There is still nothing terribly interesting to report photographically. However, I thought since I had Internet access I would do an update about where I am and what I am doing.  I moved from Takeao Town, which we now call the “Hub Site,” to a small village named Tramkak about 20 minutes drive away. Our first stop was one of the village’s two Wats. A Wat is a Buddhist temple and often serves as a community center for villages.

At the Wat our group received a blessing by two monks. The blessing began with each of us kneeling and bowing 3 times before the monks. The monks then chanted the blessing while sprinkling us with water flung from a tree branch.

Following the blessing, we were greeted by the community’s governor who through an interpreter welcomed us to the community and repeatedly thanked us for coming to Cambodia to serve. Also at the blessing was a member from each of our future host families. At the end of the Governor’s speech, we were one by one paired with our host family’s mother or father.

Our host family is our adoptive family during training and is responsible for giving us a home and room to live in, feeding us, and most importantly helping us to learn about the K’mai (Cambodian) culture and language. My host mother is named Mia. I have chosen not to call her mother but Pa-aun Sry (little sister) as she is actually 3 years younger than me. She takes very good care of me like a mother however. I’ll post more about my new home and family in the future. Saturday and Sunday was spent resting and getting to know the new family and home that I will call mine for the next 7 weeks.

On Monday, we continued our training with our first official language lesson from 7:30 to noon and technical training from 1:30 to 5:00 pm. For language training we are divided into groups of 6 and each group is pared with a Language and Cultural Facilitator (LCF). My group LCF is Savine, and I am very excited to have him as my teacher. I connected with him right away before he was assigned to me. Savin is very patient, understands my needs, and speaks English very well, which adds up to good teaching for me. I must say that so far learning K’mai has been the aspect of this experience that is stressing me the most. There is the heat and humidity too, but I am trying to ignore them

A particularly frustrating aspect of learning K’mai is that since it is not a Latin based language there is no standard way to write it without already knowing it. So far, we are not learning how to read or write in K’mai, just speak it. So note taking is a frustrating series of creating phonetic representations of the words we learn. There are several sounds that we do not have in English so you have to be especially creative to come up with phonetics for words. Each of us does it differently and often what I come up with means nothing to me when I look at my notes later. Additionally, I do not memorize well and although the grammar is not complex, my in ability to memorize the many new words we are learning trips me up.