This week was wedding week. I got three invitations for weddings in the whole month and two of them were this week. Weddings in Cambodia begin incredibly early; I had to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning to get ready each time (the bride at 3 o’clock) to participate in the fruit walk. I think it was enough to describe the procedure one time, you can read all about it in “And They Lived Happily Ever After?”. The first wedding was Rathanas sisters wedding. As Rathana lives just next to the market, they built up the tents in front of her house and also just at the entrance of the market. Nobody could get in the market anymore and the whole traffic was reorganized. It is just a normal street where they place tables and a stage as if it was actually an event location. The poor selling women that were gutting out their fish at this place had to move somewhere else. Everything is made of a giant load of kitch. The tents are decorated with ribbons in gold and pink and every chair gets a colourful coating. The entrance gates are made of flowers and fruits and inside the house where the ceremonies take place, everything is sparkling because of golden plates, chests and crockery. I was once again the tallest person at the whole ceremony, drawing all the looks at me. The girl walking next to me at fruit walk tried to take selfies with me while we were walking down the road. Everyone who lived there and was not invited came outside their doors and watched the procedure as if we were in fact an amusing parade. This is a thing I also frequently notice in Cambodia. Whenever I go somewhere, the parents are taking their children by the hand and draw them outside the house so they can see me and say “hello” and “how are you”. Garlaine recently told me, that it was really just as if we were a one man parade and they were bringing their children just like we would do in Germany or America to let them see the funnily dressed clowns and dancers that are on the wagons. When we finally arrived at the house and could put down our plates, Kadet came running towards me. Then she took my hand and pulled me towards a chair. I am sure she wanted to lead me out of the crowds and into safe territory, because she always seems to have the urge to make sure I am well and safe. We watched the Apsara dancing and threw the flowers on groom and bride. Basically, all Cambodian weddings are the same and they consist to 80% of waiting till the next part of the wedding will start.
A hundred years ago Cambodian weddings were seven days long. Later they made it 3 days and now it’s only one and a half day. Still too long. When finally the evening part of the wedding begun at four o’clock, I was incredibly tired and hungry. I got placed next to Mach who was also invited. I didn’t realize that I sat on a table with all the important people from Angtasom that Rathans father had invited. He had studied with Mach and so he was greeting him like an old friend. Despite the fact that he had to be enormously busy with greeting all the guests and bringing them to their tables, he managed to step by every twenty minutes to check if we had enough bear. We were the only table that got the fancy ABC-beer that has an extra high percentage of alcohol and is really expensive. I’m not sure if I mentioned that before, but people in Cambodia are anstossen not only one time before they start drining, but every three minutes. Then every raises their glass and screams “Lekailang” and “Chulkamoi” enthusiastically (same as cheers). I tried to drink as slow as possible, but every time I took a sip from my glass, it got filled to the top again. What made it worse was, that I couldn’t eat anything, because on weddings it is especially important to cook a lot of meat and so I was on the best way to get drunk, next to my not exaggeratingly responsible host father. I decided to search for Sreydieb, Sopohl, Sreyleak and Kadet who were all invited to the wedding too. I sat on their table that was prepared with soft drinks and tried to prepare myself for the dancing part. First the couple is cutting the cake and then they light candles, give speeches and throw the flower bucket. Everything is well organized in a way that makes everything as long as possible, from the beginning to the end.
