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
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Last full day in Bangkok
It's almost 9pm on Tuesday night here, which means Obama is some 3 hours away from inauguration. I do regret not being in the States on this day; I'd like to see it, and without going to an All-American bar in the middle of the night here (which really wouldn't be my scene) there's no way I can in real time. But I'll watch tape when I get back. Here's to a new era.
One Thai man on the street today, when he found out where I was from, said "Obama good! Bush bad!" and I agreed up until the moment he started to make shooting gestures. But mime in untrained hands is a clumsy tool, we all know that.
He was just one of several encounters today, not all great. Two separate guys tried to rip me off today in two different scams. People are quite friendly here and so it is not at all clear at first what is going on. But when I made it clear that I wasn't buying anything one of them did quite an about face from his friendly overtures and said "You stupid! Stupid like buffalo!" which rolled right off my back since I'm a big fan of the water buffalo.
Other than those two slippery guys, neither of whom did any real harm, I've had another good, full day. On my morning walk I passed the Queen's art gallery and so went in for a quick look at contemporary Thai painting. Then I climbed the Golden Mount, which is a temple atop an artificial hill made of collapsed brick from an older chedi right in the middle of the city. There are lots of large bells hanging along the staircases that you climb and apparently the tradition is to ring each bell as you pass, so I did. I spent a few hours touring the temple complex housing the Emerald Buddha and the grounds of the Grand Palace which are attached. I don't think I've ever seen so much gold in one place, and that includes Versailles. Truly remarkable. The exteriors of these temples are encrusted with gold-leaf tile and multicolored glass mosaic EVERYWHERE. It's pretty blinding, and incredibly colorful, and yet it works visually. Not as a steady diet for the eyes, but it seems to suit these most ceremonial of buildings.
The Emerald Buddha is actually jade, and about 2 feet high, and lives atop a 25' mountain of gold thrones and attendant Buddhas and lotus and so forth. He's got three different golden outfits--one for each of the three seasons: rainy, dry, winter--and the King himself actually changes the garments on the appropriate day. The King is a revered figure, and pictures of him are EVERYWHERE on the streets in large public cartouches and hanging on buildings 4 times life size and in stores and in peoples homes.
Since I was back in the neighborhood of the massage school, I popped in for a 45 minute foot massage and reflexology treatment. The woman who worked on me was great, and took my surgically repaired right ankle as a personal challenge. I can't say it all felt good at the time, but my feet aren't tired tonight after a full day of walking.
Then I decided to test out a few of Bangkok's special transit options. A major river loops through the city, and the water taxis are actually one of the fastest and cheapest ways around. They aren't just for tourists. So I took one from the old part of the city to a station near the commercial center, where I climbed stairs up to take the Skytrain, a monorail that has two lines. I rode the shorter line from one end to the other. Again, it's full of Thais, and schoolkids, and very much in use.
My last stop of the day was Jim Thompson's house. Jim Thompson was a Princeton trained architect and former OSS officer who moved to Thailand permanently after the war. He had an artist's and entrepreneur's eye, and played a major role in getting western fashion leaders interested in Thai silk. He made a fortune from the silk exporting company he founded and ran. He got quite famous after the movie of THE KING AND I, which featured his silks. He built himself a beautiful house and garden, filled with sculpture and porcelain, by taking 6 traditional Thai houses and connecting them. Walls and floors are teak, with traditional structures that are wider at the base than at the top. This includes all doorways and windows. Windows look out over a compact garden with orchids and greenery and curving brick walks. The living room opens out on one long side to a brick terrace that leads down to a boat landing on a canal, so there's a constant sound of water in the house. (The canals now are pretty filthy, but I imagine it wasn't so bad in 1959 when he built the house.) Thompson disappeared at the age of 61 while on holiday in Malaysia in 1967, so the whole story has a mysterious tinge to it.
I've wondered if my great aunt Cleome ever crossed paths with this character; it seems possible given the circles she moved in, though I think most of her time in Asia was quite a bit earlier, and she would have been older than he was. But she's been on my mind a bit since the flower Cleome is one of the most used in plantings here in street dividers and decorative parks.
I peeked in to one of the big department stores in the complex known as Siam Center long enough to buy myself a little alarm clock so I don't miss my early taxi to the airport in the morning, and to catch a bit of the upscale commercial scene, which is big here. There are fancy flyover walkways connecting all these stores, and indoor upscale restaurant corridors. The one with the longest line was the kind of sushi place where dishes pass by diners on a conveyor belt so that you can take what you want. Very hip here, I guess!
I am off to Phnom Penh tomorrow, for the second half of my trip.
Karen
One Thai man on the street today, when he found out where I was from, said "Obama good! Bush bad!" and I agreed up until the moment he started to make shooting gestures. But mime in untrained hands is a clumsy tool, we all know that.
He was just one of several encounters today, not all great. Two separate guys tried to rip me off today in two different scams. People are quite friendly here and so it is not at all clear at first what is going on. But when I made it clear that I wasn't buying anything one of them did quite an about face from his friendly overtures and said "You stupid! Stupid like buffalo!" which rolled right off my back since I'm a big fan of the water buffalo.
Other than those two slippery guys, neither of whom did any real harm, I've had another good, full day. On my morning walk I passed the Queen's art gallery and so went in for a quick look at contemporary Thai painting. Then I climbed the Golden Mount, which is a temple atop an artificial hill made of collapsed brick from an older chedi right in the middle of the city. There are lots of large bells hanging along the staircases that you climb and apparently the tradition is to ring each bell as you pass, so I did. I spent a few hours touring the temple complex housing the Emerald Buddha and the grounds of the Grand Palace which are attached. I don't think I've ever seen so much gold in one place, and that includes Versailles. Truly remarkable. The exteriors of these temples are encrusted with gold-leaf tile and multicolored glass mosaic EVERYWHERE. It's pretty blinding, and incredibly colorful, and yet it works visually. Not as a steady diet for the eyes, but it seems to suit these most ceremonial of buildings.
The Emerald Buddha is actually jade, and about 2 feet high, and lives atop a 25' mountain of gold thrones and attendant Buddhas and lotus and so forth. He's got three different golden outfits--one for each of the three seasons: rainy, dry, winter--and the King himself actually changes the garments on the appropriate day. The King is a revered figure, and pictures of him are EVERYWHERE on the streets in large public cartouches and hanging on buildings 4 times life size and in stores and in peoples homes.
