Home!

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.