Community Outreach With Unexpected Surprises

Today was another community outreach day—this month we are focusing on delivering vitamin A supplements and Mebendazole (worm prevention) tablets to children over a year of age. Slated for the visit was Prey Thnong, a Muslim community about 3k or so from my village. I’ve been there once before and the babies all seem fatter, cleaner, and better taken care of than the babies at any of the other villages so I was thinking it was going to be an easy, laid back morning since the moms clearly know what they’re doing.

But, as usual, Cambodia threw a curve ball that left the three of us (two male nurses from the health center and myself) looking around wondering where the pitch went. When we get to our usual location of vaccination delivery, there was no one there. A quick call to the Village Health Volunteer told us that he moved the location to the mosque in the village, “not far down the road, just turn left.” Now, I am convinced that Cambodians’ sense of distance (see Site Visit post) combined with their innate Asian sense of direction (i.e. nonexistent) is the reason why nobody, not even taxi drivers, know where the fuck anything is in this country. We travel “not far down the road”, stop and ask for directions to the mosque a few times, and are directed, through jungle ravines and semi-flooded roads, to this tiny mosque that stood in the middle of rice paddies. There was no one there. Perhaps the VHV meant another mosque.

So we stop and ask for directions to a different mosque. “It’s not far,” said the guy sitting on the oxcart smoking tobacco that’s been rolled in a bit of banana leaf. “Just down the road, and turn left.” So we go down the road again, turning the opposite direction. About half a kilometer later, we come to a dead end because the road is completely flooded. People are wading knee deep through the flood water to get from one side of the road to the other. I look at my co-workers and we’re all thinking the same thing: no WAY are we getting in that with our professional dress. Another plea for directions from the same guy in the oxcart reveals that the road we were actually supposed to turn left on was right next to where we did turn left, only it was hidden by shrubs and other miscellaneous undergrowth.

Eventually, we find the mosque. Or rather, we hear the mid-morning prayer going on and realize that we’re heading, finally, in the right direction. By this time, it is 9:30. We started out from the health center at 8:15. Awesome. However, it is almost immediately apparent why the VHV chose to move the meeting location to the mosque. We step onto the open fields to people just milling about, chatting, eating, kids running around throwing shoes at each other. I ask my co-worker what the occasion is, and he told me that it’s an Islamic celebration day. I asked if he knew what it was called. He didn’t.

There is a slow trickle of kids to our little stand that’s set up away from all the central madness. The two other nurses have everything covered so I sit around and gaze at the mosque, dimly noting that its quiet, ascetic beauty is quite different from the garish colors and pictures and idols that adorn the Theravada Buddhist wats around here. And then, from the corner of my eye, I see a flash of movement followed by a deafening moo.

I turn and see four grown Cham (the word for Muslim in Khmer) men trying to overtake a young steer. They have it on its knees but it is still tossing its head and putting up quite a fight. Eventually they get it on its side and tie all four legs together. At this point I have put together what is going on and have run over to take a closer look. As one man is tying up the legs, another is digging a shallow trench in the ground and two others are kneeling on the steer’s belly to keep it from moving around too much. When the steer is all tied up the men move it so that its neck is directly above the shallow trench, and the imam appears with his Koran in one hand and a sharp cleaver in another. The imam starts reading from the Koran, while the steer is covered in a white cloth and some twigs and leaves are held right above its neck. The men who are subduing the steer bow their heads and an elder Muslim lady moves through them, dabbing the back of their necks with some kind of oil. When the imam finishes his reading, he slices the steer’s neck open, through its trachea, so that its vertebrae can be seen. The animal is then left to bleed out into the trench. Horrifying guttural noises are emitted as it struggled for its last breaths, and after a few minutes, the body violently twitched for a continuous 15 seconds, and all was still. One of the men moved towards the carcass and closed its eyes. I had just witnessed my first halal slaughter.

But nevermind that, it was now time for celebration! Everyone, including the nurses and myself, was ushered into the big dining hall (what they called it, but it was actually just a wood shanty that stretched for several meters). I stood close by my co-workers as I didn’t know a single soul in the community, and all three of us are led to the front of the hall and seated in a corner. After awhile, though, I started to notice that something wasn’t quite right. I was surrounded by men. There was a clear divide in the hall between men and women, and I was very blatantly sitting smack dab in the middle of the men’s section. Furthermore, all the women were wearing skirts. I was the only female over the age of 10 sporting pants. The good thing was the pants helped me blend into the men’s section. The bad thing was my female gender didn’t help me blend into the men’s section.

After a few minutes of wondering if I should move myself or not, an elderly man comes over and motions to me to get up and move. I follow him, and he leads me to a circle of elderly women, who all shuffle and make space for me. We sit for awhile making small talk until the same elderly man takes his place at the front of the hall and starts praying. The elderly women all cup their hands in front of their faces and I imitate them. The praying goes on for awhile, everyone chanting along, until it abruptly stops and everyone yells, “Nyam bai [eat rice]!” The ladies all touch their hands to their foreheads, motion for me to do the same, and then all hell breaks loose as everyone starts digging in.

The elderly lady to my left passes me a plate of rice and I look at the dishes in front of me. A curry with chicken, some roast duck, some noodles, and some roast chicken. At some point as I’m eating I try to tackle the roast duck. There is an entire half of a roast duck in front of me, but try as I might to only rip off a small part, I couldn’t manage it and in the end gave up, leaving the mangled half roast duck where I found it, and trying to content myself with noodles and curry. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the lady on my left noticed my futile attempts at breaking apart the duck and makes it her mission for the remainder of the meal to provide me with meat. I would watch her expertly rip apart the chickens and ducks with her gnarled fingers and divide them into bite sized pieces, which she’d then toss quite unceremoniously onto my plate. We were all sitting in a rather cramped circle so she actually had her back to me. This didn’t stop her, though, and every few seconds or so another bite of meat would sail over her shoulders and land squarely in my bowl. It took several attempts for me to say “That’s enough, thank you!” before she’d actually listen and even then she only took it as “that’s enough meat” because then she’d start tossing already peeled fruit onto my plate. Orange slices, lychees, plei mien…I eventually had to stop eating because I was laughing so hard.

Even after everyone had finished eating and I was getting up to leave, this persistent old lady kept pushing things in my direction. She handed me two soft drinks, two gigantic bananas, some plei mien, and just when I was about to protest I couldn’t take all of this because I couldn’t even hold it, she whips a plastic bag out from nowhere and stuffs everything in. I was about to sincerely thank her, but she had already waved me off and her back was turned to me again.

I don’t know if all Islamic holidays are handled as such in this Muslim community, but I better make some friends stat so I have a legitimate reason to start coming here more.