Cambodia! (with pictures)

I’ve just about reached the halfway point of my time in Cambodia. Ergo, it’s time for an update. First, water buffalo: 

This is where I live.

            I’m writing this from a little guesthouse in Sihanoukville in Southwest Cambodia. It’s two hours by boat away from the tropical island of Koh Rong Samleom, my current home. There’s no internet on the island, so I make the trip to the mainland every so often.

My volunteer work here is in honor of Brendan Kutler and the Two Hats Award. I work for Marine Conservation Cambodia and conduct extensive surveys of the marine life around the island with almost 30 other volunteers from all over the world. 

The island itself is fantastic. I wake up to convivial cloudscapes, cerulean surf, and the sanguine smiles of the villagers with whom we share the little slice of heaven. And share it we do – I lived right in the midst of the village. During Khmer New Year, I fell asleep to second-hand serenades belted out into karaoke microphones from midnight to dawn by jovial Khmer men. I even shared a bucket-shower room with an elderly family (there’s no running water on the island). The living is very bare-bones; the only furniture in the shack I share with three other volunteers is a row of nails on which to hang stuff.

The village has quite the history. Two years ago, it didn’t officially exist. It was a caravan of corrugated metal full of famished squatters. Alcoholism ran rampant, and the villagers were barely surviving. Then, some developers bought the island and zoned it for development. They tried to convince regulatory agencies that the bay was fished to hell, so what harm would building it up do?

Actually, a lot. It would spell doom for the island, its denizens, and its bewildering biodiversity.

This is where Marine Conservation Cambodia comes in. We do surveys of the island’s marine life to earn it the island marine protection it deserves.

I underwent two kinds of training: scuba training and survey training. I am now a certified Advanced Open Water Diver and have been down to seventy feet. The water here is so warm that we can dive down in nothing but swim trunks and a t-shirt!

It’s a different world underwater. Diving feels kind of like flying around as a fighter jet in space. My survey partners and I glide horizontally along the seafloor and communicate through hand signals. You control your underwater altitude with your lungs, though, so it has a tangibly Zen component.

Marine life comes in so many different colors – lime greens, pastel yellows, Prussian blues, neon greens. Reefs make a distinctive cackling noise, so it kind of sounds like the entire ocean is eating Rice Crispies and giggling to itself every time I get close to one.

The training for these surveys involves learning to identify forty-plus fish - in addition to all the different invertebrate, coral, and substrate varieties that populate the waters around the island. This was a lot of fun. The fish are beautifully manifold, but I began to appreciate marine life on a totally different level when I learned to marvel at the way a chocolate grouper’s pectoral fins flit in the water as it scavenges about a diadema urchin-riddled tower of healthy brain coral.

I spend about four hours a day (any more and nitrogen in the blood becomes an issue) diving in a flat expanse of over-fished almost-wasteland called the Corral. Visibility is notoriously low (I often can barely see my survey partners), and the current is nothing short of legendary. All that’s down there are some patches of sea grass, a handful of oscillating, neon-blue Anemones (complete with Nemo-like damselfish!), the occasional magic-carpet-like black-and-orange polka-dot sea slug, and a smattering of pencil urchins.

Oh, and a lot of jellyfish. Way too many. A few days ago, I counted 28 during one dive. These jellyfish move with an entrancing undulating squeeze and vary in color from pink to deep fuchsia. Fun fact: water eats up red light. That makes these breathtaking creatures really difficult to see, and the Corral’s buffeting current flings them through the water super quickly. I’ve been stung twice. They hurt.

So why go to the Corral? Because in one out of every, say, ten-odd pencil urchins, there will be a seahorse. Up close, they look almost like alien royalty. Their faces are somewhere between horse and human, and the skeletal ridges that line their entire bodies could pass for imperial war regalia as easily as an exoskeleton. They are an eerie abandoned-building verdigris-tinged brown, and they’re rarely bigger than the distance from my wrist to the middle of my pinky.  

