A Photo Shoot

It’s time to prepare resumes.

Normally at home, this is one of those tasks that receives a few seconds worth of unpleasant audible groans before you just sit down at the computer and crank it out. You check for typos, confirm your references still like you, print it on some nice paper, and hand it in. Simple, right?

Now imagine the Cambodian version of this same task.

First, to use a computer you’d head to your local internet café or gaming hole-in-the wall where you pay 50 cents an hour to sit in a hot, dirty room and work on an ancient, slow computer. Khmer renditions of Michael Buble and Celine Dion obnoxiously blare through the establishment’s cheap speakers as you quickly begin to realize the ‘s’, ‘i’, and ‘p’ keys do not work, and because you are Khmer, your name has at least two of these letters. 

That is, unless you are a lucky EGBOK Mission student. Thanks to our donated laptops, we’ve put them to good use this past week in helping us prepare the students’ resumes. Graduation is quickly approaching and the first group of EGBOK Mission students in Siem Reap can almost call themselves alum from either Paul Dubrule or Sala Bai Hospitality Training Schools. In the past year, 10 EGBOK Mission students have completed their coursework in either Restaurant, Front Office & Housekeeping, or Bakery & Pastry programs. They have interned at a total of 14 hotels in Siem Reap and have learned everything from how to work the espresso machine to handle online bookings to make delicious Tiramisu. Some have been selected to serve at large functions held at the Angkor Wat temples and others have already been asked to consider employment at their place of internship. Within this past year, they have all moved from their home orphanages in the bustling, crowed city of Phnom Penh to the tourist- and job-friendly smaller city of Siem Reap. They live in the EGBOK Mission house and cook for themselves, pay the utilities, deal with the landlord, begin to understand the importance of saving money, and try to remember to water the plants before Ben or I get on their case.

The students come home from school or their internships everyday and take a few minutes to lounge in the entry-way’s comfy chairs, listen to music, or visit with one of us. It’s not rare for them to doze off as the others are discussing who will take out the garbage or when their next exams are. Many of the students begin their days at 5 or 6am, so ten hours later they’re severely missing out on the wonderful 2-hour Cambodian lunch time siesta they’ve grown up with.

But by later in the evening, they’ve obtained their second wind and are excited to study. Katie and I teach 3 classes a week at the house, and thanks to the donated laptops we can introduce PowerPoint and Word, get them comfortable typing, and assist them with resumes. They couldn’t be more eager to learn on the computers and often times we end class later than planned because they just can’t seem to get enough.

As graduation nears and I’m beginning to help them apply to jobs for their first time, it’s a learning experience for me, too. Photos have to be submitted with each resume, and apparently it’s not customary to smile in them. This makes for an interesting few days at the photo store, as I stand behind the photographer and beg the students to show some teeth, reminding them that employers want to hire happy people. In a three day period I visited the photo store four times – just enough for the staff to recognize me every time I came in with a group of students.

All of the boys enjoyed their photo shoot because it meant they got to put on a tie and jacket. There were a dozen different ties to choose from, two identical jackets, and a few white button- up shirts. Perfectly clean? No. But you can’t see the collar’s sweat stains in the photos, and that’s what matters.

The first group of boys I took loved this outing. We were guided up the shop’s stairs to a large room with half a dozen staff busy editing wedding photos on computers. In one corner of the room was a blue screen and a single stool in front. Even before the photographer appeared, the boys began choosing which tie had more ‘style’ and sorting through the shirts – completely reminiscent of playing dress up as a girl. One by one, they helped each other tie the tie, straighten the jacket, and pat their hair down before taking a seat on the stool. The photographer, who was approximately half my size and looked like he’d just finished splatter painting, would work his magic and literally tilt each boys head, chin, and shoulders to be all aligned perfectly.  A couple of snaps later and they were through with their camera time. But the make-believe would just begin, as they’d stand up, slowly begin to untie their tie, and carefully remove the jacket.

“I am just returning!” each one would say.

“From where?” I’d play along.

“My day at Sofitel Hotel – very long day! Many guests.”

“What do you do there?” I’d push their imaginations.

The reply would range from Guest Relation’s Officer to General Manager. Then they’d be bothered to hurry up by the next student in line who was waiting for the jacket.

I came so often that the price for each student’s 8 prints decreased from $3 to 75 cents by the third day.

The photos turned out well and everyone is sporting a big smile. When I showed them the prints the next day, they couldn’t wait to see them and talk about how handsome they were.

For Cambodia, this was an extremely easy and smooth process. Other important things, like tracking down birth certificates or obtaining National ID cards, are the types of tasks that linger on the to-do list not because of procrastination, but because this is Cambodia.

It’s not rare for twenty year olds to not know the correct spelling of their names. Maybe when they were younger, they felt like adding a few letters to their family or given name, so now they don’t remember what’s on their birth certificate. And speaking of birth certificate, some students don’t have a clue where theirs is, which adds to the conundrum. Or, they went a step further and actually scribbled over their original name on their birth certificate and penciled in a new one. Makes sense, I guess.

 It’s hard - actually, impossible, for these ‘Cambodia-isms’ to not bother me. There are a lot of them. How can you not know your age? How is it not unordinary for 19 year olds to still be in grade 8? Why is “I have no money to give to teacher” a valid excuse for not regularly attending government school? These are complex questions with answers I will never fully understand.

