It starts raining while I'm at work at 4 p.m. Some of my co workers are going to the wedding of the former director of education and of the teachers later on. But it's pour cats and dogs.

At about 4:30 I start out on my trusty bike towards home. Pretty soon I'm up to my hubs in water. This on a pretty trafficked cross town street. I'm trying to find my way around the water, but there it is everywhere. It is even being pushed into peoples' houses and shops by the wakes of the SUV's passing. Even the motodup (taxi) drivers are having trouble getting through. But through the waist deep water they wade. They just tell their passengers, "Pick your feet up!"



In the top photo, some kids decide to make the best of it all and they are swimming in street water. One has a piece of styrofoam he got from a cooler and is bodyboarding Street 63 in one of the most elite neighborhoods in Phnom Penh. The mustard colored wall belongs to the British International School of Phnom Penh. It's the elite day school for the kids of ex-pats who live here. With enough money you can even keep the weather out of your life.

Nop Kong, a farmer and tuk tuk driver from Siem Reap near Ankor Wat, Cambodia has become a dear friend. We text or chat by phone about once a week. He's trying to improve his English and I get to ask serious questions about his country.

It's the rainy seasons here and he's planting his rice fields in the hope that we will get several days of a good downpour so the fields will flood and the rice will take root. He works from about 5:30 a.m. until 5 or six p.m. plowing, planting and irrigating his fields which are a kilometer or two away from the house where I ate with him and his housemates.

In the cool months of November, December, January and February Kong takes time off of farming and drives tourists around to the various historic places in Ankor Wat. That's how I met him. First, my friend Reese who I first got to know almost 16 years ago in Kansas City, Missouri went to Siem Reap and hired Kong as a driver for his tour of the temples. Kong, anxious to make a good impression really helps out his customers by walking through the ruins with them, explaining the details of what is an overwhelming (thousands and thousands of acres) site.

Kong has always been the most gracious host to his home town. He knows it backwards and forwards and in between and is even able to describe places that locals just never go to. As you can see in the picture I still have the horrible heat rash when we took this picture at the Siem Reap airport. I've covered it with a krama, a ubiquitous scarf that almost every Cambodian keeps to carry things in, wipe the sweat, use as headwear or simply use as a towel. Kong took me directly to the tourist pharmacy in Siem Reap so I could get some hydrocortisone and an ace bandage to cover what was an ugly pulsing welt. Thanks to him I could fly back to Phnom Penh with some dignity, although the flight attendant kept asking me if my hand would be okay.... (Both of my arms have welts in this picture, but I've covered only the one with enormous red scabs.)

The best part of my little trip to Siem Reap really was visiting with Kong and his extended communal family (remember that civil society in the rural areas still reflects the socialist/communist roots of modern Cambodia) and being able to eat with them even though I could not really talk to them. We are fixing that with twice weekly Khmer lessons.

I was invited by my friend, Nop Kong to lunch at his house in a village near Siem Reap. Frankly, I cannot tell you where it was exactly because we took several single lane footpaths to get there. It was the highlight of my day because in addition to going to the market on his motorycycle.. Mind you when I say go to the market, we drove through the dirt path lined by vendors on each side with not much more room than for the moto. It was like going to 7-11 and driving down the aisle, slowing down just long enough to pull some fish out of a bowl still slithering and drag some veggies off the table. Kong and his housemates butchered a chicken for me. It brought me back to my childhood in Colonia Okinawa when dad would make me butcher and pluck the chickens in our backyard.

They butchered, plucked and gutted the chicken all in less than 15 minutes. Then came broiling parts and boiling others in soup. What came of the lunch is in the last photo. We sat around the mat in the living quarters and had morning glory stems with oyster sauce (my favorite Khmer food), chicken soup with veggies grown in the yard (fertilized by the pig), fish we pulled out of the water at the outdoor market, and other things I could not fathom.

Kong was very kind to explain that I don't eat much meat and to ask forgivness from his housemates if I was a little picky... I loved the morning glory, lettuce, carrot and cucumber salad. It was harvested right in front of my eyes and I got to see the process from beginning to end. Now that's what I call slow food.

Something I gotta tell you is that we were seated on the very mat that later this evening Kong would sleep on. Furniture in Khmer houses is limited. Married couples might buy a large wooden slat foundation for their bed and later add a headboard and footboard, but the kiddies sleep on the mats until they marry.. Kong being thirty and not married yet, gets to sleep with the other bachelors in his commune (a jointly owned farmb etween all who live there) on mats on the floor. All very cool.

