They say giving is better that receiving. As a culture, we are taught to give because that's good, and unselfish, and the more you give -- and the less you expect -- the better of a person you are. There's also the pervasive idea that whatever you receive, you must pay back. In fact, simply receiving that which is freely given is downright uncomfortable.
And yet it's something I've been learning for years now. Whether it's free lodging during a transition time, rides when you're stuck without transportation, vacations when they are really necessary, or simply a good meal here or there, the people responsible do not expect repayment, and nor do they particularly want it. If something must be done at all, one person just told me to pay it forward.
I am not rich. By Cambodian standards, I'm well-off, by American standards, I'm dirt poor. For me, I have everything I need, and if I'm careful, some things I want. But these things are cycles: I have enough, for example, to offer to pay for my students' transportation if it means they can participate in a show that I think will be really good experience for them. At some point in my life, I'll probably have enough to pay for someone's meal, might have a car or a motobike I can use to take someone somewhere they can't get to themselves. Pay for someone's vacation.
I don't feel like I have to. Receiving that which is freely given is beautiful, and yet, so is giving and knowing that the gift will be sent along and passed forward, the cycle continuing.
The mosquitos are back, and so is the heat. The cool season was not really cool at all, though perhaps it's because I forgot what the hot season was like. I didn't much notice the change except for the few cool mornings in late December. But I did notice the heat. And the mosquitos.
Were they this bad before? I assume so, as I've been bitten much less in the past few months but seem to remember that during the wet season I was constantly being munched upon.
Speaking of before, and time -- why am I always talking about time?
I was biking home from work today and thinking that I've been here just over 7 months now, which is no time at all and yet fairly significant. I found myself wondering what sparkling clean streets and sidewalks might look like, and if I'd notice them. I was trying to find a picture online of the motorbike I want to buy eventually and could only find these enormous models, nothing like the little things filling the streets here.
I was thinking about how I literally knew nothing about this country before I arrived and well, I still don't know a lot but Cambodia is not just the name of a country very far away that I may or may not have read in a textbook at some point. I was thinking about how no one knows the street names or numbers, they just know how to get where they need to go and how things look, and how I think in terms of what is near what. Thinking about how the Phnom Penh traffic is normal to me, and I feel perfectly comfortable on my bike, weaving through traffic. On the routes I usually take, I know where each pothole is.
It doesn't seem that long, and it seems like a lifetime. I'm dearly looking forward to my upcoming trip home for a thousand reasons, but sometimes I find myself a little apprehensive about re-entering that rich, western world on the other side of the ocean. Cambodia is where I live and sometimes I forget it's a third-world country, because it's just what it is and that's that. But sometimes I remember, and think about the first-world, and wonder what it will look like -- and though I know, in theory, I think the actuality will feel different than the memory.
Including -- and perhaps especially -- the food. At the beginning I found Khmer food very strange and the taste odd, but now I actually really enjoy it. I don't know how to cook it, so my diet at home has gotten pretty pathetic, but I miss it when I go without for a certain time. At lunch today, digging the meat out of a whole grilled fish and pulling it off the bone with my teeth, I thought about the Gillian who wouldn't go near fishheads, and laughed a little.
I've been quite anxious to leave the past couple weeks, in desperate need of a vacation (one month of high stress and lack of eating well and sleeping well somewhat alarmingly shaved 3-4 kilos off me and I still don't know where from), but I guess today I took the time to look around and think that, although it is nothing like my life before, this place is pretty cool.
And besides. At the rate in which time is slipping through my fingers (more so than usual, I mean), tomorrow I'll be on a plane.
That will be pretty cool, too.
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