But I do know this: In the past year, EGBOK Mission has succeeded in helping students who were either far behind or eager to find an option besides government school. They chose to come to study in Siem Reap because their futures look brighter with hospitality training. It’s easy to get overwhelmed with all of the resume editing, job hunting, and exam dates racing toward us. The students are aware of the gravity the next few weeks has on their futures, but as I was reminded today while clothes shopping for interviews with them, “Right now we go only step by step.”

This is Cambodia, after all...

The more I look, the more grossed out I get. I’m so perplexed by it, though. But by about the third time I take a peek, the nauseousness hits me and I’m positive it’s from this bizarre phenomenon rather than the carsickness. It’s an Asian thing, and after living in Cambodia for a total of seven months I’ve seen a lot of it, but this time it’s the length that I can’t get over.

I’m talking about the long, extremely unattractive hairs that sprout from facial moles.

Thought you were going to read a pleasant little update about the latest happenings in Cambodia? I’ll get there in a minute.

 Our bus driver, whom  I’m sitting directly behind, has a medium, black colored mole on his bottom right cheek so when he turns his head to the right I not only see the mole, but also the half dozen long hairs that he has so delicately grown springing from its center. When I say long, I mean it. His are at least six inches, which actually doesn’t even rival that of many moto and tuk tuk drivers, market vendors, and dvd salesmen I have had the pleasure of interacting with. Two things always happen when I see this strange occurrence. First, I suddenly lose my appetite, and second, I always ask myself if the lucky owner ever braids, straightens, or gets creative with his scraggly, wiry collection. This image stays in my head for about .03 seconds before my gag reflex forcefully distracts me and I move on to thinking about how hot it is. I guess that’s one good thing about living in 90 degree heat. Distraction when you need it.

Speaking of heat, it’s hot on this empty 20 passenger bus, but I see that the AC is on high so I suck it up and try not to think about how hot it will be when there are twenty-one more bodies on board in fifteen minutes.

Katie and I (and our finely groomed driver) are on our way to pick up the Angkor Thom junior high students to take them on their first class trip to the city. By moto, this journey out to the countryside takes a good forty minutes; today we’re commuting out there on this small bus to load up the students and bring them to Siem Reap’s National Museum – a bumpier version of the same ride at twice the length.

Once we arrive to the junior high and the students load, we repeat the rough journey. Most of the students are excited to take a seat; others are too thrilled to relax. They choose to stay standing through the entire ride despite their skulls being wounded from the violent bouncing – their balance is impressive, I think to myself. Helmets would be nice.

It doesn’t take long for two things to quickly happen. First, one of the boys suggests a group sing-a-long. This takes me back to my sixth grade choir concerts where we’d load the school bus and head to the ‘performance’ of the year – the local Lion’s Club quarterly meeting. A big deal. On the fifteen minute ride my classmates would prompt one of these same sing-a-longs and I remember always thinking ‘really?’. We’re on our way to sing, why do we need to give ourselves headaches by shouting in this acoustically unfriendly bus?

Today the student who initiated the singing suggests No Doubt’s ‘Say That You Love Me’. He asks Katie and me to join him and I lie and say I don’t know the song. Instead of this cop-out working, it just makes the young choir director initiate a new song – Justin Bieber’s ‘Baby’.  Are you sure these are village kids?

The next occurrence is less pleasant and reinforces the fact that these are village kids. Because of their infrequent car and bus rides, their carsickness hits fast. There are a few girls who do their best to hide their discomfort, but after about thirty minutes into the ride someone has communicated to the driver the need to exit the vehicle. Immediately.

Two minutes later she’s back on the bus. I hand her a water and she’s given up hiding her malaise. All I can do is tell her we’re almost off of this bumpy road before I’m interrupted by her peer sitting in front. “Teacha, please help!” I ungracefully walk to Yen and see that as her friends are barely managing to hold their stomachs, she’s reading the English-Khmer picture dictionary given to her on the first day of EGBOK Mission class last week. She’s opened to the seafood section, and wants to hear my pronunciation of ‘salmon steak’. After lots of practice, she’s moved on to ‘filet of sole’ (“Why no ‘t’ sound?”) and  ‘shrimp’. I envy her skill of reading while in motion. I also envy her skill of acting like everything is completely normal as the half dozen students surrounding her were wishing they hadn’t had lunch.

Once at the museum, the students’ energy seemed to perk up. It was clear they were not used to air conditioned or tourist-filled rooms. As we walked from room to room, I was repeatedly blown away – these students were actually taking notes.  I’ve never seen someone open their notebook so briskly and uncap their pen with such fervor in my life.

Walls upon walls of information (in Khmer and English) about Angkor rulers, temple architecture, and Buddha statues. Rooms filled with traditional artwork, maps of the world, and timelines dozens of meters long.  The students were interested in it all – Katie and I gave up sticking together as a group early on as we saw some students were documenting the information like their life depended on it. The students who meandered ahead became just as mesmerized with the short video clips about the origin of Kampuchea that in the end it didn’t matter how spread out we’d become because everyone finished together.

We just went from a rural village, to Justin Bieber, to a history museum in one of southeast Asia’s tourist capitals. And now some $2 pho for lunch - with piles and piles of added MSG. This is Cambodia, after all, and there are some things I just won’t get used to.