Bousra waterfall

Mondulkiri’s biggest tourist attraction is Bousra waterfall, a massive double-drop waterfall which is so famous it’s inspired a song, although being a Cambodian song, it’s probably not very good. On Saturday I finally got round to seeing it – Jeltje’s dad is visiting at the moment, so that was a good excuse for Jeltje to talk her friend Somnang into driving us there. There were six of us altogether: Somnang, Jeltje and her dad, me, Tak and his mum.

We put ourselves in charge of catering, which was interesting. Tak’s mum and I are currently engaged in a month-long battle for rights to the kitchen (I’m trying to do my bit for the liberation of Cambodian women, but she says I don’t know how to chop tomatoes), and while Tak is normally happy to leave us to it, barbecuing meat is his forté. At 6.30 he came back from the market with a huge 1.7kg cut of beef, some carrots, cucumber and barbecue skewers, and after several hours of battle, we were on the road just after 8am.

Unlike the other waterfalls I’ve been to so far, Bousra has clearly been developed as a tourist site, with a carpark, lots of souvenir stalls and people renting out picnic mats. The foreigners among us were also asked to fork out $1 to visit the site – many of Cambodia’s tourist attractions charge foreigners but not Cambodians, which I think is quite a good policy in principle although a bit annoying for me.

Anyway, we set up camp and then went to explore the waterfall. We did things like this:

And then we did things like this:

And then we ate food like this:

And then we took photos of monks doing things like this:

It was a really good day and nice to spend time with lovely people.

In other news, work is getting very busy as VSO want us to spend the remaining money in the budget before the financial year ends in March. We are currently organising a trip for teachers and students from three schools to visit schools in another province to get some ideas for developing their student councils. As well as that, we are hoping to support three primary schools to set up libraries, which is exciting although will involve a lot of work. One of these schools is Pu Trom Chah, which is also working on a vegetable garden. Last Thursday Tak and I went early to visit the school, and took some photos of the children and teachers working together:

And then, before we were asked to roll up our sleeves and get involved, we left. 

The last few weeks

This week I have beaten Tak three times in a row at pool, crossed a river on a motorbike and rewired a plug (without any help from the internet and electrocuting myself only once). I think this is the manliest I’ve felt since my last Bruce Springsteen phase circa 2005.

Anyway, after a busy few weekends over Christmas and New Year, work has picked up again and the last week has been quite eventful. On Thursday, Jeltje, Tak and I went to Sraee again, the school in the jungle which is probably my favourite school. This time we went on our motorbikes, sharing two between three as Jeltje’s bike was broken. It was the most difficult driving I’ve done yet but I didn’t fall off and it was very satisfying to ride through a river unaided. My approach to the difficult uphill sections of the road was mostly to shut my eyes and hope for the best, and luckily it seemed to work.

At the school Jeltje did a lesson observation and then we had a short meeting with the school support committee, which is made up of about seven people – much more impressive than I’ve seen at other schools. We had brought materials to repaint the blackboards so we did that, and it was very nice to see community members, children and school staff all getting involved in some basic school improvements. It was also nice to do a bit of manual labour – I’ve always thought painting and decorating would be my kind of job, mostly because you get to listen to the radio and drink lots of tea.

Not sure what these two brought to the table while the rest of us were working hard...

The community are also starting a vegetable garden at the school which will enable them to teach children how to grow vegetables (a useful skill in this very poor village where food scarcity is a real problem), as well as producing goods which can either be used to support the neediest families, or be sold at the market in order to make money for the school to buy resources. It is equally positive that community members and the school are working together on something, as the overall purpose of my role is to help communities become more involved in school and to value education more highly. At Sraee this job is very easy as the school staff and community leaders are very enthusiastic and motivated. This is important because, for my work to be sustainable, I need to be doing as little as possible as it is the community who will be responsible for continuing the developments when VSO eventually stops working here.

After this positive visit, I went to my first Cambodian wedding on Friday. I didn’t know the bride or groom, and barely knew the bride’s father who was the one who invited us (he works at our office). In Cambodia guests don’t bring presents but pay about $10 as they leave, meaning families tend to make their money back on weddings, so inviting strangers isn’t that unusual. It also makes the families look good to have big lavish weddings and apparently it also looks good to have a few foreigners there.

Anyway, we sat down at a table and, when it had filled up, we were served some tasty food. Each table had a bottle of brandy as well as lots of beer, and a drunk man quite high up in our office came over, said hello, was very friendly in a drunken way, and stole our brandy. Sadly he’s a deputy director, so we couldn’t take it back. Still, we had lots of beer (which I prefer anyway) and then went round saying hello to other people we knew and were inevitably hauled up for some Khmer dancing. It was lots of fun and a good practice run for Tak’s wedding which will be at some point over the next few months.