Finding a seahorse makes a chest-pounding hour of barely dodging jellyfish tentacles in three meters of visibility worth it ten times over. Even better, every seahorse we see on a survey is published in the massive logs of data that we send to a number of worldwide conservation organizations, including the UN. Every survey we do makes a measurable difference towards protecting these animals. Find a seahorse, save a seahorse.

The whole thing makes me feel a bit like a secret agent – especially the dodging jellyfish part.

Now, a bit about the country.

Cambodia is the most under-developed place I’ve ever been by a massive margin. Clear, immediate example: I’m writing this in between power outages. Cambodia suffers from severe “energy poverty” – people don’t have access to reliable electricity. They supplement the meager output of the grid with household generators. It’s no surprise this country has been locked in the third world; its people need to devote so much time to jerry-rigging an infrastructure for carting around all of that diesel. The poverty is rampant, and a tinge of desperation often fills the air. I learned this early on when I left my shoes on the beach while going for a swim; they were gone when I returned. Many people are desperately poor.

            Even with crippling issues like these with which to deal, the Cambodian people – especially the villagers – are usually warm, welcoming, and friendly. This – literally – rang true this past week. There was a wedding on the island, and all the volunteers were drawn into the proceedings like old friends. I shuffled in a conga circle of sorts right next to affable Cambodian teenagers, and they demonstrated for me the Bollywood-like, languorous, lolling hand rolls of Khmer dance. Despite the lack of electricity on the island, a platoon of speakers blared poppy ballads across the bay (hence the ringing: sound carries over open water really, really well).

            Long story short, waking up every morning with long chains of mosquito bites coating my legs and gecko poop on my floor is an adventure, but I’m loving my time here! I know Brendan would approve.

            Anyway, I’ve gotta get this posted before the power cuts out again.

           Here are some pictures: 

 On a boat ride to the mainland. We're in open water.

 Hello, there, water buffalo number two.

 Gecko in the bathroom.

 Cambodian wedding. Note the bandage. Wounds here are a big problem. Because of the humidity, they get infected viciously easily.

 Cambodian wedding again. That guy in the yellow had some fancy footwork.

As always, I’ll keep you in the loop. I’m headed out to the temples of Angkor Wat soon….

- Gavin

Shanghai: A Retrospective

First, some statistics:

            Total Continents Visited: 4

            Total Number of Flights: 16 (and one camel ride)

            Total Countries Visited: 6 (soon to be 7! More on that later.)

Anyway, with my time in Shanghai drawing to a close, it’s time for another retrospective! Let’s do this shindig.

            The two months I spent working at the BoAi center were eye-opening. My center had two floors: one for mainly physical disorders and another for mental illnesses. I spent my time between the two, helping with physical therapy classes for kids with cerebral palsy on the first and working through brain-function-boosting classes and exercises to students with Down’s Syndrome and Autism on the second.

            The work was intense but very enjoyable. My time with the kids was interspersed with the jarring realization that for all of the training and time and love they got, there is only so much progress they can make. Cerebral Palsy is not a one-off sort of thing. It is a lifelong battle, and it’s tragic to watch. When I was teaching in Morocco, there was always the possibility I may have sparked a passion for scholarship in the next big Moroccan tech mogul. I was giving my students something that would afford them a tangible advantage. That felt great – as did this job. However, the happiness I’d get whenever one of the students at BoAi would suddenly understand the difference between red and blue or stop obsessively biting his or her hands was soon tempered as I remembered the permanence of their maladies.

            One day, I asked the head of our center what happens to these children after they get older. She replied, “Exactly. That’s the question.”

            She’s a remarkable woman. Moved by her son’s battle with Cerebral Palsy, she quit her lucrative career in finance to found the BoAi Center. This was back in the 90s. It was the first NGO and NPO in Shanghai. That wasn’t easy. Since then, she’s done a lot of good, and it was a pleasure to help her. Apart from my activities with the children, I also did a lot of translation for her and the center. I even served as her translator at a big event hosted by the Irish Consulate!

Gaelic and Chinese is an interesting combination. 

 Here are some pictures of the kids with whom I worked:

 This young fella's name is Zhu Weili. He's a Houston Rockets fan.

