Getting ready to leave

I’m not often described as a decisive person, but I think I might be getting worse. I used to be plagued by fairly minor dilemmas which mostly took place in supermarkets, but this week I’m been repeatedly changing my mind about when to leave Cambodia and I’ve noticed a faint tone of despair whenever the VSO staff answer my phone calls. I decided initially to leave on Sunday 8th April, and just before my flight was booked I thought I might like to stay for Khmer New Year, so changed it to 18th April. Then it occurred to me that I have no house, no job, nothing to do and not very much money, (and also a wedding in England I’d like to go to) so I tried to move it back to the 8th. Before I could change my mind again, though, my flights had already been booked so I will be leaving on 18th April.

This is exactly five weeks after I was forced into having a Phnom Penh leaving party to suit the plans of jet-setters Gilly and Sam, who won’t be in Cambodia in April. It’s always a bit awkward when you have a leaving party and then don’t leave. It was a great weekend, though, and it reminded me how lucky I’d been to arrive with such a nice group. They had organised a special edition of NSJ, the VSO Cambodia magazine which I’d co-edited with Sam – two editions which are already being talked about as the glory days of NSJ. It was a brilliant present and I was very touched by all of the contributions, though less impressed by the insinuations about my relationship with Tak. (I think my reputation never recovered from the ménage a trois gaffe in a previous blog.)

In the last few weeks I’ve had my first illness – nasty hookworms that came in through my feet when I was digging the well. The doctor in Phnom Penh gave me around forty packs of medicine and instructions about what to eat. Luckily she didn’t say anything about drinking, and I’m assuming that getting the little parasites a bit tipsy will help the medicine kill them off. Ingran, who is a doctor and came back to Cambodia last week, confirmed the validity of this tried and tested approach. This is fortunate, as there is a five-day Leo Beer festival this week, and beer is definitely the healthiest of the drinks available here. There was the same festival in Kampong Cham when we first arrived eighteen months ago, with the same promotions, the same presenters, and the same catchy tune which is easily the best song in Cambodia. (There can’t be many countries where advert jingles are better than all of the available pop songs.) So it feels like a fitting way to end my time in Cambodia. Although I fear it’s probably also a fitting symbol of my time in Cambodia.  

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.

Christmas and New Year

Happy New Year. I spent the night eating soggy fish and chips for one at Heathrow Airport, followed by twenty hours on planes where not a drop of celebratory Cava was served. They’d also run out of food from the ‘Western’ menu so my last meal before returning to Cambodia was something disgusting, pickled and Korean, served with rice.

Before all that, however, I had a great two weeks in England. I’d planned ambitiously to put on ten kilos in order to survive another three months of the Cambodian diet (as well as my tendency to spend too much money on beer and not enough on food). But despite eating past the pain almost every day, I failed miserably, putting on just 200g, which I think is the equivalent of a low-fat sandwich. I did manage to fill my suitcase with chocolate and Christmas cake, so I might be able to put on a bit more weight over the next few weeks, although I probably need to learn the Khmer for ‘Get those thieving Cambodian hands off my English food’.

As this blog is about Cambodia, I won’t write everything that happened over Christmas, except that I had a great time seeing everyone and eating everything. It made me realise that I’m very lucky to have such good friends and family, and made me wonder why I keep moving so far away from them. The fortnight was also the first chance I’ve had to make direct comparisons between England and Cambodia; here are some of the things I observed. (I’m copying a similar format used in Sam's blog after he returned from England last year.)

1. Hot water from the tap is really great. After a few months in Cambodia in which I’d told people that British taps have hot water, I’d begun to have doubts and wondered whether I’d imagined it all, as the idea seemed so absurd. But it was true. I really enjoyed the washing-up I did over Christmas.  I did a lot of it, partly because it was a bit like a nice bath for my hands, and partly because I’d also forgotten that many British houses have dishwashers.

2. Things are much easier when you’re speaking your native language. I really like learning Khmer and I particularly like the ego-boost you get from speaking to strangers who are highly impressed with even the most basic phrases, often responding with warm invitations to come and have a drink with them, or marry their daughters. I’d even learnt so much that, when trying to speak Catalan or even Spanish to Jim’s friends Luis and Muriel, I could only think of Khmer, and in fact the only Catalan word I could remember was ‘Adeu’, meaning ‘Goodbye’, which I decided would sound a bit rude in mid-conversation. Nonetheless, it was really nice to speak English again.

3. Breakfasts are much better in England. Tea and toast beats a bowl of super noodles any day. Similarly, cheese, pizza, roast chicken, chocolate, fresh milk etc are all better than rice, and are considerably better than insects and intestines.

Jim cooks chicken

4. Saying hello is nicer than saying goodbye. The two weeks were over very quickly and, although this time it won’t be for long as I’m due to finish my placement at the end of March, coming home will also mean saying goodbye to lots of good friends here.

5. I have good friends in both places. I was obviously very impressed with all of the parties that were organised for me in England (although I think some of the guests were a bit confused and kept going on about Christmas or something), but I was also quite touched that Tak organised a surprise leaving party the day before I left. He’s living in particularly austere times, so he did his usual trick of inviting friends and then telling them to go and buy beer, but it was very nice all the same.

6. Cambodia really is very poor. You get used to the way things are here, but spending two weeks in one of the richest countries in the world, and also returning via South Korea which must be one of the richest places in Asia, makes you see it all afresh.

7. South Korea is definitely not on the way home. After flights of over twenty-four hours, I’ll make sure I’ve got a world map next time I’m booking plane tickets.

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.