On Saturday I was invited to go for a barbecue at a waterfall called Kball Preah, about an hour away by motorbike. It was a beautiful place and, when we arrived, there were a group of kids swimming and playing in the water, all of whom I knew from helping with their English class at the secondary school. Being Cambodian children, they are all very friendly, although strangely they left soon after we arrived, and it wasn’t until about an hour later that I realised they should have been in school as Saturday is a school day. Still, at least they’re doing something exciting when they skive rather than hanging around bus stops and going to McDonalds.

Today we’ve been planning our work over the next few months, as VSO’s financial year ends in March and they are keen to spend any remaining money, so we need to organise projects quite quickly. And this afternoon someone at the hospital phoned to ask if I could give blood. I was very glad too, although I regretted having my bicycle rather than motorbike, as I didn’t fancy cycling up the steep hills after giving blood.

I hadn’t been to the hospital before and it was an interesting experience. I am always reluctant to criticise hospital staff because I think it’s a tough job in any country, and I must say I was very impressed with their professionalism and the work I saw given the scarcity of equipment. Before they took my blood my landlady, who is a nurse at the hospital, took me to see the patient who needed it. I had misunderstood and thought she was going to show me round the hospital, and seeing the sick woman wasn’t a pleasant experience. She had been heavily pregnant and had begun haemorrhaging, but as she lived in Koh Nek, a remote district far from Sen Monorom, she had arrived at the hospital too late. When I saw her, the baby was dead inside her and she was bleeding severely. She looked very young and I thought she was a child at first; she was shivering in pain under a blanket, with tissues on her bed soaking up some stray blood which had escaped from her evidently inadequate bandaging. The staff took blood from someone else too and I think they are planning to operate tomorrow.

Sen Monorom is a beautiful and quite wealthy town, a place where some of Phnom Penh’s rich have their holiday homes, and especially in the first few months of living here, with exciting new experiences every week, it can be easy not to see the real poverty that exists in Mondulkiri. It is, statistically, one of the poorest provinces in one of Asia’s poorest countries. It is a province where the nearest hospital can be six hours away, or unreachable in the rainy season; where the nearest decent hospital is in Phnom Penh; where the poor can’t afford to go to hospital anyway; where children don’t go to school because their families can’t feed them if they don’t help with the farm; where many who do go to school sit and do nothing because they don’t have enough money to buy pencils or schoolbooks; where communities see their land taken away from them because they do not have the level of education to fight against illegal land grabbing by large companies; where corruption is so rife that those unable to pay are always disadvantaged.

I have had a great time here so far and although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, it’s useful sometimes to remember that that’s not what we’re here for.  

A weekend in Kratie

Friday was Cambodian Liberation Day, celebrating the Vietnamese-backed invasion which began on 7^th January 1979, and which within two weeks had liberated most of Cambodia from the Pol Pot regime. As it was another public holiday, Dave, Ingran and I went to see Gilly and Sam in Kratie. It was the first time the five of us had been together since we finished training, so it was really good to catch up. We also did lots of the touristy things that we hadn’t got round to doing during Christmas.

First of all, on Saturday morning, we took a boat to Koh Trong, a large island in the Mekong river, and hired bikes to cycle round. Gilly works with the school there so she knows the island well. It seems like a really well-organised community – Gilly says, for example, that the islanders have decided that children who want to attend secondary school in Kratie are exempt from boat charges. It was also very beautiful, with clean white sand and empty beaches almost all the way round. We even went swimming, after a Baywatch-style run to the shore which became quite a struggle after about ten minutes when it became clear that the water was a lot further than it looked. It was lovely swimming in the water, though, especially as the beach was completely empty and the water was fresh-water rather than salty.

We cut across the centre of the island on the way back to make it in time for the last boat before lunch, and saw some traditional rural Cambodian scenes. (Tak asked me last week when we were in Kampong Cham whether Cambodia seemed like England fifty years ago; he was a but surprised when I said it’s more like four hundred years ago.)

After lunch and a siesta, we went out to see the dolphins which are about fifteen kilometres north of Kratie. While the others paid $7 to go out on the boats, I sat on the shore and saw some for free. Even better, three monks came and sat next to me while I was waiting for the others. One was drinking Coke, one was smoking a cigarette, and the third had his orange robe slung below his nipple, so I think these might have been bad boy monks. I texted Gilly and told her to forget about the dolphins and take photos of me next to the monks as the boat came in. As she did so, the nearest monk asked who that strange woman taking photos of us was; I said I didn’t know and left.  

We then went to see some nearby rapids, a group of islands with fast flowing water and lots of swimming places. We waded across to a sandy bank to leave our stuff there, and had a lovely evening swim.

