Hospitals and more weddings

A few weeks ago, Tak’s dad fell unconscious while in our house and was taken straight to hospital. I’m not sure what he was doing in our house but it was lucky that he fell at lunchtime when there were lots of us about. (He has an irritating habit of turning up at our house at all hours, usually drunk, in search of more alcohol – luckily we’ve usually drunk it all already.) This time, though, he hadn’t been drinking and was feeling ill. He is now much better and is at home, having escaped from the hospital in the middle of the night without the doctor’s permission. This was very embarrassing for Tak’s family although the doctor was probably glad to get rid of him – he is a stubborn man and kept removing his various needles and catheter.

The week or so that he spent in hospital did allow me to see more of it than I’d seen before. I had been quite impressed when I’d given blood at the doctors’ professionalism (although the approach is different from in the UK – there you have about four interviews about your travel history, illnesses and sex life, whereas here they just said, ‘Feeling ok? Right, lift your sleeve.’). On the first night I was touched when a man I didn’t know invited me and Tak to join him and his friends for a drink. Then I realised he was on night duty in A&E and in fact all of the doctors were heading to their staff room with several cases of beer. I’ve read blogs from health volunteers about that sort of thing but I think if I hadn’t seen it I wouldn’t have believed it. We didn’t join them, anyway.

Pu Choo Open Day

In the past few weeks we’ve helped more schools organise open days which is good fun, and attended VSO meetings and workshops in Phnom Penh, which at times involved almost all volunteers and staff. It was a really nice opportunity to see everyone again and I remembered what a great group of people there are here. Our ICT group is getting smaller though – Kath was the latest to leave last week, though she may be back at some point next year to continue her support for the Cambodian Midwives Council. At her send-off, there were around forty or fifty people, which shows what a good friend she’s been to many people. There was also a VSO Christmas party the following night which was lots of fun, especially as Gilly was drunk enough to agree to go to DJ Club.

Wedding season has also restarted, which is good because weddings are fun, but bad because it stretches the VSO allowance to the limit – I’ve been told that the minimum we should give now is $12.50, and that is should be closer to $15 or $20. Tak and I went to one in Phnom Penh for one of his close friends Rathna, whom I also know very well, and it was good fun – I especially liked the fact that his wife ended the night in pyjamas. (At the wedding venue, I mean; I didn’t follow them home or anything.) 

Tak and I are definitely pushing at the boundaries of acceptable behaviour though – last week at a wedding we drank far too much and then sneaked out with a bottle of brandy each. In fact I was so anxious not to be seen with the brandy that I have a horrible feeling that I forgot to pay my $12.50. I didn’t have the money in my pocket when I got home, so I’m hoping I paid.

The VSO Mondulkiri team: Kim, Daniel, Edwin, To, Tak, Torn and me.

Finally, Come Dine With Me Cambodia has been released (though it takes about four hours to burn each copy so the distribution is quite slow) and has been well received so far, even though as editor I’ve manipulated the footage to make it clear that Ingran and I were robbed when we came third out of four. It’s too big to put on Youtube or anything but I’m making as many copies as I can.

I’m also going to England on Friday. I will be in London until around Tuesday 20th or Wednesday 21st, and then Liverpool until about the 30th, so let me know if you want to meet up.    

Learning Khmer

I've been meaning to write something about the Khmer language for a while now, and I was reminded of this this morning when Tak's mum temporarily forgot that we've been speaking Khmer together for a year and decided without warning to switch to French, and I realised I was finding it much harder to understand her. This might be due to the quality of her French, which she learnt at a time when almost every French-speaker in Cambodia had been killed, but still, it felt like a milestone in my progress with Khmer. 

It's not an easy language to learn, especially as it's the first language I've studied which doesn't use the Roman script, so I'm learning entirely through speaking and listening. The good thing is that people don't expect foreigners to speak any Khmer at all. In fact I get quite annoyed about this - if I go to a café with Tak they usually ask him what I want. But still, it means that people are very easily impressed and I get lots of nice compliments for the most basic phrases. And as the soon-to-be-realised Come Dine With Me footage will show, Ingran admitted on camera that I was better than him in our Khmer lessons back in March. 