 This here is Dashu. He was one of my favorite students. One day, he asked my why I was wearing my Just B Bracelet. I began to tell him about Brendan and our friendship. He would ask me about Brendan almost every day.

 This girl was sad to see me leave.

           

           

            So work was great. Another thing really stands out in hindsight, though: this was the first time I’ve lived in a foreign country without a host family, and I got the chance to sample an entirely different lifestyle. While I spent my days working entirely in Chinese, I came home to my English-speaking flatmates. That was totally new to me. I ended up with two separate social lives – one with my Chinese buddies and another with my friends from Projects Abroad. It was somewhere between the experiences of an expat and a native, and that combination was pretty fantastic.

            I spent my days at work chatting with Wang Hong and Xu Da Ge (literally “older brother Xu”) about Eastern medicinal approaches to treating birth defects, the news (there was a lot to talk about these past few months), Lady Gaga, and everything in between. At night, I hung out with other volunteers. Some of my good friends included Pedro, the loveable Spaniard; Arryl, the Norwegian who won a pancake-flipping contest sponsored by the British Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai; Katya, the Dutch-speaking Russian; Sean, a witty Brit who studies in Florida; Courtney, an Australian who personally knows a member of a band I love; David, a med-school student from Texas; and Izzy, my Brown-bound buddy from Manhattan. It was a diverse group, and we learned loads from each other.

Through my interactions with these two disparate social circles, I gained much of my second-hand knowledge of the city through contrasting cultural lenses. I ended up with a pretty unique map of this metropolis in my head by the end. For example, I can tell you where all of the nifty expat hangouts are - and I’ll automatically think of the best parks for early morning Taichi around them. I also know that the best Thai restaurant in the French Concession is near a local antique-store haven.

My existing Chinese habits became more deeply engrained. I drank hot water (in lieu of cold) almost exclusively during my time here. My Chinese friends loved it. It makes so much sense – if it’s cold outside outside, why not drink hot water? I also retained my love of local restaurants. I ate at least one meal a day at a charming hole-in-the-wall restaurant next to my flat. In fact, I had breakfast there not three hours ago. They have the best fried rice in Shanghai – hands-down. I went there so often that my roommates began to call it “Gavin’s”! I became really close with the family that runs the restaurant, and I’m sad to leave them.

As you can see, we’re pretty tight.

More importantly, though, is that I got know the differences between the two cultures more intimately than ever before. Fun little fact: they’re a lot smaller than you might think. I was a little bit shocked at how similar the daily shooting-the-breeze was with my coworkers and flatmates. When all was said and done, though, I developed two discrete modes speech – one with people my age, irreverent of language spoken, and another for older Chinese people. That was surprising. Comparing the generation gap in the States to the one here is like sticking your hand in a kiddie pool and then the Mariana Trench. That became apparent only this time around.

You probably read about it every day, but I can’t emphasize strongly enough how quickly China is changing. It’s downright freaky. In just two years, man-powered bikes went from patently ubiquitous to just above rare. The clink of chains and ringing of bells that I associated so strongly with my time in Beijing is all but gone. The new hotness? E-bikes - electric bikes.

I guess the question Shanghai poses is: what happens when development outstrips a culture’s ability to adapt? It’s a little bit frightening. I remember when I was a sophomore and phones with internet were a novelty. After coming home from my junior year in Beijing, the 3G networks were commonplace, and everybody quickly became accustomed to checking their Facebooks at lunch. That’s pretty revolutionary when you think about it. Now, imagine if the principal mode of transportation were utterly transformed in the same span of time.

Remember the 7^th country I mentioned at the beginning of this post? Well, it’s Cambodia!

The next portion of my year is dedicated to Brendan Kutler. As the inaugural Two Hats Fellow, I will spend two months on a Cambodian island in the Gulf of Thailand (Koh Rong Samleom) working at a center for marine research and conservation. In addition to salvage diving to remove debris from the seafloor, I will be collecting data on seahorse migration patterns and taking extensive reef surveys. I chose to pursue this project because it’s the sort unique interdisciplinary synthesis that Brendan and I love. I will combine our shared loves of foreign cultures, Asia, science, the sea, and volunteer work (along with good food and weird tropical fruit!) in the two months I spend on the island.