All in all it was another nice weekend but it’ll be a while before I go anywhere else as I’ve already spent most of my allowance for January. 

Sraee school and New Year

Happy New Year to everyone. It’s been a very busy week since Christmas. Last Tuesday Jeltje, Tak and I went to visit Sraee, a remote school in the jungle. In the rainy season it is too difficult to get to, but it’s been dry for a few months now and so the paths are passable. We decided to walk rather than go on the motorbikes, Jeltje and I ganging up on Tak who claimed his Cambodian legs were too short to get there, and it was a beautiful walk through the forests.

In the end it didn’t take too long and we probably could have walked there and back in a day, but we’d arranged to stay overnight at the school director’s house. He is a friend of Tak’s and is really nice. His wife also runs the shop, which I think was the source of all the beer that kept appearing. Lots of fun and a really great experience to stay in a remote village overnight. The night sky was the most amazing I’ve ever seen.

I can't remember why, but at some point a tortoise appeared. It is upside-down in the middle of the picture.

And this is the rice field at dawn.

We also did some work while we were there. The following morning, while Jeltje did a lesson observation, I met the school director and two members of the school support committee, and had a very positive talk. I was impressed, first of all, that they had a school support committee, and they were very interested in getting the community involved in the school, arranging a village meeting for the following day. I think that their isolation means that the village has to be self-sufficient, and so the community are more cohesive and perhaps better at supporting their school than other villages here. Anyway, I left feeling very positive about the school (which is extremely poor, with eight kids on benches designed for two and very few resources), and we’ve arranged to go back next week.

After a busy Thursday of workshops and meetings, Tak and I left at 5am on Friday morning for Phnom Penh. We were going by motorbike, and it was absolutely freezing for the first hour before dawn, but it was great to be driving along empty roads as the sun rose. It was a long drive (I think it’s nearly 500km), but I really enjoyed it: having left early we could stop whenever we felt like it and driving a motorbike is lots of fun. 

Breakfast at Kaev Seima, about an hour from Sen Monorom.

We got there around 1.30 and I met Ingran and wandered around Phnom Penh. We had a drink at the VSO office before going to meet Tak and some of his friends at his mum’s house at around 6pm. I don’t quite know how we managed to drink so much, but by 9pm Tak was fast asleep, I was asleep next to him and Ingran, probably feeling a bit awkward sitting watching us with Tak’s mum, was shaking me awake and insisting that we went to meet the other volunteers until Tak woke up.

We did so and, although I was annoyed that Ingran came back from the bar with beer when I definitely asked for a cup of tea, it was nice to see all the other volunteers. More drink wasn’t a good idea though – at some point I think I wandered outside to use the phone, and at about 11.30 I was lying on the grass near the river front, a worried tourist waking me up, muttering, ‘It’s no way to spend New Year’. I would have felt very ashamed if I’d been capable of thinking, but just then Tak phoned so I went to his and we met his friends at the coffee-sleeping place which I’ve mentioned in an earlier blog. I was very pleased by this as coffee and sleep were the two things I wanted, but we didn’t stay long and were soon going for food, bumping into other friends of theirs and going to a club. We went to sleep at 5am, 24 hours after I’d woken up, and I was really annoyed when Tak woke us up at 7.30 insisting we go for breakfast.

New Year’s morning felt like it usually does – painful and blurry, but Ingran and I invested in sliced bread and butter and had tea and toast which helped a bit.

The rest of the weekend was fairly quiet until Monday, when Tak, his mum and I went to meet his girlfriend Eng’s family to discuss their marriage plans. I felt quite awkward about going, especially as I couldn’t really pretend to be a relative (although I’m working on the tan), but I feel like Tak is a bit like a brother from another mother so I went anyway. It was quite a long drive in Kampong Cham province, along terrible dusty roads (apparently the government doesn’t invest in the area because it is an opposition stronghold), but Eng’s family were very nice and the food was delicious. We swam in the nearby Mekong river in the afternoon and ended up staying overnight as Eng’s brother Hong (whom I know well as he lives in Mondulkiri too) wanted to come and drink with us.

It was interesting to listen in on the marriage talks, which felt like something from a Lorca play: Tak and Eng had virtually no part in the negotiations, and it was eventually decided that they should get married before Khmer New Year to avoid the year of the tiger, which would apparently make the marriage an aggressive one. Tak and Eng were both very happy though as they are keen to get married as soon as possible; it will probably be in February or March. I am obviously very happy for Tak although also sad that he will be moving out; I’ve really enjoyed living with him and will miss him a lot.

We left early the next morning, drove to Phnom Penh, picked up our stuff and drove out again, arriving in Mondulkiri at around 8pm – a fourteen hour trip!      

Tak on the way back with his mum, who is staying with us for a few days.