A lot of parents that have their children at the Learning Center were invited and brought them with them. When the dancing part of the wedding begun I had 10 little background dancer, all of them copying my steps. It was a lot of fun and I ignored the fact that probably all 600 guest were watching me by then. We danced around the fruit table and a furious crowd of 7-year olds blocked my way, every time I was planning to sit down after a song. At 10 o’clock Sreydieb pulled me to the side. She said that Kadets father got really sick and that we would go to his house now and visit him. When we arrived, around 30 people were standing around his bed. He was apparently asleep, but maybe he just closed his eyes to not be forced to talk to all the people that had come to see him. Kadet winked enthusiastically and gestured for me to come closer. I sat down on the edge of the bed (a wooden table outside the house) and didn’t really know what was expected of me. Should I say some blessings or take his hand in mine to make evil ghosts vanish? “He speaks French.”, Kadet announced. As he was sleeping this didn’t help me at all. Kadets son climbed up the table and lay his head on his grandfathers belly. On the one hand I admire how close the families in Cambodia are to each other. Close to four generations live in one house and even aunts and uncles are not far down the street. On the contrary in Western countries we simply send elderly people to a retirement home and come from time to time to visit. I admire this about the culture and think that this is more so the way it should be. On the other hand, I believe that it is not doing any patient any good, to have his entire relatives standing around his bed chatting, in the middle of the night. I, myself, felt that I shouldn’t be there, that I was the least person that should correspond with him in French right now. I folded my hands and bended my head down to him, to show my respect. Then I told everyone in the round that I hoped he would be better soon. Serious nods from everywhere. We stayed at the house until after 11 and I had to talk to all of Kadets relatives before I was allowed to go to sleep.
Stacy told me, that she was pretty much over weddings too. Every time she has to sit and listen for hours on no end to people talking in broken microphones with the loudest voice and the noise is even increased through the as well broken loudspeakers. When she attended her last wedding, she was sitting at a table with some elderly women. All of them were mustering her while she tried to eat until one of them said: “Oh Stacy! You have a face like a duck egg!” She didn’t know what to say to that and tried to get away from the table as fast as possible. Later someone told her that this was actually a compliment. It meant that you had an evenly formed face that was pure and smooth like a duck egg.
At the wedding of Siphens cousin, both Stacy and I were invited. I was incredibly glad to have her with me. After the morning part (with a cabaret show of some ancient Khmer folk tale), the hair cutting ceremony and Apsara dancing, we waited for the evening part to begin. One of the houses of Siphens uncle was transformed to a beauty studio. We got in line to wait until it was our turn. I always feel like I am a doll that is dressed and brushed and styled, without having a say in how I actually want to look like. The most important thing is to put tons of glitter on my face and hair. I prepared myself to wait until five different courses that I couldn’t eat were brought to our table. Fortunately I sat on a table with Stacy. We were talking to each other about the daily craziness of Cambodian life and the whole time nobody of the eight other people on our table was talking, everyone was just starring at us wide-eyed and listening to what they couldn’t possibly have understood. I once again had to think about the parade-comparison that Garlaine had drawn. After that we were lighting the sparklers and I tried my best not to stand in the way of anyone who wanted to catch the flower bucket. One time was enough for me. I had to drink a beer with my favourite tuc tuc driver, Vanak, and danced with him and Linda around the fruit table. When it was about time to go home, I was stuffed in the car with 8 other people from my host-family and realized once again, that this was just the way things worked here.
To that point, the beautiful dress that Linda gave to me was completely black at the hem. I decided to bring it to the tailor to make it shorter. I went with Sopheak the next day and we walked though the market. There is one market row, with maybe 20 women, that are doing nothing besides fitting, cutting, sewing, mending, changing and inventing new clothes. When we finally found one women that had time for us, she took a giant scissor out of a basket and cut my dress shorter in about 5 seconds. I was horrified, watching her. It was like sitting at the hairdresser and hoping he would not cut away too much hair. She announced I could pick it up in five days and wept the pieces that once belonged to my dress away with a broomstick. I told myself it was for the better, but it still hurt. I really adore this dress.
I played a game with the children that is called carrot farmer. When I was younger I absolutely adored the game and could play it for ages. You just never want to be the farmer, but being a carrot is wonderful. The children all need to lie down besides one that is the farmer. Then they intertwine their hands and try to hold and while the farmer tries to break the circle e.g. pull the carrots out of the soil.