The road to my friend Nop Kong's house was a single gravel lane just wide enough to allow one motorbike to pass in each direction. Along this road are all kinds of houses, ranging from simple thatch huts to brick and stucco French colonial structures. In the inset picture is a very simple small hut built four feet off the ground on stilts. Flooding is a constant problem in the farmlands since they are largely rice fields.

More elaborate thatch huts are built high enough that the family can store equipment and even cook underneath their sleeping and living quarters. Families often put aluminum or tin roofs on their houses as they earn more cash by selling their rice.

As families prosper they panel their houses with wood and add glass to the windows. Wood is ideal for these houses since wood allows for ventilation both throubh the walls and through the floor. The thatching also allows for ventilation, though it also harbors friendly farm animals like mice, rats and geckos who keep the mosquitos down.

The most modern buildings are the French colonial brick and stucco buildings which while air conditionable and sturdy are also hot and prone to flood damage while the houses built on stilts simply stand in the water until the floods subside.

In the pre-Ankor days of about 880 C.E. (current era) a king and his sons built this temple about 10 miles outside of Siem Reap, called Preah Ko. This is a series of six temples to honor the king, his father and his ancestors. The king sees his family as living symbols of the Hindu Shiva, the destroyer and transformer who is worshipped here.


The temples are in a serious state of decline because of the civil war of 1975-1979. The United Nations is helping with the restoration since these temples have been declared part of Ankor Wat, a World Heritage site.

While the buildings at Ankor are largely stone and marble these were built with brick. Most temples these were built with a hill as a pedestal to the temple. Unlike other temples these were built on a natural hill. In ancient times the entire area was a lake of rice fields and the temple hill was the only dry land. Even today rice fields surround the temple which is only accessible by an elevated gravel road.

Funny, while on the road we passed some adults seated on a bench the size of two full-beds. I asked Kong if they were eating lunch or waiting for transportation. "No," he smiles, "They are drinking rice wine" Imagine a bar in the middle of a rice field. All that was missing was a TV with the World Football League.

This is still an active worship site that houses a wat, a monastery and stupa like this one. This stupa honors the people killed by the Khmer Rouge and buried in a mass grave nearby. It used to contain the actual bones and skills of the dead in a glass case. They are now buried in sand in the stupa itself.

So I am in Siem Reap, the province of Ankor Wat and the thousands of acres of temples and fortresses that are Cambodia's pride and joy.

I have plenty of pictures that I will 7upload when I get back to Phnom Penh but they aren't why I am here. Frankly, I came to see a friend, Nop Kong (Surname = Nop, given name = Kong) who was introduced to me as a guide/driver to the ruins by my American friend Reese. Kong is just an honestly sincere guy who besides making money cares about the folks he guides and drives.

We met briefly last year when I was up here with my housemate Tashi and her husband Matias. He was most gracious and helped me out quite a bit when I lost my plane ticket.

I will post more about him and his hosting this time when I get back home cuz frankly, the story won't be worth anything without the pictures. But let me deviate from our course momentarily and share what happened when I got here.

Siem Reap is the ultimate tourist town. The entire downtown area is dominated by Pub Street (a reminder that khmer don't drink in public bars.. they drink with friends at home.) and by the attendant tourist traps of restaurants, internet cafes, travel agencies that will arrange just about anything for you and massage parlors that will arrange the rest.

I'm out last night walking around the town at a time that will allow me to see what's here without constantly being approached by men inquring whether I need, "Tuk-tuk, mototaxi, nice massage and nice lady." Or so I thought. I was walking down a darkened street after hours when a 40 something lady approached me wondering whether I wanted a massage. Then she said, "May you can boom boom," raising her hand to about waist level. You can imagine what she meant. I'm known for my quick templer, and it was all I could do to contain myself while I was deciding how I cuold get her up to the fourth floor of the building she indicated and throw her off the roof.

Contain myself I did, long enough to take my shoes off and dust them. (Latter-day Saints and Christians will know what I'm referring to... mind I was not calling on Divinity towitness my action, just my own soul and hers.) She didn't know what I meant, thank God. But I could not think of any other way to express myself. When men approach me with the first phrase in the paragraph above, I have learned enough Khmer to say, "Every Khmer woman is your sister. I am not doing that to your sister." while letting the speaker both hear the thunder and see the lightning. This time, Goddess forbid I was speechless......

The wat or Buddhist temple next door is undergoing an almost complete renovation. As you can see they have gutted parts from floor to ceiling. But it continues to be a working monastery and the monks are using every bit of space to continue their lives, their studies and their work. Obviously a monk has used the gutted frame of this room to hang his laundry. This simple cloth is all monks wear other than a pair of boxers, loincloth or tighty whiteys for modesty. They have two robes to allow them to do their laundry which given the heat must be done every day or every other day.