Since I was back in the neighborhood of the massage school, I popped in for a 45 minute foot massage and reflexology treatment. The woman who worked on me was great, and took my surgically repaired right ankle as a personal challenge. I can't say it all felt good at the time, but my feet aren't tired tonight after a full day of walking.
Then I decided to test out a few of Bangkok's special transit options. A major river loops through the city, and the water taxis are actually one of the fastest and cheapest ways around. They aren't just for tourists. So I took one from the old part of the city to a station near the commercial center, where I climbed stairs up to take the Skytrain, a monorail that has two lines. I rode the shorter line from one end to the other. Again, it's full of Thais, and schoolkids, and very much in use.
My last stop of the day was Jim Thompson's house. Jim Thompson was a Princeton trained architect and former OSS officer who moved to Thailand permanently after the war. He had an artist's and entrepreneur's eye, and played a major role in getting western fashion leaders interested in Thai silk. He made a fortune from the silk exporting company he founded and ran. He got quite famous after the movie of THE KING AND I, which featured his silks. He built himself a beautiful house and garden, filled with sculpture and porcelain, by taking 6 traditional Thai houses and connecting them. Walls and floors are teak, with traditional structures that are wider at the base than at the top. This includes all doorways and windows. Windows look out over a compact garden with orchids and greenery and curving brick walks. The living room opens out on one long side to a brick terrace that leads down to a boat landing on a canal, so there's a constant sound of water in the house. (The canals now are pretty filthy, but I imagine it wasn't so bad in 1959 when he built the house.) Thompson disappeared at the age of 61 while on holiday in Malaysia in 1967, so the whole story has a mysterious tinge to it.
I've wondered if my great aunt Cleome ever crossed paths with this character; it seems possible given the circles she moved in, though I think most of her time in Asia was quite a bit earlier, and she would have been older than he was. But she's been on my mind a bit since the flower Cleome is one of the most used in plantings here in street dividers and decorative parks.
I peeked in to one of the big department stores in the complex known as Siam Center long enough to buy myself a little alarm clock so I don't miss my early taxi to the airport in the morning, and to catch a bit of the upscale commercial scene, which is big here. There are fancy flyover walkways connecting all these stores, and indoor upscale restaurant corridors. The one with the longest line was the kind of sushi place where dishes pass by diners on a conveyor belt so that you can take what you want. Very hip here, I guess!
I am off to Phnom Penh tomorrow, for the second half of my trip.
Karen
Monday, January 19, 2009
Of Textiles and the Body
It's 9:15 at night Monday and I'm sitting in the little garden outside my spartan guesthouse. The garden is tiny, but not spartan: lit, teak platform, koi in a pond on two sides, a gently burbling large pottery vase fountain, hanging plants...and about 40 steps off a street festival heavy with T shirts (many featuring Bob Marley, if you get my drift), street performers (a guy on a bike--heavily adorned with advertising--blaring music, a juggler/illusionist who wasn't tossing anything but was manipulating 3 and then 4 crystal balls in a mesmerizing way, so that they stay stable in space while he moves his hands over, under, and around them), beer girls outside their restaurants (all in formfitted miniskirt dresses: the Heineken girls are in green with the brand name blazoned up their side from hip onward...); and throngs of people, mostly farang: westerners. Yes, I am amongst the oldest people I see. But I figure I've lived with teenagers my whole life since I was one, so I can deal. Here in the garden it's quite serene.
If the mosquitos don't get too bad out here I'll try to tell you about my day. It was a great one!
You may find this stretches credulity, but there was another Karen on the dig, a little older than me, from Connecticut, hair redder than mine now is, Ph.D. in sociology, AND A SERIOUS TEXTILE PERSON. For a gallery in NYCity, she is currently making small stitched and embellished pieces (10" square) for walls based on photographs she took last time she was in Thailand of modern wedding gowns that preserve the folding details in the front of the skirt that are depicted on the apsaras at Angkor Wat. She also makes large pieces (8' square) that are asymmetrical but rhythmic piecings of traditional Thai fabrics. It's been really fun to have someone who is more nuts than I am for fabric. She also has a more generous budget to work with--so she's bought a lot. (I've bought some, I admit.)
Anyway, this other Karen had a connection with an American/Thai woman who is the curator for a major collection of textiles (some 1,800 pieces) that is in the care and keeping of an upscale American ex-pat law firm here in Bangkok. Karen had an appointment to meet with this woman and view the collection today, and invited me along. So we spent nearly 4 hours viewing the works on display. Fabric from the collection is how they decorate the interior walls, in a new oval building, with glass allowing views 360 degrees on the perimeter. They are on the 26th floor. Then she took us into the curatorial storage space, which is state of the art...think Metropolitan Museum. Climate controlled stacked ranks of large stainless steel trays with cotton muslin wrapping for each piece--kind of a morgue for fabric--and library style rolling units to maximize storage. She showed us lots of priceless pieces from Laos, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and Sumatra, in many different techniques. I learned a TON about symbols, etc. Will share with those of you who are curious when I return!
After that, I took a taxi to Wat Po, a gorgeous temple famous here for three things: the largest reclining Buddha in the world (I think); chedis of many of the Thai kings of the past; and--on the premises--a famous center of training for Thai massage. The Buddha is really great. He's 46 meters long, so half the length of a football field, wonderfully serene, lying on his side at the moment he attains enlightenment. The bottoms of his feet are inlaid with mother of pearl in intricate designs depicting animals and lotus and lots of iconography I couldn't place. He just barely fits in the beautiful building built around him, where every interior inch is painted: the ceiling is brilliant red with golden designs on it, the window shutters are black and gold, and the walls are painted in multicolor panels telling the whole story of the Ramayana, floor to ceiling. Quite stunning, really.
The chedis are elaborately decorated with tile mosaic, much of which incorporates gold leaf and sparkling multi-color glass so they are pretty stunning in the late light of day.
