Well. SALT is over. I am sitting in a room with carpet, at a computer with high-speed internet, hearing my family talking in the background. I'm not even sweating. In fact, I was walking around in wool socks and a winter coat last night. Definitely not in Cambodia anymore. Which means, sadly, that this blog will disappear sometime in the near future, and that this is the last post I will write on it. I've enjoyed this blogging business, though, so there will be a continuation of it at http://elgotwals.blogspot.com/ if you're interested. While I can't promise stories or photos as exciting and exotic as the ones from this past year, I will still try to keep you up to date with what's going on with me. Thanks for all of your love and letters while I was gone. (Both of those things will still be accepted in the coming months.) Look forward to catching up with as many of you as possible. It's good to be back.

My apologies for the utter lack of posting in the past month. These weeks have been a little crazy trying to tie up all the loose ends before I leave, and now that there are less than two days left, it's at a whole new level. I've barely had time to be sad...maybe that's for the best, but I really wish I had more time to process. Until I can write for real in PA next week, here's a "By the numbers," a la Newsweek, of the last week.

0 more times I will be washing clothes squatting on the bathroom floor

4 goodbye parties in the past 6 days

5 pairs of XXL underwear given to me as a goodbye present from my dear host mother

9 cheat sheets found discarded on the floor after proctoring another teacher's English final exam

20 tasks left on my list of things to do (blog entry, check. make that 19)

44 kilos baggage allowance on China Airlines

45 hours left in Cambodia

Which means I'd better continue working on that list. Your thoughts and prayers for me and all the other SALTers going through intense transition times over the next few days are much appreciated. Love to you all, and hope to see some of you soon!

So much for not writing for a long time, eh? Well, I have to do something to keep my mind occupied while I’m waiting for the time to go pick up Mom and Dad, so I thought I’d type up some of my thoughts from yesterday’s cooking adventures for you.

It sounded innocent enough—learning to make fish amok from our dear and diminutive Khmer teacher. It had escaped my mind how graphic the experience of buying fish at the market can be. I was following along rather blindly, daydreaming about something or other, when a loud thud brought me back to reality. The fishseller had a live fish in one hand, as long as her arm from hand to elbow and twice as thick, and a wooden club in the other, with which she was beating the fish over the head. I think I just stood there staring with my mouth open until she grabbed a second fish, and I snapped out of my mesmerized state just in time to assure her that we only wanted one.

Then she set to work cleaning the thing—chopping it in half, pulling out the internal organs, slicing off the scaly skin like the peel off a cucumber. The most disconcerting moment was when the half with the head, which I had long presumed to be quite dead, started flailing about while its tail end was being skinned and filleted on the chopping block next to it.

I’m not usually one for watching living things suffer, but this fascinated me. It was one more reminder of how full of life everything is here, and how close it all is to death. Life in Cambodia feels so real, so raw, so vivid. It’s so full of color, in every sense of the word. Sensory overload from every direction. Chilies that burn your throat and limes that pucker your mouth and coffee that hurts your tongue with its sweetness. Sun that bakes your flesh and beggars who grab your arm and mosquitoes that gorge themselves on your blood. Smells of frangipanni flowers, urine, frying garlic, and rotting garbage all invading your nostrils. Horns blasting, kids screaming, wedding music blaring through amps hooked up to car batteries. Orange-robed monks, neon cartoon-character shorts, gold-and-rhinestone flip-flops. And now it all feels perfectly normal. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so alive, so beautifully and painfully aware of my physical state of living, so beautifully and painfully aware of how precious that is.

So many of the protective layers that separated me from my surroundings in North America are stripped away here. Take away air-con and enclosed vehicles and soundproof walls. Eliminate space between houses, closed doors, shrink-wrapped Styrofoam trays of bloodless meat. When things happen here, I feel them.

When it’s hot, I sweat. When it’s cold, I shiver. When it rains, I get wet. When the roof leaks, I move my desk. When the sun rises, I get up. When it gets dark, I go home. When the electricity goes out, I sleep. When it’s mango season, I feast on mangos. When jackfruit is cheap, I stuff myself with jackfruit. When rice gets expensive, I eat less. When gas prices soar, I ride my bicycle. When the mosquitoes come, I hide inside my net. When the gate is locked, I stay home. When there’s no water, I forego the shower. When the neighbors have a wedding, I don’t sleep.

It makes everything feel so close. Makes me feel so close to everything. My food, my environment, my fellow human beings. So many things are simply out of my control. It used to frustrate me to no end. Now, I’m addicted to the freedom that not trying to be in control affords you. These weeks, these months have been full of intense pain, intense joy, intense hope, intense life. I’m afraid, two months from now, of sitting in an air-conditioned classroom, walking down a sterile, sanitary grocery store aisle, driving down a smooth, straight, sidewalked street, perfectly comfortable, going perfectly crazy, aching for something to make me sweat, itch, feel, live like I have here. It’s not pretty, maybe, but it’s real. I want my meat to bleed.

Not till the end of my time in Cambodia, of course. That would be far too sad. But now there are approximately 36 hours until my parents, God willing, will arrive in Phnom Penh! I've got all kinds of adventures planned for these next two weeks with them, so I just wanted to say I probably won't be writing for a little while. Until then, stay well and happy!

This is a common command in my house, directed from my host mom to my host nephew, who inevitably wants to play every time I try to read or work or think. I, or course, am "older French sibling," since the word for French has been co-opted to mean foreigners in general. The humor of it hit me one day, and I decided it was about time for another quiz for you. Can you come up with the English equivalents of these literal translations from Khmer?

1. To fry uncooked
2. Street eyebrow
3. Bee tiger
4. To raise heart water
5. To peel to turn over
6. Rice house
7. Fire flowers
8. To cross river
9. Protect hat
10. Eye water
11. To practice life
12. Activity to show to lead to give to know
13. To be friends near hand of bananas together
14. Medicine to eliminate bad smell
15. Expensive mother

...

Ready for the answers?

...

1. To bother
2. Sidewalk
3. Bear
4. To encourage
5. To translate
6. Kitchen
7. Sparks
8. To give birth
9. Helmet
10. Tears
11. To exercise
12. Introduction
13. To be close friends
14. Deodorant
15. Mother-in-law

So you get awesome sentences like, "Don't forget your medicine to eliminate bad smell when you go to practice life," and "There will be much eye water when I say goodbye to my near hand of bananas friends." Beautiful, isn't it?