The wat are not simply temples but huge complexes with stupa (monuments to the lives of monks or other individuals whose bones or relics are housed within) and various study and domitory complexes for the monks as well as kitchens if the monks conduct charity work with the homeless or poor. In the case of Wat Onalam, the one around the corner from me widows live in the complex and carry on their daily lives from within the walls. This particular wat also has a garden statuary describing the early experiences of Siddharta Gautama before he became the Buddha. (see my January posts by following the links on the left hand navigation bar here.)

The monks and others are working 24 hours a day repainting murals, resculpting a number of statues that have gone into disrepair, and rebuilding the structures that were added after the wat was walled in. Normally this particular complex has electricity only in specific locations. Now the buildings are lit well into the night. Must be hard on the widows.

By the way, in Cambodia widows by tradition shave their heads before their husbands' funerals and wear only a simple black skirt and blouse. Many are destitute since their primary income provider is now gone. So Wat Onalam and many others provide a living place and a reasonable income for them.

Some things in Cambodia are just ploddingly slow while the world has passed them by just like this cyclo pedicab. The world's technology has passed Cambodia by like the cyclo driver has been passed by the speeding motodup taxi here.

I experienced a remarkable contradiction to that here that left my mouth hanging. Normally every tourist, visitor, ex-pat or simply foreigner is invited, expected, encouraged and even required to have evacuation insurance in case of an emergency. What that means is if you get in a cyclo vs. motodup accident and break a bone you should sooner trust one of the local spiritual healers over the "Western" physicians here to set it. Instead you buy insurance specifically to get you on the soonest jet to Bangkok where some of the world's best and least expensive meidcal care can be had with a personal escort from clinic to emergency room to in-hospital suite at the Bangkok Medical Hospital, a 12 acre campus sure to set every medical tourist's saliva glands to overwork on sight.

On Sunday after church I took my glasses off momentarily, and when I picked them up the earpiece came off in my hands. If you have ever seen me without my glasses (which I doubt anyone has) you will know that I walk into telephone poles without them. I was bereft. I hadn't brought a back up pair other than my darkest-dark-for-the-brightest-summer-day-on-the-North-Shore-sunglasses. So, a careful not-too-desperate call to Charlie Dittmeier, the director of the Deaf Development Program produced a volley of suggestions from other ex-pats. I followed what I thought was best and closest to me. At 8:30 a.m. promptly I was at the front door of Giant Optical (that's the name---pronouned in English.) The saleswomen were courteous to a tea, note the deliberate spelling since that's what they offered me when I walked in the door. I explained my dilemma, including my nausea while trying to wear my one earpiece high prescription lenses. They smiled, courteously and even allowed me to ask them questions about the Khmer language of them and put up with my multiple mispronunciations of "A nii th'lai bon maan?" (How much does that cost?) In that sentence there are five vowels that don't exist in English in addition to a breathless t sound followed by a breathed h and a glottal stop and another consonant in the word th'lai. More importantly they figured out a solution to my dilemma and offered to have my lenses back in new wireless frames in five hours!

So, I'm wearing my same lenses sans broken frame screwed onto a new pair of ear pieces and new bridge. All from a country that can't set broken bones or in the case of my heat rash..Can't diagnose it before it got infected.... but that's another story.

A fascinating week in Phnom Penh! Last Sunday I happened in on our local supermarket (yes we have two major chains supported largely by middle and upper-middle class Khmer and by the large no HUGE ex-patriate community) and had to pass through the connected KFC. (Yes, we have that brand name here along with Starbucks coffee sold in upscale tea parlors.) Lo and behold who is in there accompanied by an middle class Khmer but an American Buddhist monk. It was easy to tell the man was American. His accent was so thick it could cut Wisconsin cheese.

I had always assumed that monks had a vegetarian diet. Apparently not this one. Of course, since monks don't carry money the Khmer customer next to him paid. And as I've written before, monks don't eat after noon. This one was well within safety limits by his showing up at the Colonel's at 11 a.m.

Speaking of brand names, I gotta tell you how disappointed I am that franchises of US owned companies are moving in. KFC isn't so blatant as it is a franchise of the Malaysian chain. But the sale of Starbucks is particularly disappointing since Cambodia has a number of local brands of coffee that drinkers tell me are more than adequate to fill any bean lover's pallate. Isn't it bad enough that Apple has a reseller here? I mean they even sell iPhones in the store, even though there is no local wireless company that services the brand. Wireless data service here costs $120 a month and has very limited capability. (Mind you that the average middle class Cambodian earns about $1o0-150 a month.)