And, yes, I did avail myself of a 30 minute Thai massage, right on the grounds of the temple. (This cost about $8.) It was great. Thai massage involves rhythmic heavy pressure on the fully clothed body. Here, the massages happen in a large room with the same red/gold elegant ceiling, and beds (not Western style massage tables, but Asian style platforms) five across with an aisle down the middle, and sculptures of yogi in various postures along the walls. The room is quiet, and you are served iced green tea before and after the massage. Painful at moments, but altogether quite fine.
Then, as the sun was setting, I walked to another temple--Wat Matharat, for those in the know--which is one of the centers of teaching Thai style meditation. I took a 90 minute practical class in walking and sitting Vipassana meditation. The walking part was new to me, and pretty neat. This is insight/mindfulness meditation, not concentration meditation. There was just one other person in the class--a young woman from somewhere in Europe, but since we weren't speaking I don't know where--and the class was taught by a Thai(?) woman who really seemed to know her stuff and upended preconceptions by wearing heavy eye makeup.
So I am off to bed--to practice lying down meditation, I kid you not--and thus escape the mosquitos, who are making something of a dinner of me.
Tomorrow is my last day in Bangkok. It's hard to imagine it can top this, but there are plenty of things to do and see, even with out hitting the upscale commercial district!
Rest well.
Karen
If the mosquitos don't get too bad out here I'll try to tell you about my day. It was a great one!
You may find this stretches credulity, but there was another Karen on the dig, a little older than me, from Connecticut, hair redder than mine now is, Ph.D. in sociology, AND A SERIOUS TEXTILE PERSON. For a gallery in NYCity, she is currently making small stitched and embellished pieces (10" square) for walls based on photographs she took last time she was in Thailand of modern wedding gowns that preserve the folding details in the front of the skirt that are depicted on the apsaras at Angkor Wat. She also makes large pieces (8' square) that are asymmetrical but rhythmic piecings of traditional Thai fabrics. It's been really fun to have someone who is more nuts than I am for fabric. She also has a more generous budget to work with--so she's bought a lot. (I've bought some, I admit.)
Anyway, this other Karen had a connection with an American/Thai woman who is the curator for a major collection of textiles (some 1,800 pieces) that is in the care and keeping of an upscale American ex-pat law firm here in Bangkok. Karen had an appointment to meet with this woman and view the collection today, and invited me along. So we spent nearly 4 hours viewing the works on display. Fabric from the collection is how they decorate the interior walls, in a new oval building, with glass allowing views 360 degrees on the perimeter. They are on the 26th floor. Then she took us into the curatorial storage space, which is state of the art...think Metropolitan Museum. Climate controlled stacked ranks of large stainless steel trays with cotton muslin wrapping for each piece--kind of a morgue for fabric--and library style rolling units to maximize storage. She showed us lots of priceless pieces from Laos, Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, and Sumatra, in many different techniques. I learned a TON about symbols, etc. Will share with those of you who are curious when I return!
After that, I took a taxi to Wat Po, a gorgeous temple famous here for three things: the largest reclining Buddha in the world (I think); chedis of many of the Thai kings of the past; and--on the premises--a famous center of training for Thai massage. The Buddha is really great. He's 46 meters long, so half the length of a football field, wonderfully serene, lying on his side at the moment he attains enlightenment. The bottoms of his feet are inlaid with mother of pearl in intricate designs depicting animals and lotus and lots of iconography I couldn't place. He just barely fits in the beautiful building built around him, where every interior inch is painted: the ceiling is brilliant red with golden designs on it, the window shutters are black and gold, and the walls are painted in multicolor panels telling the whole story of the Ramayana, floor to ceiling. Quite stunning, really.
The chedis are elaborately decorated with tile mosaic, much of which incorporates gold leaf and sparkling multi-color glass so they are pretty stunning in the late light of day.
And, yes, I did avail myself of a 30 minute Thai massage, right on the grounds of the temple. (This cost about $8.) It was great. Thai massage involves rhythmic heavy pressure on the fully clothed body. Here, the massages happen in a large room with the same red/gold elegant ceiling, and beds (not Western style massage tables, but Asian style platforms) five across with an aisle down the middle, and sculptures of yogi in various postures along the walls. The room is quiet, and you are served iced green tea before and after the massage. Painful at moments, but altogether quite fine.
Then, as the sun was setting, I walked to another temple--Wat Matharat, for those in the know--which is one of the centers of teaching Thai style meditation. I took a 90 minute practical class in walking and sitting Vipassana meditation. The walking part was new to me, and pretty neat. This is insight/mindfulness meditation, not concentration meditation. There was just one other person in the class--a young woman from somewhere in Europe, but since we weren't speaking I don't know where--and the class was taught by a Thai(?) woman who really seemed to know her stuff and upended preconceptions by wearing heavy eye makeup.
So I am off to bed--to practice lying down meditation, I kid you not--and thus escape the mosquitos, who are making something of a dinner of me.
Tomorrow is my last day in Bangkok. It's hard to imagine it can top this, but there are plenty of things to do and see, even with out hitting the upscale commercial district!
Rest well.
Karen
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Final Days at the Dig
My last working day at the dig was yesterday, Saturday. I've enjoyed it all along. But yesterday might have been the most fun of all, since I got to work on putting together a large pot that was in MANY pieces (70 or so) that I had dug out of the ground the day before. All that practice with jigsaw puzzles came in very handy! It's an Iron Age pot--so at least 1500 years old. The rim was complete--it's much thicker than the rest of the pot-- but all the rest was in pieces, some as large as my hand, but many much smaller. On Friday I dug it out with dental picks, gently, freeing it from dirt and also the many large snail shells that were buried with it. Still, some pieces broke as I got it out; the body of the pot is less than 1/4" thick.
All these pots are made with a paddle/anvil technique. That means they are shaped by hand and then you put one hand inside holding the anvil (a hardened clay curved piece with a handle) and you beat the outside of the pot against that anvil with a paddle (which is often wrapped in cord, here, giving the outside of the pots some texture). It takes real skill to get the pot to be an even thickness and a graceful shape this way.
After I dug out the pot I washed all the pieces. They had to dry overnight and then in the sun for several hours Saturday morning. They hold a join better if they are warm when you work with them.
