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I stand defiantly under the angry, dark skies - head tilted up, eyes closed, my soaked white floral dress clinging suggestively to my skin. For an instant, my thoughts drift away from language, from Cambodia and from the emotions of the long training day. I can feel my breath, slow and steady and reassuring against the aggressive force of the rain – a rare moment of full presence and awareness. Quickly flanked by my younger brother, sister, and cousin, we share a collective moment of calm as we experience the relief of cooling, heavy raindrops on bare skin.
A loud shriek pierces through the near-deafening sound of the downpour hitting pavement. Breaking the spell of calm, I open my eyes and see my sister playfully shoving my cousin through a wall of water falling from the overhang of our shop. Behind us, my Mai is watching us from a pink plastic chair and laughing good-naturedly at us with a friend from the village.
‘Rice is life’, all of the volunteers joke as they are being force-fed three plates of rice per day by their loving host families.
For the majority of working families in Cambodia, rice is literally their life – their livelihood, their sustenance. The wet season is the ideal time to grow rice; farmers can plant and harvest their crops because of the excess water that the daily rains provide. Many work in the fields from sunrise to late afternoon – hard physical labor for low pay to feed their families.
The importance of rice to the Khmer people can be revealed through their language - there are actually three words for rice in Khmer, as opposed to just one in English. The rice crop is called srou. After the rice is processed (husks removed, ready for cooking), it is ankaw. The raw rice is used in many snacks and can also be ground into rice flour to make up the base of many Khmer desserts. And, of course, there is cooked rice - bai, which is a central constituent of every meal. Rice is so essential to Khmer people that it is essentially synonymous with food. Already, I have been greeted countless times by the common question “Have you eaten rice yet?” which basically translates to, “Have you eaten yet?”. To eat rice is to eat a proper meal – anything else is essentially a snack, or ‘play eating’ – nyam leing.
Barefoot, my ten-year-old cousin eagerly runs across the road back to his house, ignoring the light drizzle. Slipping in the mud with my flip flops, I cautiously follow him at my Pa’s urging. He disappears around the corner of his house into a large expanse of muddy brown water and weeds. I follow slowly, turning the corner of the house while attempting to avoid the fresh puddles of rainwater and mud. From there, I spot my cousin ten meters out into the field-turned-pond, knee deep and wrestling with a large wire cage. Without my glasses, I cannot see what he’s doing so I lean hesitantly against the side of the house, watching him walk back and forth, dragging the unwieldy cage through the water.
Five minutes later, bulky metal cage in hand, he wades back towards me with a big, goofy smile on his face. Only as he gets close can I see inside the cage - a heap of small silver fish wriggling and flopping over each other, fighting for their last breaths of air. He emerges from the water and transfers the fish to a bucket with skillful ease. Waving at me to follow, he eagerly runs back to my house in the now-steady rain, hampered only slightly by the heavy supply of live fish.
It's 7:30 at night, and we are just sitting down for dinner at our outside table. As I reach over to add some vegetable stir-fry to my plate, I begin to feel raindrops against my back. Almost instantly, it begins pouring – but this is not unusual for the wet season, so we just shift around the table to the dry side and continue dinner as normal.
Pa gets up from the table to go to the bathroom. Only a few moments later, he begins shouting in loud Khmer from inside the house. Obviously, everyone else understood what he was saying and urgently ran into the house. I was left alone at the table, wondering if it was something important that I needed to be there for. So, I take another bite of my food and wander over.
It only takes a couple of steps past the threshold of the house to realize that the ground is wet. Looking ahead to locate the source of the water, I see the whole family – mom, dad, brother, sister, and cousin, and grandma – frantically trying to sweep and mop rainwater out of the ground floor, out the back door. I quickly dart into my room – towards which the water is steadily approaching – and grab my towels to try to help redirect some of the water. In only a moment of mopping they became soaking wet, so I grab a broom with the rest of my family and joined the sweeping and mopping frenzy.
At last, the rain stops as quickly as it had come on, and the floodwaters slow just as it is threatening to seep under the door to my room. In fifteen more panicky minutes, we cleared the rest of the water out and, one by one, filtered back outside to the table to finish eating. When we were all seated one more, my younger sister and I glanced at each other and burst out laughing, almost like it was dinner as normal.
Close your eyes and imagine this: It’s three in the afternoon, and you’ve spent the entire day thus far in stifling language classes, slowly going numb with information overload. But now, it’s time to bike the five kilometers over to school where you have technical training. Not a big deal, you do this everyday.
So, you exit the classroom and notice that the sky is looking menacingly dark. ‘Well shit’, you think to yourself. It is the wet season, after all. Good thing you remembered your raincoat today. You pull on your raincoat – more difficult than it should be with your sweaty, sticky skin - and bike through the schoolyard mud. It’s drizzling, but manageable.
As you pull a left onto the village road, you notice that the lush green rice fields surrounding the school are undulating rapidly; it’s too picturesque of a scene for what you know is about to arrive. Soon enough, that headwind hits you like a brick wall, and the rain comes down in buckets. The already-sizeable potholes in the roads start filling up and spilling over – you can’t tell where it’s safe to bike, or if it’s even safe at all. The road safety session you had just yesterday is seeming more like a joke now - the rain is falling so hard that you have to wipe your eyes every twenty seconds to see, and the forceful drops feel like small needles pricking your arms and face.
‘The rain’, you think to yourself as your legs nearly give out, ‘would be bike-able if it wasn’t for the wind’. This wind – pushing the rain to fall at a 60-degree angle – is fighting against you with every fiber of its purposeless, yet ruthless, existence. Your legs are trying their hardest to pedal you through the five kilometers to school within the allotted half hour of transit time, but the wind rebels, slowing you down to a walking pace.
'This is why you’ve never skipped leg day!', you desperately remind yourself, trying to find the motivation to keep battling the storm with 3 more kilometers to go. And, somehow, twenty minutes later, you stumble off your bike, red-faced and breathing heavily, soaked to the core, splashed with mud…but triumphant and on-time for the next session.
Oh, and it stopped raining.