For my 2 years of service, I will be living with a host family. My host family has 4 core members. It is much smaller than the host family I had for training, which had an average 13 people at the house. All of my new host family members are younger than me.

There is SuPha the father, SuPaha the mother, and they have two teenage children, brother Sambo, 18, and sister SahPaun, 16. Sambo currently attends University in Phnom Penh and is usually not home. The littlest one you see in the photo is Dtoee, 8. She is a niece whose drunken father, if I understand correctly, ran off leaving Dtoee and her mother who is currently un-able to care for her while she is working in Phnom Penh. She floats between living with us and her grandmother across the street.

This is the house where I live. It looks much bigger than it is. The entire yard surrounding the house is paved and covered with metal roofing. It is a bit like living in a big carport. The advantage of all this pavement is that there is much less mud and dirt to contend with, especially in the rainy season. But is makes it seem less homey.

Monsoon rain water is collected from the roofs in these cisterns and we have a well for the dry season. This is also where I hand wash all my laundry, a ritual that consumes a lot of my life here.

The actual house is a wooden structure with two rooms on the top floor and a single cement room below. Most of the living area exists outdoors under the tin roofing including a commons area under the bedrooms. My bedroom is the smaller of the two rooms upstairs. It is about 6 feet by 8 feet. The single thickness boarded walls have gaps. In a hard rain, I get a bit wet, but the breeze gets through so I like that. It is deafeningly loud in a hard rain because of all the tin roofing, and I am often awakened by the sound in the middle of the night. If it’s not the rain, I contend with the dogs barking and howling all night which are competed with only by the roosters. Yes, I wear earplugs, but I still hear it all.

You can see there is not much room around my bed.  I essentially live in the mosquito net in the evenings and at night to protect me from the mosquitoes. No, that is not a tennis racquet on the edge of my bed. That is a bug zapper, and I take great pleasure in swatting the mosquitoes with it. I was very excited when I was able to explain to my host father that I wanted to make a rack to hang my clothes on, and he gave me a piece of blue PVC pipe (seen on the right) from his shop.

Not much feng shui here. Everything about the house is practical and has a hard feel. Cambodians are not big into cushions or soft things. Cement and tile abound. My mattress is literally only a half-inch thick. Seriously, my camping pad is more comfortable. My luxury investment this week was a shiny new red fan that I keep inside the mosquito net to cool me off at night.

Many people ask me about the bathroom situation. Well, here it is. It is an out building behind the house. In Asia, a squat toilet  (“squatty potty”) like this one is most common. It’s great for stretching out your achilles tendons. The lower basin of water and bucket are for cleaning your self after using the toilet; no toilet paper here. The upper basin is where you scoop out water for taking bucket showers. No hot water here either which is quite refreshing.

… Did I mention the spiders?

This is my host family’s large building materials supply store. It also carries an assortment of other household items including beer and some basic dry food items making it somewhat of a general store for the village. SuPha and SaPaha leave early in the morning at about 5:30am every day to open the store. I am on my own for eating breakfast, but eat my lunch and dinner with the family. Actually, I should say they feed me those meals. I have not yet had a meal where I eat with all of them. Sometimes SuPha will eat with me, but usually they feed me and I eat alone. Men and women do not typically eat together any way from what I can see. Meals are not a family event like they are for many in the US.

They do all their cooking and feed me in the back of the store. It is kind of like eating in the back of the warehouse at Home Depot. There are two cats,  a dog and some chickens that hang out in the shop eating the scraps that are thrown on the ground and out the back door. It’s my current mission to get them to stop throwing all their garbage on the ground.