remains to be seen.
Charley and I couldn't stay long because there was also an evening event Charley wanted to attend and that I much enjoyed. It was a reception and screening of a new full-length documentary movie about a young Cambodian dancer who was part of the dance troupe at Wat Bo in Siem Reap and who was 'adopted' by a wealthy American woman who had connections in the dance world. She brought him to the States at age 16 and put him through an intensive crash course, one-on-one with a renowned Russian teacher, to learn ballet technique. He was admitted then to the School of the American Ballet, where he trained for several years, going to the Professional Children's School, and learning English. He now dances internationally, based mostly out of the Northwest Ballet in Seattle, a very reputable company. He's been back to Cambodia to perform (at the opening of the American embassy when it moved into its new headquarters) and to visit the current students at Wat Bo.
The movie was directed by the woman who made all this possible, Anne Bass. She was also there. The screening was at the Centre du Culture Francais, in a lovely space, and the audience seemed to include many of the (Western) people who are in leadership roles with various cultural organizations in PP, and many Khmer dignitaries who work with the arts. Charley does know most everyone, of course, and there was also much talk of CLA's recent splash with the opera, Where Elephants Weep.
This morning we held the first planning session for the work I've been asked to facilitate, starting to plan for the big Mahoasrop (or National Youth Performing Arts Festival) which CLA plans to host in PP in summer 2010. Today I just worked with core staff, trying to elicit everyone's visions about what they want this to be. There's a terrific amount of work to be done, and some of it--like finding a location in PP where 500 students/guests might stay and multiple workshop rooms and a performing space that could hold everyone, ideally in walking distance of one another--I can't really do. But I'll try to do enough to make my presence worthwhile as more than just a catalyst to start the planning process, which it certainly is!
Tomorrow morning I meet my Khmer (Cambodian language) teacher for the first time. So, for now, it's back to the flash cards I've been making. I seem to forget an awful lot between trips. My hope is that if I can get much of the essential stuff down on flash cards I can review it on the LONG plane ride when I come back to Cambodia again this summer with students. Wish me luck!
Karen
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