On discovering gravity, digging in the dirt, and decking the halls

Dear friends and family,

Elephant apples are in season... I fear for my life. Imagine if you will, a grapefruit sized fruit, as dense as a baseball, suspended 20, 30, 40 feet up in the air. When ripe, they crash to the ground with a marvelous thud. It is a good thing Isaac Newton wasn’t sitting under one of THOSE trees on that legendary day. Despite the perilous nature of the trees, the fruit is a favourite in Cambodian households. To open the elephant apple and get to the fruit inside, one must repeatedly smash it against the floor with great force. Or, I suppose you could drop it from a really tall tree. The inside is a pulpy mass of fruit and seeds. When not ripe, it is sliced thin and dipped in salt with chilli pepper. The fruit is so dry that it makes your whole mouth pucker with just one bite. When ripe, it turns into a sweet dark brown mush that can be eaten with a spoon. I must admit it took me a while to get used to eating this fruit, and I was just starting to like the unripe version and now suddenly it is the season for ripe elephant apple.

This week was very exciting at ODOV. We finally got our hands on some seeds and started planting! I have a whole plot at the back of the farm for research. We planted garlic, shallot, and potato from vegetables purchased at the local market. The purpose of this experiment is to see if they will actually take and grow successfully. We also planted some tomatoes in a nursery bed for transplantation to the research plot later this month. This is a variety trial, to see which variety of tomato grows best/tastes best/gives the best yield of tomatoes (assuming they grow at all). The only problem is one of the packages is in Chinese, and another variety came in a clear plastic bag, so we don’t actually know what the varieties are. We also hope to save some tomato seeds, which may not be feasible if the varieties in question are hybrid. Unfortunately, since we can’t read the packages, we won’t know until we try! We also planted some ginger in a shadier region in the front of the office.  This crop could make a nice profit from selling to the market if it grows well.

I had a great time out in the garden helping to plant these vegetables. I work closely with the gardeners; learning together. They have been very helpful teaching me how to do things in the garden, and I have been able to give some tips on growing these new vegetables, and focusing our efforts into a more controlled experiment. I have also been spending more of my spare time recently just helping out with other areas of the garden that are not research related. Who wouldn’t rather dig in the dirt and weed cabbage beds than help write grant proposals and reports? It took me a while to discover that no one at ODOV was going to invite me out to do things in the garden, or volunteer to show me how. I eventually realized that if I wanted to be out in the garden more, I just had to go out, watch what they were doing, and start helping. Now that the ice is broken, the gardeners feel more at ease talking to me, and knowing my eagerness to learn, are quicker to teach me new things. I hope some of our vegetables grow!

Life in Mesang is going well. Even though it doesn’t FEEL like the Christmas season, I have been celebrating in tiny ways; listening to Christmas music (of course), listening to Vinyl Café Christmas concerts on podcast, decorating my room, and attending a Christmas celebration at a church in Mesang. Last week I discovered with dismay that when I got a new notebook laptop for Cambodia, I accidentally forgot to copy most of my Christmas music onto it! Thankfully, I have mobile internet on my laptop, and can stream Christmas music live from music stations at home, even when there is no electricity here! Technology is great for some things! However, technology failed me when it came to Christmas lights. What is Christmas without Christmas lights? Realizing that I would never find lights in this town, and since there frequently is no power anyway, I decided to make my own lights out of coloured ink pencils, paper, and string. The result is very fine indeed! I used the same materials to decorate the miniature Christmas tree given to me by some other MCC workers. You can see a picture of my village’s only Christmas tree below!

As for the Christmas celebration I alluded to above; I wasn’t sure what to expect, but what I found definitely wasn’t it! To me, the affair looked more like a Cambodian wedding rather than a Christmas celebration, were it not for the fact that there was a flannel graph nativity scene (with a mysterious cloud of smoke randomly inserted into the scene and with a book floating in the sky), and Christmas music. And even the Christmas music sounded like Cambodian dance music, but I was able to catch the occasional word “Noel” and “Jesus”. But it wouldn’t be a Cambodian party without loud music blaring from no less than 12 speakers (I counted)! I guess I couldn’t expect Christmas in Cambodia to be the same as at home. We should embrace differences, right? All-in-all it was a wonderful experience, a great time of fellowship, and a chance to meet new people. I am very glad I braved the long road and went. In a way, I was very glad they did not try to imitate a traditional “western” Christmas. Part of what makes Christmas at home so special is the traditions that come along with it; the sense of anticipation, familiarity, peace, and fellowship that comes when we gather together and spend time with family and friends. Being in Cambodia over the Christmas season is really helping me to appreciate the aspects of Christmas that NEVER change; God’s love, Jesus’ sacrifice, our salvation, and our hope.

May you be filled with a peace that passes understanding!

Yours truly,

Rebecca

Elephant apple... the unripe kind.

"O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree..."