Triple the New Years, Triple the Fun

So the bane and boon of my first two or so weeks at site has in fact been a holiday: Khmer New Year. In fact it effected my last two weeks or so of training since kids stopped coming to our classes because it was “almost Khmer New Year.” But having been removed from our training villages and agendas, the free time was rather staggering without an outside structure.

However, there was also the fact that Khmer New Year is a major… well, party frankly. It technically lasts 3 days, which were the 14th-16th. But really, it was much more than that since when school “started again” on Friday the 20th only 50 out of 2000 kids showed up!

Now what is the best way to describe Khmer New Year… one side of it is religious, to be sure. Families get together offerings of food and bring them to the Wats (temples, or pagodas) to offer to the local monks. They also set up small altars/offering tables in their houses where they put drinks, fruit, a picture of the Buddha, and incense. They would also do some upkeep on the spirit houses that stood in their yards, and add new offerings. The Khmer society is extremely polite and sensitive to giving thanks to ancestors (they are terrified of ghosts, and seem incredulous that I’m not). They also often host group festivals called bons where they would set up canopies, invite monks to come and say prayers, and then eat and make merry afterwards.

Now this “making merry” is the second part of Khmer New Year. Part of it is playing traditional games. They play various card games, but overall a lot of them remind me of different versions of duck-duck-goose, or marco-polo, and other such activities that were awesome when we were kids. This is a big deal around here because game playing is often frowned on during regular life because 1) why are you playing games when you should probably be working to help your family and 2) EVERY game here is played for money. Even if it’s just for pocket change of those involved, it is all gambled on. I played a good bit of soccer with some of the local guys, and it was awesome, but literally as soon as people gambled the last of their money, they all just stopped and sat down and just talked until it was time to go home. Kind of demoralizing that they had no motivation once the wagers were done!

Yet perhaps the biggest part of this making merry involves the fact that the local Wats, on various days of the holiday depending on the Wat, host what can best be described as giant, equatorial raves… with baby powder. Basically huge, intensely loud speakers are set up and pump Khmer pop music (a lot I don’t understand, but I did hear a techno remix of “Jingle Bells/We Wish You A Merry Christmas” and a Chinese translation of “My Humps” by the Black-Eyed Peas. And I think I heard some DMX in the distance once… Hilarious). All the local kids come to run around, dance (lots and lots of this), play games, buy little snacks and drinks from the carts people bring there, and throw baby powder on each other. This baby powder can’t be emphasized enough, as everyone has it and the point of the game seems to be who can get the most powder squarely in someone else’s eyes. Luckily most of the kids seemed to be confused/scared of me, so I didn’t get it as bad as some of my fellow PCVs (in some villages apparently they would throw buckets of water on you first so it was like being tar and feathered).

But that doesn’t mean I got off easy. For example, one day at 7 am I went on a bike ride with my brother Tee to our grandmother’s house. It turns out this house is about 6 miles away, and when I got there it was one of the bon/festivals I mentioned. So from about 7:45 onward, I was offered tons of food, and tons of “white wine” which is actually rice moonshine, and sort of tastes like a cross between Mad Dog 20/20 (Angy will be celebrating right here) and turpentine (aren’t they basically the same thing?). But it was a blast, despite being blazingly hot, and there was lots of laughing and dancing and such. Not a word of English was spoken, but I liked it because after chilling under my porch for half a week I was pumped for anything! Then suddenly, at 11:45, my host mom says “ok, you can go back home to the Wat now. And take Tee-ah (my 11 year old brother) with you”.

So at dead noon I find myself biking down a South-Asian road with a Cambodian boy riding on the back of my bike (and trying not to think about where people thought I was taking him). And as home is getting near, he reminds me to go straight to the Wat. So at this point I’m completely drenched in sweat, deliriously singing, and pull into a Wat courtyard of easily 300 people. All of whom are having a ton of fun but I am suddenly the main event. It was such a Peace Corps recruitment video it was amazing. The staff has called it “living in a fishbowl.” I sat in a chair to drink some water, wandered around with some students that wanted to practice their English, and then danced Khmer style to Khmer music… all the time followed by an entourage of at least 15-20 children watching everything I did not even counting the 70 other people constantly watching me from around the yard. Absolutely out of this world.

Next New Years in the States, beware the baby powder.