So it was Saturday afternoon before I could try to find pieces that fit together. Once you find a match, you brush off the edges that match with a dry toothbrush (in case there's any dust settled there, though you washed those same edges with a toothbrush yesterday), and then use a wooden skewer to spread ordinary white glue on one edge. You align the pieces and hold them together while the glue begins to set, and then prop them up in a basin filled with pig food pellets (looks like rabbit food--works like sand) and put small pieces of masking tape over the join to support it while it continues to dry. I was able to find about 20 joins that matched. Those have to dry before they can be pieced to each other, so someone else will get the pleasure of trying to finish the pot this week!
There are several intriguing features in the pits that have to do with how people lived at various points. One pit has a complicated set of ditches and trenches that are some kind of water feature; another has a layer of crushed pottery and shells making up a sort of floor, where there might have been industry of some kind; a third has a set of wobbly ridges of much harder substance than the surrounding dirt which might be a wall at the edge of the mound. This is just speculation--I'm told that the ratio of lab time to dig time to figure out what is going on is at least 3:1. Mapping of all these features accurately on paper is crucial. Carefully drawn maps on graph paper are created every 10 cm of depth, with all artifacts marked with location and tagged and bagged with a unique catalog number, along with a pit number, a spit number (depth marking), and whether the artifact came from a 'feature' or just the general dirt. Each object is also listed in an artifact catalog for each pit. All these then are entered in a database, along with photographs that are taken of every significant feature at any depth. They've found more than 13,000 artifacts so far...
People who can draw really accurate pictures of what's in the ground before it's moved are very valuable on the dig--we didn't have anyone who could do that until the end of the week, and then a professor from the archaeology/fine arts department at one of Bangkok's universities came out. He spent two hours drawing the sherds that were 'my' pot and several others, all mixed together in the ground, before we took any of it out. It's a remarkable drawing.
No new burials were found while I was at Ban Non Wat; but since they already have 674 skeletons from this mound in storage in the 'bone house' in town, that's OK. There's been a whole crew of Aussie students here working on them. It's possible that some burials will show up this coming week, but in no way do I feel shortchanged to have missed that. I did get to see both a human skeleton and a dog skeleton in situ early in my time at the dig. It's just astonishing how productive this site is.
Most of the staff running the dig are New Zealanders and Aussies, which has been fun. They will keep working this season until February 14, and will be back next year. My coworkers included a young British couple, a wonderful young Danish woman who is studying archaeology, an American woman who was in the Peace Corps in Thailand 38 years ago, a woman from the Chicago area who is a retired software engineer who goes on 5 or 6 digs a year (some in the US, but she's also worked in Guatemala and England and Africa); and a CT couple who have been to this dig several times before.
The daily schedule involved breakfast (usually fried rice) at 7, leaving for the site at 7:45 in a songtauw, which is a small truck that has bench seats in the back and a roof. We arrive at the site about 8:30, and wait until we're given job assignments (while the villagers open up each pit and make sure to deal with any scorpions or snakes before we get there). We work from 8:45 or so till 10:15, take a tea break, work till lunch at noon, work from 1:00 to 2:15--another tea break!--and then 2:30 to 4, when we board the songtauw for the ride back to the Phimai Inn. Dinner was at 7 each night, followed by a brief talk about some aspect of the research. I was often in bed by 8:30 and up at 4 to do two hours of Cambodian language study before the day at the dig got underway. Rest assured, there was plenty of time in there for beer and the occasional dip in the pool...
We also took a little side trip to the largest banyan tree in all of Thailand. The thing is amazing. This is the kind of tree that sends roots down from branches, so it looks like a forest, but it is just one organism. This one is 350 years old and covers 3,500 square feet. I haven't figured out how to post pictures on the blog--but there's also no way to do the thing justice in a photo. Very cool.
We've seen a bunch of other things while out at the village. The older woman who lives right where the headquarters for the dig are wove reed mats the second week. She collected reeds, stripped them down in half and took out some of the pith; dried them; dyed them four different colors, and then wove them into a patterned mat (about 4' by 6') using a wooden loom put together with wedges on the ground. The warp is just thin orange string. She has no pedals but can create two different sheds by tilting the wooden heddle toward her or away from her. She will sell them for about $3 each.
Some of the girls in the village helped one of our group learn how to fold and sew banana leaves and petals from marigolds and bougainvillea into the elaborate tiered offerings that are given to the Buddha for special merit. That was a full day project.
Villagers taught us how to use dried rice stalks to make round wreaths; these will be used in the coming week to stabilize pots (most of which have round bottoms) for display when a group of 100 local officials and teachers come to the site to learn about what is going on. We all sat together on the ground to do this. A man who had been working at one of the pits where I'd been digging--they really know what they are doing but they are patient and friendly with us inexperienced types--showed me how to do this even though we couldn't talk to each other, and once I passed muster he set off to make elaborate figures, like corn dolls, but bigger.
So today, Sunday, we traveled back to Bangkok by van. Then I took a taxi to my budget hotel near Khao San Road--the backpacker's market area. It was an adventure to find the place, especially since it's tucked back in an alley off the road, and addresses in Bangkok are fairly erratic. But I'm OK with adventures in highly populated places at midday. Finding the place required the best efforts of a taxi driver, some phone calls, a street bookseller with some English, and a doorman from a nearby and larger hotel. This is a VERY spartan place. I'm writing this sitting on my bed in a room that is, well, monastic: or the old-fashioned Thai version of a pod hotel. It's about 5' wide and 9' deep, with nothing in it but a bed and a small bamboo ladder for hanging a few clothes on, and a light. The bathroom is just across the small lounge outside my door. The fact that it's off the street means it's quiet, and there's a little garden downstairs where I can hang out, so I think it will be fine. And it's just $12 a night--with internet!
This afternoon I went walking in the area to explore, and lucked into an outdoor traditional dance/music event at the National Museum. I sat on the grass and watched people--I was one of only a few Westerners there--and stayed for the first hour of the spectacle, which was going to last nearly 3 hours. Tickets cost 75 cents. There were food stands set up, and lots of the audience were women my age or older, but there were also families and groups of teenagers. The show used live music with sung narration telling parts of the Ramayana story. I didn't stick around long enough to see the Monkey King do his thing, but did stay long enough to see some of the women's costumes. The program was in Thai, but it was my sense that this was a professional troupe, maybe appearing here since the National Theater next door is closed for reconstruction.
