Youtry
With his 2 brothers, Uee and Umong, Youtry led the community and the church where we worked this month. It was such a blast to have contacts that are around our age! We were fast friends, and laughed so much this month. The boys always slept on the porch “for our protection.” We were grateful for that. And of course, with our extremely limited Khmer language skills, they translated for us. Having shy, soft-spoken translators was interesting. I’m sure we embarrassed them more times than they will tell us.
One very memorable thing about Youtry: The Swagger. He has this model/gangster walk that is so hilariously awesome. We caught a few video clips of his walk… better known as the “Cambyland Swag.” His Facebook info says, “My favorite thing to do is hunt snakes.” And he is serious. To any World Race teams who get to come to Khampong Cham, don’t be fooled. WE are his favorites!
Trei
While prayer walking a nearby village one morning, a skeleton of a man hobbled over to us, picked up 2 pieces of straw from the ground, and made them into a cross. He held up his little cross, grinned, and pointed to his chest. We laughed and introduced ourselves, with Youtry’s help. The man invited us into his house, and told us about how his sons had married Christian women, and he knew all about Jesus.
In his high bamboo house, he served us a drink that we thought was really good tea, until he told us it was coffee. It wasn’t good coffee. But we sipped happily while he told us about himself. His name is Trei and he is 83 years old. During the Polpot regime, he was working as a palm farmer. One of his sons was recruited into Polpot’s army. But as he explained to us, “The Khmer Rouge didn’t recruit you to fight, they recruited you to die.” He lost an uncle to the soldiers as well.
At one point, the Khmer Rouge took all of the solid wood siding off of his house to build rice barns. He replaced his walls with thin bamboo branches, and they still stand like that today. As we left, I noticed a stack of solid wood planks beneath his house. For the past 35 years, he has been collecting wood to recover his walls. He still doesn’t quite have enough.
We went back to visit Trei twice, always with a small gift. We finished every beverage he served us: watery coffee, and a kind of melon juice that tasted like pure liquid brown sugar. I don’t have any recordings of his quiet, rough voice, but it’s something I won’t forget.
Song
Oh wow… this woman. From the minute we met her, she was a ball of squealing energy, which was surprising for a hunched old woman. We talked through Youtry as she pinched, poked, and even punched us with a strange sort of affection. I did record our second arrival at her tumbledown bamboo house! Song’s mouth and fingers were stained red with the mixture of drug plants that many local women chew on. Even as we sat with her, she would crush the mixture of plants and glue while excitedly pointing and talking to each of us.
The last time we went to visit her, she kept asking when we would come back. It surprised us, but as we said goodbye and hugged her tiny, hunched shoulders, she cried. How could she care so much about six random white girls who only visited her three times? I suppose anything that brings you joy, then says “I’m not coming back” would be kind of heartbreaking. But Youtry knows how to get to her village, and he has promised to take future Racers to go see her.
Students
I can’t pronounce most of their names, and it’s not for lack of effort! The Khmer language has 26 vowel sounds (most of which are nasals, anthros!) that my mouth just did not get along with. But these are the kids I spent 2 hours with each night, trying over and over again to pronounce English fricatives correctly. I was grateful for my background in linguistics to help them learn to say their THs and Fs and Vs, but it left my team with a fun new “expletive”… What the fricative?
So we’re off again, to a new country on a new continent. And yes, Cambodia has a face now. But as it gained its reality in my mind, it broke my heart. So few countries we will visit have such a history, have come out of so much terror so recently. Learning about that time has left a mark on me more than anything else this month. For them, I pray for peace, for hope, for a future.
Chum reap lee!
-Katie