So much for the branding of Phnom Penh. Sigh

This week has been particularly busy for me. After the passport fiasco, which took all of Monday to resolve, I was looking forward to a chat with a co-worker who manages the Deaf Community Center to ask him to help me recruit sign language models to video. Instead the staff at DDP and several students, supporters and clients were invited to a meeting to discuss the upcoming visit of a Thai delegation from a disability organization that has offices throughout Asia.

As it happens the delegation was here to talk with Deaf people about their needs and wants and to begin a conversation about community organizing here. I say begin, but as it happens this same group minus two important Deaf members were here in 2007 having the same conversation. Two days of workshops ensued with two Deaf Thai leaders facilitating the conversation. Deaf people from three distinct organizations joined this workshop. DDP had about 15 participants who used Cambodian Sign Language. Krousar Thmey, the local K-12 school for the Deaf sent six or seven teachers and students. They use an American Sign Language descendant so frequently they needed the services of one of the hearing teachers who signed (note I did not say interpreted... more on this later) into Signed Khmer. (Think a sign language imitation of spoken Khmer.) Then a third group of about six came from an organization that services the province adjacent to Phnom Penh. None of these Deaf people knew a formal sign language or spoken language of any kind. They served as a model for most of the 49,000 Deaf people in Cambodia who have not had contact with either Krousar Thmey or DDP.

The meeting was held in a hotel ballroom, several sumptuous breaks and lunches provided with hotel staff dressed in suits and tailored uniforms to serve our every need. (More about this later.) The conversations were facilitated in Thai sign language with two Thai sign language interpreters voicing. That voicing was then interpreted into Thai and re-interpreted into spoken Khmer by a Thai-Khmer interpreter born in a disputed region of what is presently Thailand called Kampuchea Surin. By the name of the area you might guess that the inhabitants are Khmer (Cambodian) and that they speak for the most part both Thai and Khmer. The Khmer interpretation was then re-interpreted in to Cambodian Sign Language by DDP staff. One of the Thai delegation was a liaison from a Japanese funder who spoke passable Khmer and Thai but not enough to understand either of the spoken interpretations. She did however speak fluent English and of course Japanese. (Are you confused yet?) So I provided a Cambodian Sign Language and eventually a Thai sign language interpretation into spoken English for the two days of the workshop and a third day of leader meetings.

I'm exhausted just writing about the experience. Imagine the Thai Sign Language and Cambodian /Sign Lnguage interpreters who had to sign or voice everything said in every language. Occasionally hearing members of the delegation would describe objectives of the workshop activities and the information needed from the Deaf people so both sign language interpreter teams would be working simultaneously. See the picture above. The woman is interpreting to the audience at large in Cambodian SL and the man is intepreting into Thai Sign. Only the Japanese funding representative, myself and one of the Thai sign language interpreters could use all of the spoken languages. (Mind you when I say I speak Thai and Khmer....we're talking I can ask where the bathroom is and when dinner will be ...not much else.) When spoken Thai or Khmer was used I interpreted from the Cambodian Sign Language into spoken English. Any time a Cambodian Deaf person spoke I interpreted, but I kept getting tripped up by the ASL variant used by the Krousar Thmey delegation. Most of the time I had to pick my jaw up off the floor by these ASL variant-fluent Deaf people talking about events in their lives (or more likely events fromthe experiences of the hearing teachers who coached them... more about this.)

What an experience! On the third day of this working group the leaders held a meeting in spoken English ---- my head hurts ---- so I was elected as the DDP interpreter. (Imagine interpreting into and from a language I only have known for six months... ay yay yay!) At times the Thai sign interpreter had difficulty negotiating the voicing into her fourth spoken language, so I backed her up as well. Needless to say, I am taking the day off to work on my real project videoing Deaf people modelling classifiers in Cambodian SL.

Phnom Penh.... The passport fiasco worked itself out. The immigration officer asked me to meet her at the airport, and handed my passport to me only after calling me away from where others could see what business we were transaction. When we were alone she pulled out four passports and asked me which was mine! Obviously I wasn' t the only person taken in by her arguments.

I'm glad to have my passport back... So glad. I know now what it means to be a man without a country.

Phnom Penh - - - Note to self: Never ever surrender your passport to anyone but an authorized immigration officer doing their immediate duty and nothing else. As I landed in Phnom Penh, I applied for a business visa noting that I would be in the country for two more months. An immigration officer followed my passport from officer to officer until finally she took it from the final handler and called me aside telling me that my not-minutes-ago-applied-for visa would expire that very day and that I would need to give her $60 more (in addition to the $25 I already handed over to the desk) to be able to remain in the country without paying a $5 a day fine for having an expired visa.