I have two more full days to explore Bangkok before heading to Phnom Penh. Not enough time to appreciate all the different aspects of this city, of course! I think I'll steer clear of the cosmopolitan commercial centers of the city in favor of more historical sites. Off to bed!
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Day Off!
It's Monday here and I have just a few minutes to post before leaving with part of our group on an excursion Earthwatch has set up for us on our one day off. We're headed to Phanom Rung, a hilltop temple site somewhat south and east of here, a bit closer to the Cambodian border.
So here's a quick update on my first week of work at the dig: I've actually dug in two of the four pits currently underway. A third pit (which contained the human skeleton and the dog skeleton we saw when we arrived-some 15 burials were in that pit) is now finished; a fourth pit, quite deep, has been quite wet and muddy at the bottom (about 4 meters down) and will now be reopened and finished. A four meter square is standard pit size, and both those pits were that size. The two I've worked in are bigger, but not yet as deep, in part because they are near the edges of the mound.
In one pit, I've sectioned (cut in half) a feature that may be a hearth of some kind. This required me to try to notice soil type differences--something I felt a little too inexperienced to do well, though the sticky black stuff was easy to spot. Finding the edges of an area of a certain soil type is harder.
In the other pit, I spent yesterday exposing an area where pottery sherds are embedded, using dental tools, a small trowel, a brush, and a plastic tea spoon. I was working with a Thai woman my age--no English, but she tried to teach me some Thai--who was very skilled and good at showing me how it's best done. Fun! Except for sitting on the ground for long hours in cramped positions leaning over. But it's good for a laugh for everyone when I try to get up. And I'm far from the oldest volunteer--that prize is held by an 80 year old English woman who lives on 3 acres of land outside Oxford and grows all her own vegetables.
I've also washed lots of pottery shards and cleaned up bronze artifacts (with dental tools and acetone, gently), bone artifacts, stone artifacts, and a few shell things.
Saturday was national Children's Day in Thailand so we all pitched in and bought school supplies and balloons and some candy and bagged them up and gave them away to the 27 children below age 12 or so in the village.
All these children had clothes--tops and bottoms--which is not true of the village where we work in Cambodia. This village, though in one of the poorest districts of Thailand and quite rural, has a paved road, electricity, running water, and even a street light. The contrast between rural Thailand and rural Cambodia is quite stark. Subsistence rice farming is the rule in both places, but the systems surrounding in Thailand seem MUCH more functional: four lane paved highways (many of them!), schools, hospitals, water, electricity....
More later--I'm off on our excursion!
Karen
So here's a quick update on my first week of work at the dig: I've actually dug in two of the four pits currently underway. A third pit (which contained the human skeleton and the dog skeleton we saw when we arrived-some 15 burials were in that pit) is now finished; a fourth pit, quite deep, has been quite wet and muddy at the bottom (about 4 meters down) and will now be reopened and finished. A four meter square is standard pit size, and both those pits were that size. The two I've worked in are bigger, but not yet as deep, in part because they are near the edges of the mound.
In one pit, I've sectioned (cut in half) a feature that may be a hearth of some kind. This required me to try to notice soil type differences--something I felt a little too inexperienced to do well, though the sticky black stuff was easy to spot. Finding the edges of an area of a certain soil type is harder.
In the other pit, I spent yesterday exposing an area where pottery sherds are embedded, using dental tools, a small trowel, a brush, and a plastic tea spoon. I was working with a Thai woman my age--no English, but she tried to teach me some Thai--who was very skilled and good at showing me how it's best done. Fun! Except for sitting on the ground for long hours in cramped positions leaning over. But it's good for a laugh for everyone when I try to get up. And I'm far from the oldest volunteer--that prize is held by an 80 year old English woman who lives on 3 acres of land outside Oxford and grows all her own vegetables.
I've also washed lots of pottery shards and cleaned up bronze artifacts (with dental tools and acetone, gently), bone artifacts, stone artifacts, and a few shell things.
Saturday was national Children's Day in Thailand so we all pitched in and bought school supplies and balloons and some candy and bagged them up and gave them away to the 27 children below age 12 or so in the village.
All these children had clothes--tops and bottoms--which is not true of the village where we work in Cambodia. This village, though in one of the poorest districts of Thailand and quite rural, has a paved road, electricity, running water, and even a street light. The contrast between rural Thailand and rural Cambodia is quite stark. Subsistence rice farming is the rule in both places, but the systems surrounding in Thailand seem MUCH more functional: four lane paved highways (many of them!), schools, hospitals, water, electricity....
More later--I'm off on our excursion!
Karen
Thursday, January 8, 2009
Pottery and Salt
It's the end of day 3 out at the dig. I've gotten pretty good at washing pottery shards and sorting them. There are hundreds of pounds of these, many only the size of a dime. All have to washed by hand with a scrub brush or toothbrush in water. It's repetitive, but kinda contemplative, too. There are also occasionally whole pots, or nearly whole pots. Yesterday I got to sponge one clean that actually had painted designs on it. It was about the size of a mango. Today I was just doing fragments, separating out pieces that had interesting features, especially rims. There are dozens of 50 lb rice bags full of such, each labelled as to which pit and which depth it came from. For most of these little sherds, all they will do is weigh the total mass (once cleaned of dirt) and the interesting/rim fragments from that same location. There are standard ratios of rim to general fragments. If the ratio in a given lot falls outside those ratios--either more rims or fewer than standard--it suggests that they should analyze that site further, because something unusual may be underway.
Most of what I washed today came from a pit near the edge of the mound where there seems to be some evidence of water systems, and perhaps some early industry. This is just one of three pits that are currently being dug. I took a turn doing some digging yesterday, and it raised my respect for the expertise it takes to see and feel and hear a difference in the texture of the soil, which is most of what you look for to find what is then called a 'feature.' Once found, features require careful digging, mapping, and analysis. This year some 20 villagers are hired to help dig--it has been as many as 40 in the past, when they did the huge pit out of which came some 660 burials--and they make it look easy. You take down a floor by 10 cm at a time, unless you find a feature of some kind. The Thai villagers can eyeball 10 cm exactly and quickly take up that much soil leaving a perfectly flat floor. Impressive!
