New Year’s Eve

It’s 7 pm on December 31st, and I’m sitting at my favorite wifi spot, the Green Mango, in Phnom Penh. The air is balmy, and Christmas lights are still adorning shops and restaurants… A light rain is falling, and in about an hour, Wayne and I are going to a New Year’s party at the home of a woman I have yet to meet other than by email.

I can’t help but think about my first days in Cambodia, a year ago. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Huh?

A year ago, Deb and I arrived in Phnom Penh separately, she from the US, me from France. I remember in vivid detail my first days here, pretty much everything about the visit, in fact. In spite of my credentials as a long-term expat in France, I’m not a seasoned world traveler like many people I’ve met in my life, and I was both excited and disturbed by the differences between the world I knew and this Cambodia.

Beauty and ugliness, light and shadow, fullness and poverty… Cambodia is a confusing place in many ways to a Westerner. That’s part of its charm. One year later, I’m still bemused and fascinated by the contrasts, by the challenges that living here present to someone used to a world where creature comforts and self-expression are considered to be God-given rights.

Living at Wat Opot further complicates the task of defining Cambodia: it’s “in” but not totally “of” this country. It’s a kind of wonderland where all is believed to be possible, and yet we are confronted daily with proof that it isn’t.

This journey is both enriching (“enrichissant”) and frightening sometimes. It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to question everything that one once held dear, and yet sometimes… it would be so lovely to just be able to go “home” for a few hours. A brief respite from self-questioning, from this constant learning to adjust to a way of life that is multi-faceted and so, so foreign.

Hence the need to seek out islands of Western-ness from time to time – something that I never had to do in Paris, as my involvement with the American Church took care of the expat uncertainties, sometimes to the point of threatening to alienate me from the French community I wanted so much to understand and be a part of.

These are New Year’s Eve thoughts… perhaps tomorrow I’ll have a tiny glimmer of inspiration as to what my resolutions for 2009 should be. I can’t think of anything intelligent to promise myself, no wondrous renewal to aim for. For the moment, I’m still where I was a year ago, discovering, finding things strange, wanting very much to NOT find things so strange… and yet still enjoying being immersed in what I’m beginning to think of as a trial-by-fire for my soul.