I'm interested in languages and the logic with which they come up with their words. Some of my Khmer favourites are bear (honey tiger), giraffe (long cow), to grow up (get big and fat), jellyfish (sea cloud), and snot and ear wax (poo from the nose and ear respectively). I also like the fact that they use the same word for the inner tube of a bike and for the intestines of an animal. I've probably never eaten inner tube (though you can never be sure in Cambodia), but I'm willing to bet it doesn't taste that much worse.

About a week ago I began learning the Khmer script, because it suddenly seemed ridiculous to be illiterate at the age of 26. It looks daunting at first and I'm not sure of my teacher's pedagogical commitment (an increasingly bored Tak is teaching me), but it's very satisfying because you make progress very quickly. When I get round to learning how to type, I'll write something in Khmer.

I don't have any photos to go with any of this, so I'll just add some of the open day that was held this morning at Lauka school.  

Comings and goings

Towards the end of September our ICT group said goodbye to its third volunteer. After Danny had left in March and Ingran in August, it was Dave’s turn to head back to England. We made quite an elaborate film called Come Do VSO With Dave, in which we compiled his best moments and then rated him out of ten. Most of us also managed to make it to Phnom Penh to say goodbye. And then we had a night out that was so much fun that they following day Dave decided not to leave after all. He’s just started a new VSO placement in Phnom Penh for nine months.

In Mondulkiri we have lost two volunteers though: Neil has a new placement in Phnom Penh, and Jeltje left to work in Kampong Cham. Before she left we went to the Sea Forest, and then to her house for a leaving party.

I’ve been in Mondulkiri for over a year now and haven’t written much about the Punong, the province’s largest ethnic group. While Sen Monorom town is mostly made up of Khmers, in the countryside almost everyone is Punong, and having less access to markets, education, healthcare and other services, their poverty tends to be more severe. Most are small-scale farmers and walk miles every day to sell their vegetables in Sen Monorom, carrying their produce in baskets which they wear on their back.

I’m lucky enough to have become a bit of a regular at a Punong family in Pu Trom village, as Tak and his dad have close friends there, but a bit less lucky that it’s considered very rude not to drink alcohol when visiting, so my recent progress on that front has suffered a bit of a setback. It’s always a gamble because sometimes they have the nasty 70% rice wine which is almost undrinkable, but other times they have the delicious homemade jar wine. It’s not as strong and really tasty. They don’t usually make it with clean water though, so it usually makes a reappearance of some sort the following day.

They’re very welcoming and the house always seems to have about thirty people in there. I assumed the extra people were also visiting but it turns out that it’s common for Punong men to have more than one wife, so they’re actually all members of the same family. I find it hard to imagine what that must feel like, and it also doesn’t make much economic sense as, in a country where men are the main breadwinners, that’s a lot of wives and children to support. Apparently it was also common among Khmers too until fairly recently. 

I don't have any photos but below are some of the people from Pu Trom performing traditional music at the school open day in June.

At work we’ve been helping schools to update their community maps. This involves community members and teachers drawing a map of the catchment area and filling in information such as the number of school-aged children in each house, and anything that might make it difficult for children to attend school, such as disabilities or extreme poverty. Teachers can then compare these maps with actual attendance rates and work out who is not coming to school, and can then visit these homes to find out what the problem is.

We’re also going to be doing some research on behalf of Actionaid and NEP (an umbrella group for all education NGOs in Cambodia) on children’s rights in schools. Tak and I attended a five-day workshop in Kampong Cham to train for this (although I won’t be carrying out the research myself). It was difficult as I was the only foreigner and after the first morning Tak got bored of translating. I understood most things but found it hard to contribute. It was nice to meet NGO workers from across the country though and see a group of young, educated, opinionated people who are committed to improving their country.

  

Travelling in the northwest

Last week was Pchum Ben, one of the longer Cambodian public holidays and a religious festival which I still don’t really understand, except that it involves lots of parties at the pagodas. I went to the northwest with Dave and two of his colleagues, Phinet and Sharon, to visit Preah Vihear temple on the Thai border.

