Wedding Season

Wedding Season in Cambodia is a very special and hectic time for a volunteer.  Along with the usual workload you must budget your time between keeping up relations by attending weddings that can last up to 20 hours.  Okay so as a foreigner unless you have some relative in the wedding you can usually get by showing up for the reception, but it still can be quite exhausting.

I’ll walk you through the second week of February and that will give you an idea of the wedding season here.  So first of all I had two weddings that I had formally been invited to, with an invitation with my name on it and everything and neither of them were in the town I worked in.  Boom right there we already have 3 days off of school.  Next you are never really sure when you will get a spontaneous invitation by a Khmer person you haven’t seen in a few weeks to attend a wedding, this week I happened to receive two of these more informal invitations.  So I am already looking at 6 days (4 for actual weddings and 2 for travel) and thankfully my school director was understanding “yes because you are a foreigner you will get invited to many things and will miss some school” he says.

Anyway, now you are probably wondering ‘What exactly happens at a Khmer wedding?’  Well for the all day one I had to find transportation to a fairly remote village where I arrived at around 2PM.  Many volunteers have the opportunity to ‘walk the fruit’ in the morning at 7AM, however I have enough problems waking up for my 7AM class let alone arranging transportation to a remote village.  So I get to the village around 2 and everyone is intermittently eating and gossiping about me and I get to see many of the teachers from my school.  Well I soon discover that the reception or the next part in the wedding won’t start until around 7 so I have a good 5 hours of eating and drinking with Khmer people ahead of me.

I learned a valuable lesson at this wedding because although I had been to a few before this was the first one I actually had some understanding of the ceremonies and time lapses when there was simply nothing to do, because I had a friendly lady from Houston describing what was happening.  I also want to express that Khmer weddings are a really big deal, not just for the parties involved, but for anyone within a solid 5 kilometer radius.  They blare the music, dance for hours, drink like fish, eat, and then do it all again.  So by around 10PM I feel pretty tired (I know 10PM, cut me some slack I didn’t have my afternoon nap) but being a foreigner here is like having the Golden Ticket from Willie Wonka and everyone wants a piece of you.  You get pulled every direction, everyone wants to talk to you, and many times you just want to sit and cry (cough) I mean sit and relax.

It is a nightmare for me because it’s like all the avoiding of all the shady characters in my school won’t fly anymore, I’m there and they know I speak Khmer, and I can’t pretend I don’t.  So soon my co-teacher comes to bail me out and I am put to bed, it feels funny writing that because it’s like I’m an overgrown child, but whatever, if I didn’t get out of there I was going to throw a tantrum that would make a toddler losing their favorite toy seem mild.

So cram the above experience 4 times over into one week and you have a volunteer who needs a vacation.  Lucky for me I have found a polite way to turn down invitations now, and now I almost whole heartedly refuse to attend a party unless another volunteer will be present.