I did have to wonder what they made of a farang (foreigner) like me coming half way around the world and paying for the privilege of digging in their dirt. Since I also didn't feel like I knew what I was doing, I felt awkward. There are other members of the volunteer team who have studied archaeology and so have experience with troweling and they tell me that they too are unsure moment to moment so maybe this is just how it is. So, while I'll certainly do some more digging before the two weeks are up, I may choose mostly to do other things where I'm sure my labor is genuinely helpful.
We also did a quick side trip today. We saw the ruins of one of the 'hospitals' --which weren't medical facilities, but places of hospitality for travelers, like inns or hostels--built along one of the roads stretching from Angkor Wat out this direction, under the reign of Jayarvarman VII. He's the Khmer king who built Angkor Thom and the Bayon (the temple with all the faces) and Ta Prohm (the temple which has huge trees growing over it) , shifted the Khmer religion to Buddhism from Hinduism, etc. The famous sculpture of a smiling head is thought to be his portrait.
We also saw how the local villagers extract salt from the soil now in the dry season. There are patches where salt comes up to the surface from underground deposits as the rice paddys dry out. Using local clay, they dig a pit about 4' square and 3' deep, line it with clay, and then line one side of it further with reeds and burlap bags. On that side, they dig a neighboring hole, about a foot in diameter but deeper, and then connect the two at the bottom of the shallower pit with a bamboo tube. They shovel in salt-laden dirt, and then pour water in on top of it. It filters into the smaller hole, where they can collect the briny water, which has salt in it, but no other impurities. They make a small float out of a particular tree resin, and when this floats on the water that's come through the filter, they know it has enough salt in it to warrant boiling down. The salt that crystallizes on the side of the boiling pan is bitter and used as a stomach remedy, but what's in the bottom of the pot can be bagged and sold. It's quite an operation, but requires essentially no capital--just skill and knowhow. It's a good moneymaker when they can't be growing rice.
No promises but I'll see if I can post some pictures soon!
Karen
Most of what I washed today came from a pit near the edge of the mound where there seems to be some evidence of water systems, and perhaps some early industry. This is just one of three pits that are currently being dug. I took a turn doing some digging yesterday, and it raised my respect for the expertise it takes to see and feel and hear a difference in the texture of the soil, which is most of what you look for to find what is then called a 'feature.' Once found, features require careful digging, mapping, and analysis. This year some 20 villagers are hired to help dig--it has been as many as 40 in the past, when they did the huge pit out of which came some 660 burials--and they make it look easy. You take down a floor by 10 cm at a time, unless you find a feature of some kind. The Thai villagers can eyeball 10 cm exactly and quickly take up that much soil leaving a perfectly flat floor. Impressive!
I did have to wonder what they made of a farang (foreigner) like me coming half way around the world and paying for the privilege of digging in their dirt. Since I also didn't feel like I knew what I was doing, I felt awkward. There are other members of the volunteer team who have studied archaeology and so have experience with troweling and they tell me that they too are unsure moment to moment so maybe this is just how it is. So, while I'll certainly do some more digging before the two weeks are up, I may choose mostly to do other things where I'm sure my labor is genuinely helpful.
We also did a quick side trip today. We saw the ruins of one of the 'hospitals' --which weren't medical facilities, but places of hospitality for travelers, like inns or hostels--built along one of the roads stretching from Angkor Wat out this direction, under the reign of Jayarvarman VII. He's the Khmer king who built Angkor Thom and the Bayon (the temple with all the faces) and Ta Prohm (the temple which has huge trees growing over it) , shifted the Khmer religion to Buddhism from Hinduism, etc. The famous sculpture of a smiling head is thought to be his portrait.
We also saw how the local villagers extract salt from the soil now in the dry season. There are patches where salt comes up to the surface from underground deposits as the rice paddys dry out. Using local clay, they dig a pit about 4' square and 3' deep, line it with clay, and then line one side of it further with reeds and burlap bags. On that side, they dig a neighboring hole, about a foot in diameter but deeper, and then connect the two at the bottom of the shallower pit with a bamboo tube. They shovel in salt-laden dirt, and then pour water in on top of it. It filters into the smaller hole, where they can collect the briny water, which has salt in it, but no other impurities. They make a small float out of a particular tree resin, and when this floats on the water that's come through the filter, they know it has enough salt in it to warrant boiling down. The salt that crystallizes on the side of the boiling pan is bitter and used as a stomach remedy, but what's in the bottom of the pot can be bagged and sold. It's quite an operation, but requires essentially no capital--just skill and knowhow. It's a good moneymaker when they can't be growing rice.
No promises but I'll see if I can post some pictures soon!
Karen
Tuesday, January 6, 2009
Day 1 at the Dig
Greetings, all. Monday Jan 5 was a travel day for me, joining up with the Earthwatch team and driving by van northeast of Bangkok to Phimai and settling in to our lodgings. My room is basic but plenty adequate--similar to the guest house rooms we use in Siem Reap--and in a much larger establishment with internet access in the entry, a pool, an outdoor restaurant, and performers singing karaoke till later than I wished last night.
We made it out to the dig today, about 45 minutes from the inn. It's at Ban Non Wat. (Ban = village; Non = mound; Wat = temple.) They've been digging here for some 6 seasons, and it's just one of several neolithic/bronze/iron age sites within 20 kilometers. The way they chose the site was to fly over by helicopter, looking for mounds with evidence of moats around them. This is one such. The moat wasn't deep and probably wasn't defensive; it was more likely part of water works, separating the surrounding rice fields from the village.
The current village on the site has memory going back about 130 years, but it has probably been occupied for nearly 4000. Many of the villagers are employed by the dig--at least one member of each family--and so the project is popular, and we are very welcome, though not all families have granted permission to dig on their land.
The archaeologists here have dug (and refilled) multiple sites in the village, including one very large site that yielded hundreds of human burials. They find burials most everywhere they look, and many shell middens. (Three village women spend all day every day washing shells and sorting them.) They are also looking changes in soil texture that (to the trained eye--I certainly can't see it yet) suggest structures and water elements. This year, they are digging in a series of smaller sites, hoping to establish where the edges of the village were at different eras. Today I got to go down about 4 meters into a pit where the bone expert was getting ready to lift a skeleton that had been exposed. She was taking really careful measurements, but wasn't yet ready to determine sex. Small ceramic pots had been buried near the person, as is true in most of these burials, and other people were cataloguing and bagging these. Really beautiful and accurate drawings are made of each find in situ before things are moved, and exquisite mapping is done of the whole pit each 10 cm of depth.