The four of us in Preah Vihear province

Preah Vihear is one of the most important of the Angkorian temples and probably very beautiful, although it was so foggy we couldn’t see it. Perhaps more significantly, though, it’s been the source of conflict between the Thais and Cambodians for decades because, although it was officially recognised as Cambodian by the UN in 1962, the only access was from the Thai side, leaving them effectively in control. In 1979 it was the scene of “the worst forced repatriation in UN history”, as Thailand marched thousands of Cambodian refugees fleeing from the starvation caused by the Khmer Rouge back over the border. And more recently, the ownership issue resurfaced when UNESCO awarded the site world heritage status and Cambodia built a tarmac road; this, coupled with Thai political instability and a flare-up of nationalism in both countries, led to fighting earlier this year, with several soldiers killed. There has been no fighting since February though, and the temple has been reopened to tourists.

Before we got there we had a night in Siem Reap followed by a drive up to Anlong Veng, a town close to the Thai border and the last Khmer Rouge stronghold. It was controlled by them right up until 1998 and is the resting place of many of its leaders, including Pol Pot and Ta Mok. It wasn’t an unpleasant town and people were friendly enough, but I couldn’t help wondering what kind of things they’d got up to, and what on earth they’d been thinking for so long. After lunch we visited Ta Mok’s house, a weird place because, alongside the cages where Khmer Rouge prisoners were kept, there were groups of people having picnics. Then we drove almost to the Thai border to see the cremation site of Pol Pot – he died mysteriously and was cremated the same day. It was raining and felt appropriately grim, a large mound of grey earth covered by a simple tin roof.

It was a nice drive to Sra Em, a town about 25km from the temple where we stayed the night, went to a Pchum Ben party at the pagoda, and left around 6.30 for the temple.  

The area was heavily militarised, with lots of army buildings including one with about eight tanks, and when we reached the temple after a very steep drive, there were over a thousand soldiers stationed there. I wasn’t expecting this at all but, although the fighting is over, neither side is withdrawing its troops until the other side does. A group of soldiers offered to take us round and handed us a gun, saying we could hold it. Being a bit clumsy and wary of accidentally restarting a war, we declined. I did think though that there can’t be many national armies who, on the frontline of a warzone, would offer their guns to passing tourists. Of course, Dave and I weren’t just tourists but had military experience: at the age of 15 I did four days work experience at Altcar army training camp, and Dave once did an army fun day at school. We wondered whether to ask if they wanted us to get them some tips.

The soldiers took us round the whole site, showing us bunkers dug into the temple walls, the sandbags marking the border, the Thai military camps on the other side, and some of the damage done to the temple by Thai shooting. 

The sandbag wall is the official border

Bunkers dug into the temple walls

I’m not generally inclined to like soldiers very much, but I had lots of admiration for the ones we met. They were warm and friendly, had been there a long time without being able to see their families, and were sincere in their commitment to their country without being excessively nationalistic – they said that they no longer had a problem with Thailand since the recent change of government. And when Dave (who says he gets uncomfortable with lulls in the conversation and says wildly inappropriate things) asked if they found it difficult being so far from a karaoke bar – synonymous in Cambodia with casual prostitution – they didn’t get offended and just said that their work was more important. They didn’t even get angry when Dave when one step further and asked if they liked Thai food. 

Dave and Phinet

Three of them took us round and stayed with us the whole time, so afterwards we bought them lunch to say thank you. Dave later told me he’d come really close to asking the man serving us if they had Thai Green Curry; luckily he managed not to, and we left them on good terms. They’d been really good to us, although presumably really bored as they’d followed us around for three hours.

We drove in the rain back through Sra Em towards Tbaeng Meanchey, the capital of Preah Vihear province, which had nothing much there apart from a great bakery with the best bread I’ve had in Cambodia. We left the next morning and, after visiting a few pagodas on the way, we went back to Kampong Thom, where Dave lives. Phinet invited us for a Pchum Ben party at his cousin’s house which was fun, and the following day I left for Phnom Penh. Overall it was a great week and really fun to do some travelling again. And I’m glad that, the day after Dave’s leaving party, he decided to accept a three-month placement in Phnom Penh, so he won’t be leaving after all. 

