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.