Cambodia, part 14 – Mesang

Friday, November 25th, became the second day of Thanksgiving for me…

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The first time Ordinary Spouse and I visited Cambodia, her brother (Mr. Guest Complacent) was living in Mesang. When he first moved to that area, he lived with a host family, and although he had moved into his own place by the time we visited, we still had the opportunity to be dinner guests in the home of his hosts…

Dinner, January 2001

Group photo, January 2001

Fast forward nearly eleven years into the present… When his host family heard that we were visiting again, they invited us for another meal. I guess they considered it an honor to welcome us again. I certainly felt honored to be there.

We left Phnom Penh fairly early in order to get to Mesang by lunchtime. (Don’t forget to allow for Phnom Penh traffic!)

Did I mention that I love Phnom Penh traffic?

This is our route from Phnom Penh to Mesang. We went counterclockwise around the loop. The straight-line distance from Phnom Penh to Mesang is about 70 km.

Most of the trip was on National Highway #1 (from Phnom Penh to the southeast corner of the route shown above). That portion on the highway went fairly quickly, although it was interrupted at Neak Loeung, where vehicles have to cross the Mekong River by ferry.

Waiting in line for the ferry

That crossing is something of an eye-opener if it’s your first trip across. The moment your vehicle stops, you are greeted by a large assortment of vendors and beggars…

(Vendors…)

(And more vendors.)

After the ferry, it was quick driving again until we turn north off of the highway. My notes from the trip indicate that it was during this stretch that I saw an Asian Fairy-Bluebird – a gorgeous bird. I include a picture here so that you may all ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’…

(Asian Fairy-Bluebird by Bob Owen)

After we left the highway, things got a little slower. As on the road to Chong Khneas from Siem Reap, this road had also been damaged during the wet season, and it wasn’t quite back to full health. There isn’t much to say, except that we bumped along until we got to Mesang. Some of the holes were pretty big…

…and we either went slow or went around. Sometimes our driver would pick a path, change his mind, back up, and start through in a different direction. But eventually we arrived.

Many things were much the same as I remember them. The house is very similar (although that front stairway is new!). The parents have only aged a little bit.

There were also a few noticeable differences. The grandpa passed away a few years ago. (My brother-in-law was in the country at that time, and it was nice that he was able to be with their family for part of the funeral.) And where there had been parents and children last time, the children had gotten older and now there were some grandchildren thrown in to the mix…

Grandchildren! (And Ordinary Spouse to help out a shy one.)

We were welcomed warmly with smiles, snacks, and tea.

About the pictures above: At the top, Grandma sits with Ordinary Spouse and Youngest and Oldest Daughters. In the second, Grandma holds Oldest Daughters hands in her own. In the middle, the dad serves us some snacks. At the bottom, you can see all the snacks. Note the yellow tomato-looking fruit. It’s a persimmon. That was a first for me. (I can’t remember the taste now. I’ll have to try one again some time.)

The floors in houses in the countryside are made of bamboo slats, with openings between them. You eat on the floor, and clean-up afterwards is easy since you can simply brush things down to the animals below. In another example of hospitality, our hosts had unrolled their sleeping mats (beds!) to serve as tables for us.

I’m guessing that those snacks could have been a full meal for us. But the meal was yet to come…

Rice and utensils

That is a lot of food. Two full chickens, fish, and eggs, plus all of the side dishes.

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It is one thing for us to have been tourists and for me to report on our vacation. It isn’t that hard to describe what we did and saw and purchased and tasted. However, it’s another thing for us to have been guests in this home, to do the dance of hospitality and customs and social norms, and for me to try to make sense of it afterwards. From that perspective, I find that this is perhaps the hardest blog post about our time in Cambodia. So I’ll just continue on and do the best that I can…

I think that I’m probably typical in experiencing a bit of nervousness anytime I’m in someone’s home for the first time. Most of us feel a certain pressure. It may not be pressure to impress others, but there is at least some pressure to not embarrass ourselves and a desire to respect our hosts. That pressure becomes more acute when you’re a guest in someone’s home in a foreign culture.  In Cambodia…

• Shoes are removed when entering a home.
• The head is sacred, so you don’t touch someone’s head. Not generally a problem with adults, but when you have children it becomes a different matter. I have no recollection whether I might have touched my own children’s heads. And I have no idea whether that would be viewed in the same way or not.
• Feet are the lowest part of the body. When seated on the floor, we tried to either cross our legs or tuck them to the sides. Stretching them out in front (as North Americans might do after a nice meal) wouldn’t be polite.
• If you are handed something, you receive it with your right hand.

Those are all things that I can/should do to maintain proper etiquette. I could probably think of some others, and of course there are many that I have no clue about. I really have no idea how well I did at observing the ones that I knew. That, of course, is part of the fear or nervousness. You go in to these new situations knowing ahead of time that you’re going to do something that you shouldn’t have, just because you didn’t know any better or because you’re not used to acting in certain ways.

Another aspect to Khmer etiquette that I found to be awkward (and that I couldn’t do anything about) was that the host mother didn’t eat with us.  I don’t know why this is, although I assume it has to do with hospitality. She was probably making sure that we (who were honored guests) had enough to eat. At the same time, I (who was honored to be a guest) would have been glad to eat with her. Funny how hospitality sometimes works like that.

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‘Hospitality’ has been bouncing around in my head for a while now. I’m thinking it gets at the heart of what Christians are supposed to be about. We open space for each other to be ourselves, to love and be loved, and to allow God to enter in. We practice hospitality by being both host and guest. And we do it differently in the United States and Cambodia. We do it differently from place to place within the United States. We even do it differently from one family and one person to the next. Part of hospitality is allowing for the times when it doesn’t turn out the way we intended or expected.

One of the funny things about our dinner in Mesang is that despite all of the awkwardness (new foods, new customs, limited communication), I felt “at home”. Ordinary Spouse and I discussed this afterwards, and she agreed. We both felt more at ease during this visit than we had the first time. Perhaps we’ve become more relaxed and better able to receive our hosts generosity.

Speaking of generosity – I was amazed by it. I kept thinking that our hosts might have really sacrificed to serve us that meal. Sometimes you can only say, “Thank you.”

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It seemed like the day came to an much too quickly, and it was time to begin our return trip to Phnom Penh. One of my few regrets from our entire trip is that we didn’t do another group photo like the one from eleven years ago. So a series of departing pictures will have to do…

Rice and children

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Walking back to our van

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A panorama from the front yard

A panorama from the front yard. (Very large file!)

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As consumers across the United States were standing in line at midnight, impatiently waiting for Black Friday deals, I was halfway around the world being humbled by true generosity and hospitality. I was blessed more than I could possibly say.

Thank you.

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