The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not represent VSO.

25 February 2011

The wedding

Reader, he married her.

 
That’s the gist of what happened last week. However, Cambodian weddings are extravagant and colourful affairs (very colourful, in fact), so for those who are interested, here’s the full account of Tak and Eng’s wedding.

To begin at the beginning, or rather, with me, about two months ago Tak announced that on the wedding day I would be the groom. I was a bit taken aback by this because I didn’t know his girlfriend very well, but it turned out he’d got mixed up and meant the best man. In Cambodia there are three best men and traditionally they should be unmarried and have both parents still alive. Many of Tak’s close friends are married already so he had a pretty empty barrel to scrape from. Still, I felt very honoured to be asked along with two of his cousins, Sinny and Lucky.

Incidentally, the Khmer word for best men is neak komdor, which sounds dangerously close to kdor, the word for penis, so I didn’t tell anybody who I was in case I accidentally told them I was Tak’s penis man. Fortunately, my bright orange and pink silk clothes were a bit of a giveaway.     

We left Phnom Penh on Sunday morning and arrived at Eng’s family’s house in rural Kampong Cham province, where the wedding would take place on the Tuesday. The family and their neighbours were busy with preparations – decorating the house, beginning the cooking, shopping, setting up the marquis and stage – and it was interesting to see everything from behind the scenes. We also had a lovely swim in the nearby Mekong. 

 
The wedding began at around 5pm on the Monday evening, with a ceremony in which four monks blessed the couple. 


Only the bride and groom were dressed up for this; the rest of us were wearing ordinary clothes, and after about half an hour of chanting it was over. Monday evening was a quiet affair as we all had to wake up early the next day, so after a few beers with Tak’s family (most of whom came on Monday as they were coming from far away), we went to bed about 9pm. 

Tak and his penis men on the night before the wedding.
Tak waltzed into the house saying he would be sleeping with Eng, and about three minutes later was frogmarched out by Eng's mother, sheepishly joining me, Lucky and Sinny outside on the veranda. Long after we went to sleep, Eng and her family were still preparing the hundreds of plates of fruit and presents which would be used for the procession the following morning.

The bride and bridesmaids (including Jeltje, who stepped in when one of Eng’s friends dropped out) were awake from about 3.30 to begin the hair, make-up and dress preparations and at 5am we were woken up too. I also had a bit of a disastrous hair styling, but it faded into insignificance when our costumes appeared. 


At around 7am we went downstairs, Tak first, then Sinny and Lucky carrying a gold umbrella each and me carrying a bouquet of flowers. When everyone started laughing I assumed it was because of the bright pink clothes, but it turned out the bouquet is supposed to be carried by the groom, as the three of them knew only too well. I wasn’t amused. Anyway, we walked about a hundred metres from the house, and all of the wedding guests who weren’t part of Eng’s family came and lined up behind us, each carrying a plate of fruit. Accompanied by music, we processed towards the house where we offered our gifts, in a ceremony that serves to underline the economic nature of traditional Cambodian weddings. (The groom pays the $3000 cost of the wedding, and although guests pay around $10 each, this money goes to the girl’s family, so they end up making a handsome profit from the sale of their daughter.)

Following this we all ate breakfast and then there were further ceremonies involving the bride and groom’s families offering each other gifts. We were also changed into orange clothes ready for the hair-cutting ceremony which took place at about 11am. 

 

This was downstairs and, after listening to some monks chanting again, the wedding party (the couple, best men and bridesmaids) sat on chairs in a line while two people began enacting a comic play. I found it difficult to understand and soon switched off, and so I was horrified when the microphone began working its way towards me and I was made to get up on stage with them. I had no real idea what was going on, but I think the gist of it was that the man was trying to pay me to marry the woman, and my role was to say no, which I think I managed to do. Anyway, everyone laughed a lot and I was soon allowed to sit down again. After this there were photos of family members pretending to cut the bride and groom’s hair, symbolising a shared future that begins growing from the same point.

Before lunch, we also went down towards the village to pay respects to someone’s ancestors (not sure whose). This took place just outside a school, so lots of the children came out to watch. While Tak was happily boasting about all the attention he was getting, it was pretty obvious that none of them were looking at him but were all staring at me – more than anywhere I’ve been in Cambodia so far, this is the place where people seem totally unaccustomed to seeing foreigners.