School enrolment campaigns

Apologies for not having written anything for such a long time. Things have actually been quite busy at work, even though it’s still the school holidays. As well as helping the VSO staff set up new placements in good governance and health for next year, we have had lots of workshops and, more recently, have been working on school enrolment campaigns. These take place during the last fortnight of September to sensitise parents and communities about sending their children to school. The weather this week has been terrible, though, and we haven’t always been able to attend the campaigns, but we did go to one at Pu Tang village on Tuesday. 

This was organised by the school director and they didn’t have a banner, but there was quite a good turnout from the children, who walked through the village with a loudspeaker and posters. It was nice when other children came out of their houses to join them.

The walk was about an hour and the girl in the picture above (who I think came up to my knee) managed the whole thing. I felt very sorry for her though as she probably has to do this another three or four times before she’s old enough to enrol herself.

We’ve also made a leaflet with ideas for community involvement which we are distributing to all the schools. And one day in August we had chicken, which is a very rare occasion as it’s expensive here. They’re slightly cheaper if you buy them alive, so we did, although I didn’t enjoy driving him home: he wriggled a bit and broke my eggs. I hope they weren’t related. At home I put him in the spare room, gave him a plate of uncooked rice and called him James; Tak and Eng slit his throat, plucked and gutted him. James nearly had the last laugh though as he’d left a bit of poo inside which the murderers got all over their hands. But he wasn’t laughing when he came out of Jeltje’s oven.

Anyway, I think I mentioned in my last post that my placement is being extended until March 2011. As a result I’ve decided to step back from Cambodia’s collective alcohol problem, which until now I’ve been participating in quite enthusiastically. I’d always thought it was impolite to say no, and that a year wouldn’t do much harm, but now that I’m staying longer I’m going to be more careful – especially as times are hard and we can usually only afford the lethal 70% rice wine. (Last time I think it burned through some of the lining of my stomach and gave me acid indigestion for days, so I’ve given it up completely.)

Next week it’s Pchum Ben which is a big holiday in Cambodia and most people go back to their home villages. Mine’s a bit far away (although I’ll be home from 17-30^th December), so I think I’m going with Dave to Preah Vihear which is a famous temple on the Thai border. I haven’t been to the northwest year apart from a short trip to Siem Reap so that should be good.      

Changes

VSO is currently finalising its new strategic plan for Cambodia and it’s likely that they will start working on good governance at national, provincial and district levels. As public services are currently being devolved to district level (at least in theory), VSO will be able to combine this with continued support for health and education: volunteers will work in small teams with some supporting public services and others supporting district councils to administer these services effectively and to improve democratic accountability. I think it will be a big challenge for VSO to work in this area as Cambodia’s culture of deference as well as widespread corruption makes democratic development very difficult, but it’s also probably the single thing needed to help move the country forward.

VSO is also planning to reduce its geographical presence to the four poorest provinces in the east, including Mondulkiri, so there will be more volunteers here over the next few years. The good news for me is that it is likely that I will be able to extend my placement for five months to continue the work on education as well as help set up the new volunteer placements, which will begin next March. As the alternative is the miserable thought of supply teaching until next September, I think I’m keen to accept.

It’s also good that Tak will keep his job and will then have new volunteers to work with in March. We might need to clarify our respective roles, though, as I definitely feel there’s been some confusion in the volunteer/volunteer assistant working relationship. In fact I think I might be the victim of some highly exploitative working practices: as well as chopping down trees to clear his land, I also seem to be expected to build his house. Last month we went to Bousra to collect wood (not from the forest, I mean; from his cousin who he’d already bought it from). I thought it was nice of him to ask me along, and was imagining a nice trip to the countryside, and maybe a break at the waterfall on the way back. For some reason it didn’t occur to me that lifting and carrying enough wood to build a family-sized house might not be that much fun. It wasn’t, especially when we arrived back in Sen Monorom and realised we had to do it all again, unloading the wood, which took hours and hours. There were 294 planks of wood altogether, and there were no Mars Bars to help us get through it.

