Kampuchea Crossings

Bump to baby on the beaten expat track

Nathalie Abejero

Pandemic winter activities

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It’s the holly jolly season year 2020 and we’re looking for things we can do safely, outside the house.

In NYS/NYC we’re thankfully not seeing the catastrophic surge that the rest of the country is now reeling from. But we’re seeing spikes across indicators (indoor activities will be restricted in NYC in a few days). And the vaccine rollout seems to agitate everyone into increasingly careless behavior. It’s like we’re in limbo – help’s on the way, but there are so many caveats and really we’re still in the throes of incompetence until that stupid buffoon is dragged kicking and screaming out of the White House. With all the mediocre-white-guy stupidity within the GOP my diet has often been reduced to late night popcorn and bubbly.

So sad but our exit strategy has been blocked all year 😭:

It hasn’t been too cold yet, thankfully, so we’ve been able to do outdoorsy stuff and aren’t cooped up as much as the spring.

With the newly-bald fauna, birds are all about the handouts. You literally only have to find some bramble anywhere in the city and put some feed out, and you’ll be the happening spot for warblers, titmouse, cardinals, chickadees, etc.

Tufted titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor)
Black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus)

And why waste an opportunity to keep these kids out and tire them out? We brought the grill and had a picnic while they scrambled around Central Park’s geological quirks. Did you know that vast sheets of ice age glaciers once plowed across Manhattan, dragging and dropping a trail of rocks, today known as glacial erratics? You can see a lot in Central Park. (I took a fascinating tour once through the iconic park with Sidney Horenstein, a geologist from the American Museum of Natural History. RIP.)

Making Kombucha is surprisingly minimalist

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Someone in my neighborhood posts regular SCOBY giveaways, and so one day I decided to pick one up out of curiosity. Never did this before, and I’m not even a big fan of kombucha (they give cans of them away at street festivals and events, but I don’t recall being impressed). But hey, with kids there are always projects you can add to the curriculum.

So the little girl and I went to pick it up and the gal handed it over in a plastic container with barely any liquid. Scoby is short for Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast, by the way. It’s the living home for bacteria and yeast, which turns sweet tea into tangy, fizzy kombucha. The scoby grows to cover the liquid’s surface area, sealing the fermenting kombucha from the air. Kitchn.com says to think of the scoby as “the coral reef of the bacteria and yeast world. It’s a rubbery raft that floats on the surface of the kombucha.” (It’s a great lesson plan for young kids!)

I didn’t actually have time to see what entailed this whole kombucha-making operation before picking it up, and we didn’t have a glass jug to put it in. So I schlepped over to a thrift shop across the street and found this Bellco glass spinner flask. This piece of lab equipment sells for ~$279 and it was sitting under a pile of dust in that thrift shop with a $4 tag.

The SCOBY promptly sank to the bottom of the vessel.

There’s no shortage online of Kombucha-making advice, and the directions I followed are here. I threw black tea and sugar into a pot of boiling water (NYC tap). Then, since the first fermentation needs a cup or two of “starter” liquid I had to hunt down some unpasteurized, unflavored commercially sold Kombucha. Every bodega and grocery and cafe person I asked in El Barrio looked at me with a side eye (“kambu-whaaa?”), pointing to the guava juice instead. Thanks, dude, random “healthy” beverages won’t do. After 20 blocks I finally found an Upper East Side health food shop that carries not one but five different brands of it.

We placed the scoby in the flask (the little girl says it’s feels like a wet gummy), then mixed the tea with starter Kombucha and poured it in. We plugged up the arms with champagne corks, covered the top with a cotton square, and stuck the whole thing in a corner where it requires you leave it alone for 3-7 days. Totally forgot about it til we did laundry next and when I looked – voilà!, mama had a baby scoby! It’s quite exciting to make something grow, no?

After the 2nd fermentation the kombucha was taken out of the flask, mixed with sweetener, and put into fermentation bottles (I only had one) for 3-10 days. The whole process is surprisingly idiot-proof – though I will update this post after we test the end result in a few days. Reminds me of another fermented probiotic beverage we made last year, Finnish lemonade, which was a hit with the kids and was super simple to make.

If any of you happen to be nearby, I’m happy to send a bottle home with you. Hey, there might even be a scoby in your Christmas basket this year, or scoby dog treats, or….! (I hear scoby hotels grow out of control!)

After a few days mama scoby floated slowly to the top. After about seven days there was a baby scoby.
Here’s a better view of mama scoby and her baby.