Lunchtime offered an opportunity to change clothes and go the toilet (I hadn’t been able to do that in the apsara trousers), and we had one more ceremony to attend before we could have a break – the washing of the feet ceremony. Tak put on a suit that made him look like a king, and Sinny and I stood behind him while Eng bent down and sprayed liquid soap on his feet, presumably to symbolise wifely obedience. No comment on that one.

We had an hour or so to rest (although Tak and Eng continued non-stop with various photos and ceremonies) before putting on a bright blue suit to go downstairs and greet the guests as they arrived. 


This was good fun for about an hour, then really hot and tiring for the following two hours as we could see everyone else eating and drinking. Interestingly, many of the villagers were leaving by 4 or 5pm, despite going to huge amounts of effort with their wedding costumes and hair. All in all, there were over 600 people, although not all at the same time as they came and left at different times.

At about 6.30 we were finished and could start on the beer, which flowed very fast as lots of people wanted to drink with the foreigners. I thought the ceremonies were over but there was one more to go – a Western-influenced cutting of the cake ceremony. We wore white suits (I felt like I was in a boyband) and I took a few photos as we were waiting for it to start.


 
Downstairs, we walked behind the bride and groom as they were covered in confetti. Because by this stage people were a bit drunk, this ceremony was more relaxed and good fun. 

 
Less fun was the whisky which followed and which meant I got very drunk very quickly. 

 
I still managed to do some Khmer dancing which always impresses people (Cambodians don’t seem to realize that their traditional dance is the easiest in the world – you just walk around a table and move your wrists a bit). And then I did a little bit of being sick, which doesn’t impress anyone.

All in all it was a great experience to be so closely involved in and I felt very honoured that Tak had asked me. The next chapter will involve the ménage à trois that is awaiting us when we go back to Mondulkiri tomorrow as, until Tak and Eng manage to build their house, it’ll be just the three of us... 

07 February 2011

Family times

Last weekend we took Tak’s mum home to Phnom Penh, after an interesting month living all together. She is a bit like a radio with the off button broken, and at times she seems to pick up different stations at once as she drifts between Khmer and French with no warning of the signal change. Still, I have enjoyed listening and have learnt a lot – she’s like Radio 4, a shopping channel and a Cambodian National Party spokesperson all in one.

Firstly, I’ve learnt that I don’t know how to buy tomatoes, green peppers or mushrooms. Every shopping trip was followed by an examination of my purchases, with a scolding for anything that looked like it might be expensive or Vietnamese. She also taught me a lot about cabbage, which was one of her favourite subjects that she returned to at least daily. And she told me that red hair wasn’t good, but that she would forgive me because I was foreign and couldn’t help it.

Washing my clothes was a trial, as I do everything I’m not supposed to do - using the kitchen rather than the bathroom, heating up water, using too much washing powder, doing it myself when I ought to have a wife to do it for me. I think I managed to win her over on the washing up though, as she nodded approvingly at my technique. Phew.

Seriously, though, it was very nice to feel part of a Cambodian family and it felt quite authentic – Tak got infuriated and spent lots of the time avoiding her, leaving us plenty of opportunities to continue talking about cabbage. At other times they would both come home in good spirits and we would talk and have a drink which was lovely.  She is a great person and actually probably one of the most independent Cambodian women I’ve met: she is separated from her husband, drinks alcohol (most women don’t), sits with Tak’s friends when they come round (rather than retreating to the kitchen as other women do), and speaks her mind.

And in Phnom Penh, coming back from a visit to Tak’s cousin, she said she hadn’t eaten the food there because she didn’t like the thought of me not eating there too. I was very moved by this kind thought.   


Back at work, things are getting exciting. I’ve been to Phnom Penh twice recently to buy children’s books to support library projects at three primary schools. Visiting one of them today for a meeting about something else, it was great to see a group of children spending their breaktime reading. 




Once the libraries are set up, Jeltje and I are encouraging the schools to organise open days for families and community members to come to the school, discuss their children’s progress with the teachers, watch children perform something related to their learning, and cook a communal meal. If they work well, they will engage the community in their school, provide an opportunity to celebrate the children’s learning and promote the use of the library among the children as well as the community. And if they don’t work well, at least there’ll be some food.