The sad news this week is that Ingran is leaving. He’s given up Cambodia for the bright lights of Watford, so it can’t be long before he’s back. But still, we’ll miss him in the meantime. Last week lots of people from our original September 2010 group came down to Phnom Penh to see him off. He's awesome and Cambodia won't be the same without him. 

Food

We have been out of Mars bars for about two weeks now, and it’s beginning to show, with the ever-tactful Tak’s mum telling me I’m thin and don’t look good anymore.

(Incidentally, VSO has recently moved to new a office but my postal address – VSO Cambodia, PO Box 912, Phnom Penh, Cambodia – remains the same. Just in case anyone’s interested.)

So until somebody is kind enough to send more, I’ve been embracing Cambodian snacks. These are mostly insects which Cambodians developed a taste for during the desperate Khmer Rouge years when people would eat whatever they could to avoid starvation. They are also mostly disgusting.

I’d already had deep-fried crickets, which mercifully taste much more of deep-fried than they do of crickets, and silkworms, which are sloppy and revolting, as well as the famous pon tea kone – a boiled duck egg with a half-formed and slightly hairy foetus. And last weekend in Phnom Penh I was drunk enough to find myself eating ants cooked with garlic and chilli. Worse was to come, though: at one of the stops on the bus ride back with Tak and his mum, I bought pineapple and water, and they came back with tarantulas. The legs were fine, tasting a bit like twiglets, but the body nearly made me sick. 

Before...

... and after.

Still, I felt satisfied that Cambodian cuisine had nothing more it could throw at me, saying to Tak that the only thing I still hadn’t eaten was a cow’s penis. 

He looked knowingly at me, smiled and said, ‘Oh yes you have.’

June

This week I had my first ever dream about teaching that wasn’t a nightmare, so I think that means I might be missing it. Nonetheless, work has picked up over the last few weeks, and on Monday we had a really good open day at Pu Trom Chah school. We went with fairly low expectations as the director isn’t always very reliable, but they did a great job, with the children performing plays and model lessons, the community arranging a Punong blessing of the new library, and families bringing food to share with everyone.

We also went to Sreiee for a community meeting about the dropouts, and had lots of fun driving through the very muddy roads.

And this weekend we’re also going to Phnom Penh to buy library books for a school called Pu Choo which we’re just starting to work with. As the school year is about to end, lots of the activities in our plan will need to wait till next year, so libraries is something we can work on over the next few months. In September and October we’ll begin focusing on enrolment campaigns and school openings.

I thought I’d start by writing a few paragraphs about work, as someone pointed out that most of my blogs are about drinking. Also a bit concerning is the fact that the beer seller near Tak’s house in Phnom Penh knows me by name, and that when I was walking past a shop on the way to Jeltje’s house the other day, the woman shouted, ‘Whisky? Beer?’ (I think I’ll get Tak to do the shopping in future.)

Anyway, the past few weekends have been lots of fun, especially Ingran’s birthday weekend when he and Gilly came by bike to Mondulkiri. They were welcomed by a delicious Cambodian beef soup that Eng has taught me to make, and it wasn’t until a few days later that I remembered that Ingran doesn’t eat beef. Still, nothing like a bowl of plain white rice to celebrate a 30^th birthday.  

We had a walk in the rain to a waterfall before coming back to a house party. This was the biggest one we’ve had and was lots of fun, although since then Gilly and Ingran have been spreading lies and photoshopped pictures, which you can see at www.ourvso.com and http://ingran.wordpress.com.

Sadly not everyone managed to stay as sober as me.

We spent the following day eating about seven meals and drinking lots of tea, before going to the Sea Forest for some fresh air. 

Family holiday

Firstly, to Pu Trom Chah, the school that was building the library. Last week we took the books to the completed library and it was lovely to see the children so eager to start reading them even before they had been organised. This child was particularly thrilled with a story about a magic mango tree:

This month, we will try to help the school organise a community day to open the library and to encourage families and community members to take an interest in their local school. In the other two schools where we’ve supported libraries, the children are going to expand the book collection by writing their own stories or non-fiction books. There’s only about one more month of the school year so we will need to work hard to do as much as possible while the schools are still open.