Technology fun

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I love technology, and wish I had more of it in my background. Check out how this guy makes iridescent tempered chocolates with a 3D printer, in the first tweet below. He provided all instructions free on his twitter feed. And imagine how much less painful organic chemistry is, if learned this way, second tweet below. The learning possibilities are endless for homeschooling curriculums.

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Mourning in the time of Covid

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The kids had a sweet Grandma. She pushed her comfort zone to hang with us – she got on that 30-hour trip to Bangkok for our first kid and tried everything (durian, street foods, even a tuk-tuk ride straight out of the movie Ong Bak!). She always had a thoughtful gesture – I’d forget my own birthday and anniversary if it weren’t for her cards. And she loved our friends. She was always there.

Working with the upsides of this crisis

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When we transitioned back to the US five years ago I thought turbulence was the new normal, given all the changes in healthcare (mergers, acquisitions, hospital closings and new value-based arrangements that lead to all sorts of complex partnerships). There was a lot of restructuring in the sector and especially in the public hospital system where I worked. But that pace of change pales compared to this 2020 pandemic.

It’s now eight weeks into “New York on Pause” (our lockdown). We’re patiently waiting, yet aware that nothing will be “normal” again soon, if ever. It’s easy to descend into existential despondency at the state of the US (abysmal levels of incompetence and obstruction from the White House, anti-Asian discrimination and crimes, etc.). But we’re also at a critical threshold of opportunity. Conversations I’m having these days is how this crisis is impacting career, work, and raising kids, given that all long-term goals have to be re-evaluated now. And wow, where to start, so I will skim through the leading thoughts.

The unifier-in-chief in all this is New York Governor Cuomo. His daily briefings are so valuable because there’s new information every time I look at the news. Most of it has been bad (new pathologies were emerging almost every day for weeks) but there’s also a lot of good (so much neighborly efforts, like helping elderly people who are at highest risk get their groceries). But always, even through the roughest patches, he looked at the positives. He looks for the things that are doable, he asks for help and ideas, and he tugs on your sense of community and shared values. Whatever the shortcomings of his approach, he brought us all together on this. His briefings are broadcast daily across the globe.

And if you followed these briefings, there are a lot of things to learn about how the future is shaping up, at least in New York State. The leadership here at least seem to recognize the golden opportunity at this juncture to re-imagine and re-shape the future of this region. It’s not a stretch to think how our careers, lives and our kids’ education will change to accommodate all of this.

Cuomo frequently refers to the upstream factors around our epidemic and the response. Why are specific demographics more vulnerable? Why are hospital systems not coordinating? Why is the distribution of needed equipment and supplies so poor? The problems are so disparate, so far upstream, and yet they converged to create so much disruption and deaths in NYC. Cuomo identifies a lot of these, including issues of equity and social justice:

  • Over-reliance on the federal capacity
  • Too few geographic sources of raw and finished products and equipment (China)
  • Industries’ ability to coordinate (healthcare workers) and pivot production to where things are needed most (ventilators and masks)
  • Lack of resilience of community infrastructures
  • The role of systemic environmental racism, which consistently puts communities of color at higher risk of health issues – more crowding around homes and workplaces, associated poor quality of home and work spaces, the type of service work our communities typically take, unstable access to food / childcare / healthcare. This is just to mention a few!

Given the national political landscape, it’s so refreshing to have a regional coalition of governors who coordinate data-driven initiatives to 1) get us out of this mess, 2) guide the re-opening, and 3) lead the recovery.

(The daily briefings – over the course of two months now – literally touch on all the principles of population health. Watching them are like a refresher course on public health and epidemiology.)

These briefings and other developments in the country offer clues as to where all of us will be pivoting. In New York State and the Northeast, there is the creation of new industries to source our own products. This doesn’t have to revolve around manufacturing factories. There are plenty of maker space opportunities. In healthcare, hospitals will start coordinating more across the public-private-civil sector space, for more effective responses to crises. For education, California State University and others will conduct all Fall classes virtually. In business, NYC’s largest finance, consulting, banking, research firms won’t be returning their workforce to the office this Fall, and are contemplating a much reduced commercial real estate footprint in the future.

Notwithstanding current challenges, the implications are massive. These developments will be upending opportunities and re-organizing the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

In civil society / community-based organizations / communities, for decades there have been dialogue about the importance of cross-sector partnerships, and attempts at institutionalizing arrangements that incorporate voices from civil society. Who else knows how to navigate our communities and channel synergies at the grassroots? Certainly not the executives or academics or politicians! In this recovery phase, our communities’ role in the policy sphere is a no-brainer.