In this same pit there is a dog skeleton, clearly a deliberate burial, with no grave goods. So probably a pet....about 2500 years ago.
What I spent most of my time doing today was sorting bagged and labeled artifacts into groups (clay, shell, bronze, iron, stone, petrified wood, carbon dating samples, coprolites, and a few labelled 'enigma') and then cleaning shell artifacts using a toothbrush, dental picks, and water. It was really fun and satisfying, and meant I got to see a lot of examples of things that have been found already this season, including bangles made of shell or bronze, small bells and beads, stone axes, clay pellets and spindle whorls--which are small weights made of clay used to twist cord or thread.
Lunch out at the site was locally grown rice and pineapple curry. REALLY tasty.
Jobs will rotate throughout the time I'm here, unless and until someone finds something they love to do and wants to stick with it. There's a longtime volunteer here who is the ceramicschief, and she supervised a group washing sherds today. I saw a couple of pots she'd pieced back together (using masking tape!) and hope at some point to learn more about how this is done.
I'm enjoying myself!
Karen
We made it out to the dig today, about 45 minutes from the inn. It's at Ban Non Wat. (Ban = village; Non = mound; Wat = temple.) They've been digging here for some 6 seasons, and it's just one of several neolithic/bronze/iron age sites within 20 kilometers. The way they chose the site was to fly over by helicopter, looking for mounds with evidence of moats around them. This is one such. The moat wasn't deep and probably wasn't defensive; it was more likely part of water works, separating the surrounding rice fields from the village.
The current village on the site has memory going back about 130 years, but it has probably been occupied for nearly 4000. Many of the villagers are employed by the dig--at least one member of each family--and so the project is popular, and we are very welcome, though not all families have granted permission to dig on their land.
The archaeologists here have dug (and refilled) multiple sites in the village, including one very large site that yielded hundreds of human burials. They find burials most everywhere they look, and many shell middens. (Three village women spend all day every day washing shells and sorting them.) They are also looking changes in soil texture that (to the trained eye--I certainly can't see it yet) suggest structures and water elements. This year, they are digging in a series of smaller sites, hoping to establish where the edges of the village were at different eras. Today I got to go down about 4 meters into a pit where the bone expert was getting ready to lift a skeleton that had been exposed. She was taking really careful measurements, but wasn't yet ready to determine sex. Small ceramic pots had been buried near the person, as is true in most of these burials, and other people were cataloguing and bagging these. Really beautiful and accurate drawings are made of each find in situ before things are moved, and exquisite mapping is done of the whole pit each 10 cm of depth.
In this same pit there is a dog skeleton, clearly a deliberate burial, with no grave goods. So probably a pet....about 2500 years ago.
What I spent most of my time doing today was sorting bagged and labeled artifacts into groups (clay, shell, bronze, iron, stone, petrified wood, carbon dating samples, coprolites, and a few labelled 'enigma') and then cleaning shell artifacts using a toothbrush, dental picks, and water. It was really fun and satisfying, and meant I got to see a lot of examples of things that have been found already this season, including bangles made of shell or bronze, small bells and beads, stone axes, clay pellets and spindle whorls--which are small weights made of clay used to twist cord or thread.
Lunch out at the site was locally grown rice and pineapple curry. REALLY tasty.
Jobs will rotate throughout the time I'm here, unless and until someone finds something they love to do and wants to stick with it. There's a longtime volunteer here who is the ceramicschief, and she supervised a group washing sherds today. I saw a couple of pots she'd pieced back together (using masking tape!) and hope at some point to learn more about how this is done.
I'm enjoying myself!
Karen
Sunday, January 4, 2009
ARRIVED!
I've arrived safe and sound in Bangkok. Travel was trouble free, as these things go: van from New Haven to JFK, 13 hour Korean Air flight straight over the polar ice from NY to Seoul, a four-hour layover in the very modern and upscale international transfer terminal complete with free internet lounge, and then a five-hour flight to Bangkok. Having crossed the international date line, I arrived at about midnight--common for US flights to this city--and the temperature was 75 degrees Fahrenheit. Yes, it is January.
I had an easy walk through immigration and my luggage arrived with me as hoped. Earthwatch's directions on how to avoid the shills in the airport and get to the legit public taxi stand were accurate and helpful, with just one adjustment as to doorway number, which I thought remarkable given that this airport was occupied and closed less than a month ago, well after those directions were published. I could see no signs of the recent turmoil.
My taxi driver spoke some English, and clearly recognized the name of my hotel, a 30 minute drive away, easy enough in the middle of the night, without the infamous Bangkok traffic. He had a bit of the spirit of Tony, our favorite tuk-tuk driver in Siem Reap when I travel there with student groups. So, while I couldn't understand everything he said, I did learn about his family, and that he had worked in Saudi Arabia for 14 years as a driver: this when his children were young, and his wife stayed in her native village in the north and raised them. He worked for a good company, he said--they paid his salary every month, unlike other companies that said they would but didn't--although he lived in his car for at least part of the time. Now that the Thai economy is better, he is back home, and driving jobs in Saudi Arabia are filled by people from the Philippines and India.
Mr. Taxi Driver also gave me, with my encouragement, some basic Thai lessons: how to say thank you and I'm sorry and good morning and good evening. He was even willing to coach me in the women's word for yes, which is different from the men's word, as in many Asian languages. Apparently, everyone uses the same word for no. My ear is good enough that I can mimic well in the moment but retention is another matter entirely! As a largely visual learner, I am severely hampered by not being able to decode the written language. The same is true for me in Khmer, Cambodia's language.
My hotel was expecting me, and so by 2am Sunday morning here (2pm Saturday afternoon, EST) I'd washed off the travel dust and was headed to bed, just as the BBC channel on TV broke the news of Israel's ground incursion into Gaza.