Secondly, eight months of shopping in Phnom Penh markets have left me quite blinged up – with my $6 Rorex watch, my Leevi’s jeans and my real leather Dolce and Garibaldi wallet – and this week it was the turn of the ‘Dream to have a bit of a makeover, with a $5 new seat cover. It’s the same cover used in the latest version of the Honda Dream, so I can pretend my bike is a lot better than it is. (I’m aware that readers are probably not as excited about this as I am.)  

And thirdly, I feel the need to offer a correction following my last post in which, like an early 1990s Sun reporter, I outed our cat Tony. It turns out he’s not having an affair with Sarah Brown at all; instead Sarah has been illegally entering the house to steal Tony’s food, and Tony is understandably having none of it. As well as apologising to Tony, we’ve passed draconian immigration laws and are forcibly deporting all foreign cats, with a squirt of water to discourage repeat offences.

And now to the visit of my parents, who came for a week on the 15^th May. They came with someone else too, someone who just sat and got drunk all week, but I can’t remember who it was now. Anyway, we had a lovely week’s holiday in the south-west, going first to Kampong Som to have a few days relaxing at the beach. 

We also stopped in Ream National Park on the way to Kampot, and took a boat to a small island where we had a beach to ourselves, with just sea urchins and jellyfish for company. It felt very idyllic, apart from the company (the jellyfish, I mean, not my sister). Tak and my family got on very well, and Tak announced his intention to steal them, or at least to steal my passport and take my place in the family.

                                                                                         

Kampot was very nice and we went to Bokor Hill, which used to be a mountain retreat with a hotel and casino built by the French, but which was a site of major fighting between the retreating Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese-backed forces who overthrew the Pol Pot regime in 1979. The Khmer Rouge were holed up in the old Catholic Church and the Vietnamese were in the hotel, and both buildings are grim places, the walls littered with bullet holes.

The area is very beautiful though, with cool mountain breezes and extensive forest views. Sadly, a private company is developing the site, which meant we had to pay a huge entry fee and also had to walk part of the way as the road is being rebuilt. I enjoyed the walk uphill through jungle tracks, but it seemed bizarre to be paying so much money to have to walk. We all managed it though, even Tak who claims his legs are too short to move by themselves.

At the abandoned hotel we had fun taking photos until I realised that Tak was in fact just taking photos of himself, like this one:

 Here are some taken by others:

In the afternoon Dad, Tak and I went on a boat ride along with river which turned out to be very nice. 

And then we met up with Jim, Sarah and Jen who had been in the same area but a few days ahead of us, and had dinner together. 

After dinner we went briefly to a disastrous nightclub, before sending Tak and my sister Lucy to buy alcohol (another disastrous decision) and sitting on the river front drinking rum. It was fun and everyone got on well, with Sarah telling my sister that she was much more fun than me, which was a bit rude but also true as Lucy was on top form.

After Kampot was Phnom Penh which was hot but enjoyable, with another good night in DJ club. On Sunday Tak’s mum came back to Phnom Penh after being at a family wedding in Kampong Thom, and she and my mum enjoyed talking to each other in French. We decided to go out for lunch to avoid any potential conflicts about vegetable-chopping methods.

It was sad to see my family leave on Sunday afternoon, so Tak decided it was just the time to buy half a crate of beer, followed by three bottles of whisky at various street-side locations in Phnom Penh and another trip to DJ club. I was dubious to begin with but decided he was probably right.

The hungover trip back to Mondulkiri the next day was a bit of a struggle, and Tak decided to take advantage of my weakened state to find me a wife, telling people at every stop that I was looking for one. At Snuol I think I was offered a choice of two, and if we’d stayed any longer I think I would never have been able to leave that less-than-delightful town (the Crewe of eastern Cambodia). 

Since then we’ve also said good-bye to Jen who has been missed by all, but who decided it was time to leave Curly and go to seek a better life with Raquel in Kuala Lumpa. If she doesn’t find one, she’ll be off to Sydney, New Zealand and then America.

So now it’s just the three of us again, and only another five months before I’ll be leaving myself.