Arriving

Our small, prop powered plane skirts below the uniform gray of the impenetrable cloud cover to reveal a landscape swollen with moisture. Footage from New Orleans immediately comes to mind; roads are flooded, fields are flooded, rice paddies, forests...and where is the city, Siem Reap? We descend further, and soon the tiny dots become villagers, mopeds, cars; but no Siem Reap. As the plane wheels grace the runway with a sharp protest of friction, I am left wondering if I boarded the wrong plane.

The culture shock of landing in Bangkok was limited to a number of signs in a beautifully foreign alphabet, and the harshly realized fact that tap water should not be drank (my Thai companion looked at me as if I would soon fall over dead when I informed her I had already drank well over a liter of it; no harm done, however!). Now, walking through the small concrete terminal of the Siem Reap airport, it swells and surges, a tumultuous ocean to navigate, and a challenge to enjoy the navigation of it. I walk out of the airport, and an unfamiliar face rushes up to me, and in a high pitched, good natured tone, broken with small bursts of uncontainable joyous laughter, introduces herself as one of the staff at the Global Child, Smey. She has brought along an older student, who seems as excited to see me as Smey. What proceeded is an interchange that will persist far into the future, I’m afraid.

“What’s your name?”

The answer is indiscernible, a hopelessly complex combination of sounds that my ear has only witnessed in poorly dubbed karate movies. My ears are not conditioned to the beautiful complexity of the Khmer language, and although I indicate comprehension, I’m at a loss for how to refer to him.

If walking through the airport was to be aboard a boat in this ocean of shock, driving to the school and arriving was being thrown overboard into the heart of the ocean. This analogy makes it sound painful and frightening, yet the experience is endlessly fascinating and supremely exciting. As we drive down a potholed road, we are swarmed from all sides by drivers on small personal scooters (motos, as I will know them to be called). Some of these have what look to be chariots in tow (tuk-tuks!), and they swarm and dart before our eyes in a dance whose rules are unfathomable to Western preconceptions. Our winding journey takes us through roundabouts, past ancient crumbling buildings, and under the canopy of trees arching gracefully over the road. We veer off the paved road, past a temple and a line of orange clad monks, and arrive at the end of a bumpy dirt road, before a large house guarded by a heavy iron gate. The Global Child, what will become a home, a place of work, and so much more in the coming months.