I’m excited! As always, I’ll keep you posted.

 I saw Shinchi Osawa on the weekend of Brendan's birthday. I gave him a Just B bracelet... AND HE WORE IT FOR THE REST OF HIS SET! LOOK LOOK LOOK IT : O

 Just a cool shot. Taken on Chinese New Year.

Fun with infinity pools in Hong Kong. Taken when I visited a friend who goes to college in the mountains of Hong Kong Island. 

Shanghai

Hello from Shanghai, China!

              Sorry for the lack of pictures - I can't actually access my blog. My brother (love you, Conor) was kind enough to put this up for me. The censorship wasn’t even an issue the last time I was in China. It’s gotten worse since then. Blogspot, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have all been totally “harmonized” (tongue-in-cheek Chinese slang for “censored.” People also use “river-crabbed” online, which is a near-homonym – 和諧 he2 xie2 vs. 河蟹 he2xie4 ).
             My first couple of weeks in Shanghai have been excellent. I live in a flat in a very Chinese section of town with three roommates: a British girl from Nottingham, a Norwegian girl from a rural village, and a boy from New York City headed to Brown next year.
             I started work at the Shanghai BoAi center the day after I arrived. Its name (博愛 bo2 ai4) translates to “fraternal love” or “universal love” in Chinese. It’s a fitting name for a non-profit organization that provides full-time care for children and young adults with mental handicaps, physical disabilities, or, in a few cruel cases, both.
             The work is intense, but it’s very rewarding. The kids at the center all call me “foreigner older brother” (外國哥哥wai4 guo2 ge1 ge1) – even those older than I!
             Now, about Chinese New Year. It was wild. Most of the city shuts down when the immigrant population leaves for their hometowns across China. The only restaurant open for the past two weeks was a noodle restaurant owned by members of the Islamic Hui people. As a result, I ended up eating in a Muslim restaurant before heading out to watch fireworks on one of the two big nights of Chinese New Year. After eating dinner with my Chinese friends in Morocco on Eied (a major Muslim holiday), it was definitely a full-circle moment.

            Guidebooks tell you not to visit China during the two weeks of festivities. If possible, I’d recommend you do. I was fortunate enough to experience a Chinese New Year during my junior year in Beijing, and I was crazy-go-nuts overjoyed to have the opportunity to take in a second one. There are two nights where everybody in the entire city sets off fireworks. At once. This comes after a week-long buildup where people set off all kinds of pyrotechnics on the street. I’m not talking about firecrackers (though you do get plenty of those). I mean gnarly ones that shoot up and explode and spray flaming colors everywhere - front yard, broad daylight.
            The city feels uncannily like what a warzone should for the duration of the holiday. Firecrackers, off in the distance, ring like gunshots (or really heavy rain, if you’re inside). The smell and smog of gunpowder flood the streets. Large booms shake the air and set off car alarms. To top it all off, most stores are empty. Then, you see people walking around with large stalks of cabbage in bags flash you a grin and teenagers giggling into cell phones.
             I was fortunate to be on a rooftop 30 stories above the madness on the Chinese New Year’s Eve. It looked like the entire city was getting bombed, but not from the skies above, but from the street level. Every building was bathed in conflicting tones of purple and green, in red and yellow, as the thick clouds of gunpowder smoke grew more luminous, they thickened with every new firework. There isn’t anything else like it on the planet – believe me, I’ve looked.  I’d go on, but I took 10 minutes of video : D I’ll upload that as soon as I get my systems for working around the Great Firewall of China.

            This city is incredible. Beijing feels like a clash between the new and the old China. Shanghai (so far) appears to be a more peaceful overlay of the East and the West. There are entire blocks in the French Concession that looked plucked right out of Paris. That said, the European illusion falls apart pretty quickly once you see (ironically enough) one of the million Chinese-ified pseudo-French bakeries.
            So there you go. I’ll keep you updated. : P
            Happy Chinese New Year!