  • How do we get our community-based organizations and non-profit groups to become crisis-adaptable?
  • How do we tap into the sense of civic duty and shared social responsibility?
  • How do we build organizational capacity and the civic infrastructure to channel grassroots response? Hong Kong got through their epidemic despite their government! Why couldn’t we?!

For education and homeschooling, what does it mean to go through this period where all of society had to pivot to address a crisis where we have no idea what we’re up against? And then there’s the sheer pace of technological advancements during this time. Global crowdsourcing of clinical observations, preliminary research findings, emerging pathologies mean we’re deluged with information that is unfiltered and haven’t gone through rigorous peer review. How do we teach our kids:

  • To be data-savvy, literate and math-literate?
  • To expertly navigate the massive amount of information and to incessantly fact-check all information?
  • To stay current with advancements, such as the practical emergence of big data, the use of artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies?
  • To navigate collaborative spaces, and work across industries and disciplines?

There’s so many opportunities here, at all levels of personal and work space, in community dialogue and the policy sphere. This experience with covid-19 has scarred a lot of us, where most of us in NYC do not know at least one person who died. It is a numbing experience, but it is a chance to turn all this into something positive, and it starts with each one of us who is navigating careers while raising kids. We just have to remember, no matter how bad things look, there’s always an upside. And we create opportunities from that.

Mrenh Gongveal, Elves of the Khmer

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Whether on city streets or deep in the Cardamom Mountains, in a poor village or inside a gated Phnom Penh villa, you’ll invariably come across small makeshift houses hanging from prominent locations in businesses and homes. They are so universally present where Khmer people are, that they collectively fade into obscurity, mirroring its relative decline in recently documented Khmer history. Chasing the Elves of the Khmer delves into this Cambodian tradition; it’s a photo essay that captures the creativity that goes into these omnipresent “spirit houses” and celebrates the popular practice of erecting shrines dedicated to the Mrenh Gongveal (ម្រេញគង្វាល), or Elves of the Khmer.

Photos in this post are from “Mrenh Gongveal: Chasing the Elves of the Khmer”

Ask any Khmer about spirit houses and a common explanation is that they “bring luck.” Dig deeper than that, and you soon find that the origin story is elusive. The Khmer word Mrenh is explained by some to mean literally “tiny” while others might refer to the slang for “one who catches fish.” Gongveal means “keeper” or “herdsman” or “guardian”.

The spirit house range from a simple container to elaborately designed mini-mansions, reflecting the residents’ economic means. They contain toys and figures for the spirits, and offerings are regularly placed in them, such as small cups of water or food.

Researching it doesn’t clarify things. There’s no single accepted system of transliterating the Khmer script to the Roman alphabet, which complicates historical documentation and retrieval. For example, in addition to “Mrenh Gongveal”, variations include M’ring Kung Veal, Merang Kengveal, and Mrén Kongvial, etc. On Wikipedia it is spelled Mrenh Kongveal.

From the book:

“Mrenh Gongveal seem to be similar to the elves of western folklore. The author found they were originally perceived to be nomadic beings in the jungle, where they were the guardian herdsmen of wild animals, especially social animals that travel in herds, such as elephants. Hunters, farmers and mahouts (elephant trappers), would make baskets to leave offerings for Mrenh Gongveal, to bring luck in the hunt, to help them capture young elephants and buffalo, or to ward wild animals away from their crops. Today Mrenh Gongveal are thought of as akin to supernatural guardians, associated with a person, place, or institution. They protect or offer guidance to their benefactors, usually through telepathy (heard as whispers) or influencing dreams. They can’t be seen by adults but belief holds that they can make themselves appear to children between the ages of 6 and 14 who are “pure of heart”, and many Cambodians claim to have seen Mrenh Gongveal as children. By anecdotal accounts the roots of Mrenh Gongveal appear to be uniquely Khmer. Mrenh Gongveal are small in stature with bodies comparable in size to human children, and are fond of mischief. Offerings are often left to them when seeking their help.”

So for those similarly fascinated by this particular Khmer mythology, this book is an artistic endeavor, a journey of photos, anecdotal accounts and archived historical info. Read about it in Goodreads, or get it on Amazon. It was listed as a “2018 Summer Reads” selection in BookWorks Destination/Vacation category.