“People from India are black. Why are you white?”
June 14, 2009
This was one of the first greetings I received during my initial trip to the provinces north east of Phnom Penh. I’m sure both my grandmothers would be mighty proud to hear such compliments around the supposed fairness of my skin, and what a “compliment” it is! Besides the political correctness issue, (sometimes I find the bluntness refreshing, I’ll admit), village life is incredible. These people live with no electricity, no running piped water supply system, forget heating or air-conditioning systems and completely absolutely forget indoor nice clean lavatory facilities. They sleep on hard bumpy wooden beds with no mattress, and I’m sort of shocked with myself for being surprised at this, and finding it uncomfortable. In many ways, I don’t feel like a foreigner here, because I sense such similarities between this place and India, but I forget that seeing poverty is not the same as living it. That is much harder. Seriously.
I had to spend a whole day in the village interviewing people, then sleeping in one of those houses at night – complete with no electricity, no ammenities whatsoever, – and be a fully functional human being the next day, after a night when the cockerels had conversations with one another starting at 3:00 am, right outside my window, after having slept in a very hard incredibly bumpy uncomfortable bed. It was rough. Also, everyone goes to bed the moment it gets dark, i.e. 7:30 or 8:00 pm!
I have seen poverty – lots of it, and in some of the worst extremes, and ironically in some of the wealthiest cities (like New York) so it’s been even more striking in those instances, and I know how poor people in India live. But it stops there. I’ve seen it, but have never experienced it. For this trip, the initial survey data I have to collect about handwashing facilities and practices at home requires me to stay in the villages for up to 4 or 5 days at a time, attempting to conduct up to ten 40-minute interviews a day, in the heat and vegetarian-free food zones of these dwellings far away from the big city.
Needless to say, the first days I spent there were tough on me, and I was all the while aching to return to be mybeloved Phnom Penh, with it’s edible vegetarian food i.e. my favourite Dosa Restaurant, and my comfortable bed, and my airconditioning, and my friends.So that has been really tough – seeing how attached I am to my creature comforts. And really, the biggest thing is food. It’s amazing how grumpy I get when I don’t have proper food I like, and that is near on impossible in the villages, when they eat rice and meat all the time. Which means I only get to eat the plain rice. Even the thought makes me ridiculously upset…
However, given that of my 8 weeks remaining in the city, I have to spend about 5 weeks worth of them in the villages, I’m sure I’ll get over these issues soon enough, and learn to find a way to combat the food situation. I’m trying to remind myself that it could be much worse, and that Phnom Penh isn’t so far away…