I slept most of the leg from Seoul to Bangkok, and another 4 hours or so once arrived at the hotel, so I awoke Sunday morning refreshed and with some hope that my body clock had reset to Thai time. The hotel is fairly far from city center, and since I know I will have three days for sightseeing once I return from the archaeological dig I am doing with Earthwatch, I have elected to spend today, Sunday, within sight of the hotel, with no particular ambition, on R&R: a preliminary go at what the Buddhists call 'non-doing', something at which, in plain language, I suck.
'Non-doing' is part of what I am doing here, if that makes any sense. Those of you who are averse to psychological/spiritual talk may want to skip the next 6 paragraphs. (I know: yikes! She's a wordy one!) The leave of absence I've taken from my teaching job is designed to give me time to recalibrate my inner workings so that I can recover from long years of laboring long hours. I know that I need to build a different approach to my job for the future, one I can sustain as I age and my energy level--which has always been quite high--begins to subside. I am seeking a more 'middle way', again to borrow Buddhist language. Solo travel confronts me with my essential self more than most other activities I know. (Backpacking in the wilderness is another activity that accesses this inner realm for me, but I am no longer in physical shape to pursue that avenue.) Away from the easy distractions of home, surrounded by strangers who expect nothing much of me, I am thrown into my own interiority in a way that is profound and useful. I speak less, for one thing, and getting away from my own outer voice makes the inner one stronger. (It's OK, you can smirk!) I understand the pull of silent religious orders, though I doubt I am headed there.
Some of you know my art quilt work. Quilt #1 in a series I call Journey of the Self is called 'Taking the Plunge.' It hangs over the couch in our living room. Quilt #2 in the same series--which I've been working on in one way or another for a good 15 years, no joke--is called 'Pushing the River.' I am, I think, nearly done with it, in outer reality and inner business. I've long known that the next quilt in the series has to do with floating with the current, in a much more contemplative and less busy mode. This trip is part of a conscious effort on my part to acknowledge, honor, and engage in that transition.
Some of you close to me know or have sensed all this. My sister Linda gifted me with Jon Kabat-Zinn's book WHEREVER YOU GO THERE YOU ARE, which I am reading slowly over this month. My friend Sandy knew in a flash, with the uncanny insight good friends provide, that when I said that Earthwatch had asked me to bring a kneeling pad for the dig, this also had to do with prayer.
A third gift, quite unexpected, came from an old friend who was an AFS exchange student in Thailand the same year I was an exchange student in Germany, before we met as frosh at Wesleyan. Matt sent me a digital copy of a tape he'd sent to his family back then, having to do with his decision about whether or not to spend a month as a novice monk in Bangkok--something almost all young Thai men do. I listened to it today with great interest. I am not Buddhist, and though drawn to some Buddhist concepts, I question how far I, with my deeply Western training, can expect to go adopting Buddhist ways. Culture matters, after all. For one thing, I suspect I am way too caught up with the notion of self to access much understanding through Buddhist practice. So for now, I recognize that I use Buddhist concepts in somewhat the way I use scientific theory: as elegant metaphor for scientific processes I recognize, or choose to believe are central to the way the world works. Jungian thinking is another analytic tool I find helpful in digging through my inner layers.
In arriving at how I might best spend my leave, I came to understand that I wanted to do service in SE Asia without teaching, since I knew teaching would keep me in talking relationship with others when what I really need to do is study myself. The eventual goal, I realize, is to do both at once, but for now I need to indulge in my own affairs rather exclusively. I don't know what the dig will be like, but I'm hoping I can be quiet, and think about time, and maybe piece pottery shards together occasionally, since piecing is part of my aesthetic, whether it is in fabric or theater works or jigsaw puzzles. What this adds up to is that I hope, over this month, to build mindfulness, especially around issues of non-doing and doing too much.
I'm almost done with this spiritual talk! Forgive the overshare, if that's what this is. I do it because I believe that we are all made up of the material and the spiritual, and because I can only speak of it indirectly when I am in proximity with you, but find it easier to be direct when I am a distance. (What's that about? Some of you with greater wisdom in these matters will know. I think it is the spiritual equivalent of why you can only see faint stars at night out of the corner of your eye, not straight on--see what I mean about metaphor?) I said when I invited you to read this blog that I believed in reciprocity, and I do. So this is also meant to prime the pump, a bit. Some of you know things through your conscious pursuit of your own journeys that I might benefit from hearing at this juncture in mine, though I question how much learning is transferable in these realms. But consider yourself invited to share back, if you wish. Know that blog comments are public, so that musings you want to keep more private should come to me a k_bovard@yahoo.com.
Back to the material front! I took an hour's stroll around the hotel's neighborhood today. Out my 8th floor window I can see a 10 story Veterinary Teaching Hospital, part of Kasersart University--it says so right on it in big English letter. Down at ground level, this is a well-off residential neighborhood with 2 story connected row houses, fairly modest in size. Most have an accordion gated carport in front with the house entrance behind and a second floor above. Almost all the cars I saw were Toyotas of various sizes, though I did spot one Isuzu, one Mercedes, one Honda, and two vintage VW bugs within a few blocks.
Since today is a Sunday and a holiday, most restaurants in the area were closed. So I was thrown back on the hotel restaurant, which had a prix fixe dim sum lunch, so I was OK with that! It went on for multiple courses--which I wish I had time to describe in detail for my foodie friends out there, but my internet session is going to time out shortly. Suffice it to say that I don't need any more food today!
Tomorrow, Monday, midday I rendezvous at this hotel with the rest of the Earthwatch gang and we head by van out to Phimai, near the dig. So I suppose that means I am going to work, though not in the routine way. I know that many of you are also heading off to work on Monday, often on one side or another of the teaching podium. May our various labors be meaningful enough to sustain us.
Rest assured that I won't be writing at this length very often. Know that I don't expect to talk a lot henceforth about my inner journey (I have a lovely journal for that purpose) but I did want to name it, both to myself and to you, my friends and family. There is power in naming, and if I am going to change deep-seated habits, I need to call all the power into the process that I can.
Off to poolside, with reading: THE BOOKSELLER OF KABUL, to keep me in travel mode. Maybe I'll swim a few laps, too. Or maybe not, in service of non-doing.
Thanks for listening.
Karen
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