Here are a few old stories that I’ve been meaning to post…

Once the project officially started, I was in a field a lot for the first few weeks…helping to recruit villages by meeting with village leaders, and then recruiting households through community meetings and household visits. I must admit that I often feel a bit useless when I’m in the field because I can’t speak Khmer. This means that I need a translator to talk to the villagers, and because most of my field staff have limited English, I need a translator to talk to them too. Wow, it takes soooooo much more time to get anything done when everything that is said is translated back and forth. There is still stuff I can do in the field, but I now can really appreciate the fact that learning the native language is necessary to be truly effective. So anyway, the community meetings are largely run in Khmer because I’ve done the spiel so many times that I pretty much know what is being said without actually understanding the language. During the meetings I try to be super attentive and smile despite not knowing what exactly is being said…and I laugh now and then when appropriate (I can’t quite explain how I know this…context clues I guess). At one particular meeting, in the village of Trapeang Kampleanh, many of the women (women and young children attend the meetings because they are often the ones working at home during the day) started laughing and so my project coordinator relayed the joke to me. (Let me tell you, most of the jokes that Cambodians tell are NOT funny…well, at least they aren’t funny to us. I’ve had to work on the art of fake laughing.) But in this particular case, what they said was actually funny, so they got a real Erin laugh. And they thought it was so great that I laughed the same way as them. And they were right. There are so so many differences in our cultures, but there are few things…smiling, laughing, crying…that have no barriers. And it’s pretty amazing what you can communicate with those simplicities.