A quick entry

It’s been quite an eventful few days. Firstly Tak’s house-building suffered a bit of a setback when the previous landowner turned up and pointed out that they were building on the wrong land. Tak’s land is actually a lot smaller than he thought and he’s disappointed that there aren’t any shady trees (“drinking places”). But it’s lucky that he hired particularly lazy builders who hadn’t done much work, so it hasn’t taken them long to relocate to the correct land.

In better news Eng finally went for a scan and is having a girl, which everyone is happy about. I was a bit shocked, though, that the baby isn’t due until the end of June, because Eng is really quite fat already. I think I’ll need to keep a closer eye on my dwindling supply of Mars bars in future.

And just a note about Tak’s mum. Tak told me the other day that he had a dream that he and I were in the forest and I got bitten by a snake. Tak’s mum’s reaction was to ask if I died and, when Tak said yes, to clap her hands repeatedly and say, “Good, good, good.” It’s taken me almost a week to understand that, according to her interpretation, it means I’ll be getting married soon and will stay in Cambodia forever. The logic is that the snake represents a woman, the bite is her choosing me, and that by killing me it means that she will stay with me until I die – which, after a snake bite, is presumably not very long. Whether this logic is common in Cambodian culture or just among the slightly mental is still unclear, but I’m not generally convinced by Tak’s mum’s theories. She claims that visiting Angkor Wat in Siem Reap will make you live for a long time, because the temples are very old, and this week she banned Tak from eating chicken because she thinks it will damage his skin, given that chicken skin isn’t very smooth. Luckily for Tak, who is fond of chicken, he hasn’t taken any notice of anything his mum has said since about 1992.   

January

January is usually the worst month of the year, particularly if you spend it in a secondary school classroom, but this one in Cambodia has been lots of fun. There have been more weddings, trips to Pu Trom and Sreiee, parties with Eng’s friends from the bank who, having a bit more money than Tak’s friends, tend to have really good parties, and lots of nice evenings with friends. (The recycling man who came yesterday was pretty staggered with the amount of beer cans we had and had to go home to get bigger bags.)

Work has been a bit slow because there have been lots of workshops and trainings, making it difficult to do activities with the teachers in schools. Luckily, I seem to have found alternative employment as cheap foreign labour on Tak’s building site, as his house-building has finally got underway. After a long process of applying for permission from the Forestry Administration and various other departments, Tak managed to get his wood from the forest to his friend’s house in Pu Trom, which at one point involved carrying a massive log through the forest on the back of his motorbike. I couldn’t help very much, so was pleased when it came to loading the wood on to the truck to take to Sen Monorom. As this involves no skill whatsoever, I was able to help, and in fact I was better than most of the other people because they were all about a foot shorter than me. I was particularly pleased that I was much better than Tak who, though quite strong, hasn’t done any exercise in all the time I’ve known him.

Tak has hired two builders who come from another province but spend their time going from one building site to another, where they set up camp until the work is finished. They wear hats and have loud, deep voices which I find hard to understand, and smoke all the time and squat and sit round fires in the evening, and so they remind me of characters from a Steinbeck novel. I think if they were Steinbeck characters they’d probably be a bit nicer though – Tak is finding it hard to get them to do any work and he seems to be doing a lot of the work that he’s paying them to do. Eng’s dad has come to help out which is good as he can oversee things while Tak is at work. ‘Overseeing’ was the job I was after, but Tak says he’s got me earmarked as well-digger, which I’m not sure is the most glamorous job on the site. Expect me to come back to England looking like Hulk Hogan. Or to be stuck down a fifty-metre hole in Cambodia.

We have also been to Sreiee twice this month, probably my favourite school and the one that used to require an overnight stay. The first time I went it felt like Macondo from the novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, a village that you stumble across unexpectedly in the middle of a vast jungle – it even has smooth round rocks 'as big as prehistoric eggs' which Garcia Marquez describes in the opening page of that novel. But things are about to change: a new road has almost been finished and you can now reach the village within about 45 minutes. This might be good for economic development, but having seen what’s happening in the rest of the country, it will probably mean the arrival of big rubber companies throwing people off their land and cutting down the forest. Either way, Sreiee will change dramatically, I think.