I'm going to Cambodia and Romania!!

I meant to start this blog as soon as I found out about my trip to Cambodia this summer, but I have been so busy and now I am going to Romania as well. Because of both of these very different trips, I am going to start this blog to keep track of my preparations for the trips, which hopefully will help other people planning to visit or live in either place. I also will document what I do in both countries - personal experiences as well as my public history activities.

As mentioned in the description of me and the blog, I am a PhD candidate (aka long-term graduate student) at Arizona State University where I study U.S. women's history and public history. For those of you unfamiliar with the term "public history," as I was when I began in the field in my masters program, it means doing history in and for the public as opposed to just acting as a historian in academia. Sub-fields include museums, archives, oral history, community history, historic preservation, etc etc. I have worked in oral history and in museums and will be involved in both of these areas on my international travels. It is my hope that through these experiences I will be able to become more involved in international public history, a growing field of great interest to me.

Cambodia:

Over Christmas vacation I read a New York Times piece about several different non-profit groups working in Cambodia. Since my sister-in-law is from there, I tend to keep my eyes out for news pieces and other info on that country, so I read this piece with interest. In looking at the different websites mentioned, the Harpswell Foundation came up. This group built a much-needed for for girls from rural parts of the country so that they can attend college, all of which are located in the capital city and do not provide housing or even offer housing options or help. The dorm is in its third year, and they are building a second dorm in another part of the city. In addition to their course work, the girls take a leadership seminar and English classes each week. The foundation also sponsors a Leadership Resident to live with the girls for a set time, anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months.

After learning about this project, I contacted the founder and then flew to Boston a month later to meet with him in person...and I will be going to Cambodia for six or seven weeks this summer - July and part of August! While there, I will work with the girls on their English; I think I mostly will work with writing and essay skills. I also will be able to run part of the leadership seminar and use that time to teach them a little about U.S. women's history. The publisher of Through Women's Eyes, an excellent textbook in this area, has agreed to donate several copies of the book so that the girls will be able to read the text, look at primary documents, and exam images, drawings, and photographs from our own history. I think this will be a valuable experience and will help demonstrate the long struggle for rights, freedom, and power that women in this country have undertaken since the colonial period.

These aspects of my time at the dorm will be wonderful, but the main focus of my stay will simply to be with the girls and answer any questions they have about the US and places outside of Cambodia since the end goal is that they will study abroad once they complete their undergraduate degrees and then return to Cambodia to be the future leaders of that country. In addition to this kind of moral support, I will work on a project of my own design with the girls. I would like for each of them to conduct an oral interview with a Cambodian woman involved in the government, business, or non-profit sector. I am hoping to make all of these contacts before I go or in the first part of my stay so that the girls simply need to choose who they would like to interview from a list and then complete the interview. Once complete, I would like the girls to work together and create a small exhibit of these women and their stories. This can be displayed in the dorm and made available on a short-term basis to nearby schools and libraries so that other girls can learn about the strides Cambodian women are starting to make.

To prepare for this project, I have started taking some Khmer language lessons (it is hard but fun!) and involved several clubs from hometown in Texas. These high school students have agreed to help raise some money so that I can purchase some materials for the project - such as several digital recorders to be used in the interviews and then left with the dorm and enough money to build the exhibit. I hope to set up some sort of Facebook page or some other communication site so that the Texas high school students can communicate with the young women in the dorm. I think this would be a great cultural exchange and wonderful language practice for the girls! Thank you so much to the students at Eastland High School key club and beta club for helping out with this project!!!

Okay, that is it on Cambodia for now :) Stay posted for updates on my travel preparations....


Romania:

And, just as I was completely excited and thankful for the opportunity to go to Cambodia and work on this amazing project, I found out this Tuesday that I received an Fulbright to go to Romania for the 2009-2010 academic year!!! This is a grant that I have applied for twice before for New Zealand and always seemed to end up an alternate, so I almost couldn't believe the email when it arrived. Since then, I have received something in the mail and have communicated the the Fulbright commission in Romania, so I am starting to believe this is actually happening!

Let me explain the process a bit. This is a very long grant application and wait. I started working on this over the summer, submitted many drafts and revisions to the scholarship director at ASU, submitted the application to ASU in September, had an on campus interview in October, made more changes, submitted the final version of the application in October or November, waited until January to hear if I had been forwarded from the US committee to the individual country committees, and then found out on the last day of March that I received an award! In the meantime, I have been taken Romanian all year, and I can't believe that know I actually will need to know the language. To help with this, I am going to start meeting with the Romanian instructor once or twice a week to start going over things more intensively. Interestingly enough, Romania is 60% romance based and 40% slavic, so it isn't completely foreign.

Still, wish me luck with all of these different languages I am undertaking!!

I think this should be it for my first post...the longest post ever :) I am starting to work on the medical aspects for both countries, and there should be an update on that by next week!