Thursday, August 13, 2009

Sorry for the delay!

From Milwaukee to Dallas/Ft. Worth to San Francisco to Tokyo to Bangkok to Phnom Penh and then from Phnom Penh to Takeo to my training village I finally made it to where I am supposed to be in Cambodia! At least for the first few months! Sorry for the delay in my blogging...this just doesn't seem like a priority when I get online. I always seem to have way more emails and facebook messages to reply to and not enough internet time. Not to mention the internet is extremely slow in this country which makes everything harder!
So I bet you're wondering how I'm doing. Well...things sure are different here! Every aspect of life from the food to hand washing my clothes to the rumors of no toilet paper being true my life has definitely done a 180. At first I thought that it was too much to handle with frequent thoughts of jumping back on a plane but recently (the past few days recently) things have been looking up and I am starting (for the first time in a very long time) to be excited about being a Peace Corps Volunteer.
Like I said the culture here is as different from American culture as you can get. I moved in with my host family the first week we were here and already I have a million stories about them and my interactions with them. First off they cannot say my name. Apparently the last a in my name is too hard for them so they call me Karo or Karos. It's pretty funny but at first when they were trying to get my attention I didn't actually know that they were talking to me. I think I've got it down now. The family consists of a mother, father, two daughters one son-in-law and their one year old daughter. I love the little baby because she is the only one who doesn't laugh at me when I try to speak. And I always bring her home little treats which is why I think she smiles so big every time I come home. My host mother is kind of a touchy woman which really shocked me at first but I'm starting to get used to it and now I just let it happen. At first I was having back problems because of the sleeping conditions and she noticed me rubbing my back a lot. So one day when it was particularly bad she turned me around and just started giving me a rub down. It felt really good (sorry Kevin) but this was only like a week in and I didn't even know this woman! I wanted to enjoy it but it was just so awkward. And then a few days later when she noticed all of the mosquito bites on my legs (around 30 of them) she came up to me with tiger balm and started to rub that all over my legs. Again...too soon. And the whole family loves to touch the scar on my foot. It's like they have never seen a scar before. And the whole family loves to touch my arm hair. So all in all I'm getting a lot of touching here. I guess I'll just go with it!
I would love to tell you about training and my daily life but right now I don't have time. I just wanted to give a quick update about things here. If there is anything specific you want to know just ask! I'm not sure what everyone is interested in. Just let me know!! I'll try and do this on a more regular basis but during training that might be difficult because my training village doesn't have internet. Training goes until Sept. 24th so after that things will be more regular. I am requesting to have a site that has internet but we'll see how that goes! Hopefully my posts won't be as long as this but since I hadn't done this yet I thought I might give you a lot! I hope everyone is doing well at home. I miss everyone a lot!! Take care!!!