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.