She demanded my passport telling me she would arrange for the two month extension to my visa. She spoke Englishso poorly that I had to ask one of the Cambodian Sign Lnaugage interpreters to help me out by signing to me in Cambodian SL. Even then I could not understand what was going on. So, thinking I had no choice I left my passport with her. She promised to have my passport back today, Sunday. I have made four calls to her jpersonal cell phone, none of them except the last answered and not only did she not have my passport, but she didn't even recognize my name because she had "three passports in process."

A chat with a local travel agent revealed everything I suspected, a) that the officer was acting outside of her official duties, b) that I was being overcharged, and that I did not need to hand over the passport, and that I was at risk of losing it..... ay yay yay!

This is the first clip of about 15 videos I am working on to leave as training tools for the Cambodian SL interpreters.

I was in Kampot, a seaside town in southern Cambodia to observe Maly and Sot Rea interpreting an AIDS workshop. I met this young man there and noticed how articulate he was. A brief conversation later and I got him to sit for a self introduction on video. I could not have had a more perfect model for a training video. Here are the first few seconds as he introduces himself and where he is from.

Malaysian Federation of the Deaf Secretary shows the new headquarters offices, and explains that their national publicaton,held by Justin Smith is laid out and published by Deaf employees and vocational trainees in the building.

The highlight of this trip to this developed nation was the trip to the Malaysian Federation of the Deaf headquarters in a Kuala Lumpur (abbreviated and signed K-L) suburb. The Federation maintains offices in a building that also houses a Deaf-owned and run cafe and other Deaf services. The Federation is funded by the Malaysian Federal government and maintains offices in several states.

The headquarters building has a video relay service center, computer skills training center, work skills training center for illiterate Deaf people and several apartments for the trainees who stay in KL for a six month stint of training. A language lab also allows the Federation to train interpreters in both sign language and interpreting. Interpreters are also requested through the Federation for events throughout KL.

The interpreting workshop was a huge success for the participants. They heard lectures on the role and practice of Deaf interpreters (interpreters who are themselves deaf who work with individuals with limited formal sign language or whose sign language is unique.) They also heard about the intricacies of interpreting in Malaysian courts. The hands on exercises in the workshop included interpreting and voicing from live speakers in one on one situations and interpreting from mock lecture formats.

Interpreters and students came from all over Malaysia itself, from the Maldives (a Republic in the Indian Ocean), the Phillipines and of course Cambodia. While the majority of those interested were Christians, as you can see in the picture there is one Muslimah and a number of Buddhists. The workshop itself was conducted in spoken Malaysian English with Malaysian SL (interestingly abbreviated as MySL) interpretation. Native or home spoken languages of the participants included at least four Chinese languages, Khmer, Tagalog, Hindi, Dihevi (the Maldives national language), Malay and Urdu. After the workshop was done we were invited to see the headquarters of the Malaysian Federation of the Deaf. That tour was the highlight of the conference for me.

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. --- Arrived here after an hour and a half flight from Phnom Penh on Air Asia, Asia's new budget airline. KLIA, the international airport is quite a confusing place, made worse not by the fact that no one here speaks English, the majority do, but by the fact that I wouldn't accept the fact.

I'm here to attend an interpreter's symposium. Typical of developing interpreting communities and developing Deaf communities this symposium had a hurge range of sign language students and interpreters, mostly sign language students and the remainder were people who "interpret" in religious settings. It's hard to understand why in a majority Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist nation such a large percentage of the people interested in interpreting are Christians.

I'm here with Vichet and Veasna two Deaf Development Program interpreters and their support staff Tashi and Justin both Deaf. The dominant sign language here is an American Sign Language descendant. So Justin and Tashi are able to provide interpreting services for the two Cambodlian Sign interpreters. It's interesting to see Deaf people providing interpreting services to sign language interpreters. It's a righteous turn of the tables.

Today's discussion centered on the needs of nascent interpreters. Because the interpreting community here is small, the interpreting servcies for the eight or nine deaf participants mirrored that fact. Working interpreters had multiple roles, sometimes at the same time in this conference. So working interpreters switched out of roles, frequently more than once every 15 minutes. It's something that happens not only in Asia, but also in Hawaii. It's something I find disconcerting given that Deaf people then have only limited access to the workshop interrupted by the interpreters' frequent other roles. In addition, the working interpreters felt free to voice their own opiinions as part of the interpreting role and often censored Deaf people by choosing who could speak or not. Some things don't change regardless of where you are.