When I arrived in Cambodia, I brought ‘The Fault in Our Stars’, a book by my favourite author as a present for Sopheak. We read a chapter every week ever since and finally finished it now. It was a struggle and more than once Sopheak was ready to stop reading. I always had to summarize the chapters for her and ask her questions so she would stay interested. After we had managed to read about half of the book we made a lot of progress. Sopheak finally got into the story and really wanted to find out what would happen in the end. It was the first book she ever read in English and considering that she had done a really good job. The next book that we are going to read is ‘The Hunger Games’ and she already finished chapter one.
Apropos reading, I started a reading group with some of the older children now. We are chose to read the original version of Peter Pan. It is a wonderful book. I believe that it should be part of every child’s education to learn about Peter Pan. I already mentioned that I read the simple version of the Peter Pan story with the class that I teach from 5 to 6. Lisa, one of the girls in the class recently came to me and asked me if I believed that Peter Pan really existed. I told her, that I believed in it with all my heart and that she should do the same. Because every time a child stops to believe, one fairy looses her glow and will never be able to fly again. Lisa looked at me with big eyes and then she said: “You know teacher Malin, Peter Pan is my idol.” I smiled, because I had managed to attach her to a story that is dear to me.
There is one swimming pool in Takeo. It belongs to a guesthouse and on our last public holiday I went there with Sokna, Sreyoun, Peareah and Sopheak. It was really funny because all of them wore jeans in the pool and I had to teach them how to swim. It took Sokna 30 minutes before she dared to jump from the 1 meter board. We spent 2 hours in the water, trying to chase each other, finding out who could spend the longest time under water and who was able to make a handstand. I wished for my little, six-year-old sister Fenja to be there. She would have played mermaids with us and given us interesting, newly invented names like “Geile Flosse”. Afterwards we were so hungry, that we all ate three Banh Xeos and a coconut in the little restaurant by the market.
One of the fathers of the children I teach in the kindergarten class studied history in university. He tells me a different story every morning he comes to the school and I am always eager to learn new things. This week he told me the story of Dasom, the founder of our village Angtasom. Dasom was a poor farmer who one day began to sell his coconuts at the place where our market is today. Since then more and more people came and followed his example. The place slowly began to develop and is today not only the working place for most of the people in and around Angtasom, but a meeting place where children play, women get their beauty treatments, man play cards, babies sleep in hammocks, elderlies exchange their gossip and monks go to receive money and food and give their blessings. Everyone loves the story of Dasom, that’s why there is a festival for him every year and a statue near our Bookbridge building, showing him carrying his coconuts.
In Cambodia there is a custom of taking a coin and rolling it so hard over your skin, that it leaves red scars on your body. One might ask why anyone would do this, but Cambodians believe that it makes the bad ghosts that are dwelling in your body when you are sick leave you and search for another host. Sreydieb got a cold last week and when I saw that she had red streams all over her body, I just couldn’t believe it. I asked her how she could be so naive and think that this actually helped to cure a sickness. I could see from her movements, that every inch of her body was aching. “You are not Cambodian, you wouldn’t understand this.”, she replied defensively. “Did your cold go away or are you still sick?”, I asked her. “I already feel better.” she said. I am the last person to believe in healing magic, but maybe it really has something to do with faith. If people know that the same method had healed their ancestors generations ago, they have this trust of being able to heal soon. I didn’t have the intention of convincing her that her old, traditional ways of curing were balderdash, besides the fact that she probably hurt herself even more with it.
Other traditions that you should better not break in Cambodia are for example pointing your foot in the direction of someone or outstretching it, sneezing when you are sitting at a table, leaning against a table or kitchen counter, talking while cooking, showing your knees and shoulders, hugging or much worse kissing someone, looking a monk in the eye, talking in a loud voice, whistling… just to mention a few things. The whistle thing was something I couldn’t understand, until Sreydieb told me it was like inviting thieves to come into your house. Since then I stopped doing it. These customs might sound strange to us in the West, but how strange must they find us and our habits when they had the change to experience our culture! All in all I consider humans simply as a very strange schöpfung, that has its eigenheiten in every country on earth. All we can do is to try to accept the eigenheiten of the others, to live together in a peaceful diversity.
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