Hi

Been pretty quiet really. Its been raining a bit which has turned the place really muddy, but a bit cooler.

Last week was in a provincial town called Kampong Chnang which is super nice (gardens, paved roads etc) so I had a bit of a whinge to my colleaugues about Kampong Speu and they said, yeah it is the worst place in Cambodia, it's the ''Chicken's Neck'' (as in all the good things pass through it). Tee Hee.

Oh and one of the schools we visited had an awesome bell. It was half an american bomb that had been dropped on the country in the 60s when the Vietnam War spilled over. It was held up by barbed wire so it looked like a piece of modern art, but no it was a bell :)

Oh and this nice piece of recycling awww

Umm thats about it.

Bye :)

Movin' Dirt

Ok enough of that soppy HIV stuff, here is some real masculine stuff - digging. Well watching other people dig. We went to go measure some new ponds the other day so here are some photos. PS we are into day 4 of a funeral next door, which means monks chanting at 5am!

This is an example of a pond completed last year. Its pretty empty cos it hasnt rained in a while.


This is a rice bank put together by a french NGO here VSF. Basically WFP provides a bunch of rice and the NGO/Community build store. People borrow the rice in the hungry times (when last harvests rice runs out and before next harvest) and repay once their harvest comes in. Sorry cant figure out how to turn it around!

This is an example of an 60% complete road with people working on it. See how high it is above the ground due to flooding risk so it is real hard work for them.

This is us measuring (i am not in the photo) the site for a future pond.

A bit sad but hopeful

Sorry, another HIV Post!

But today I went to a pretty amazing place. But let me start at the beginning.

So basically we have to submit a WFP annual report soon, a glossy pretty much saying how great we are (same as any other annual report). So we went out to Takeo province to interview a lady who was being assisted by WFP and a partner NGO , Partners in Compassion (but I will get to them). So this woman was married with a boy (very cute kid btw!) when her husband started falling ill. They sold all their land and possessions to try and treat him and they eventually found out he was HIV. He then killed himself. Then she started getting sick and it was really bad. Luckily her sister brought her to this NGO and with their help and WFP's food she is quite healthy and is on anti-retroviral drugs which help delay the onset of AIDS.

So after the interview, we went to the Partners in Compassion site (which is located behind a pagoda) and I requested a tour.

As we walked in there was a girl, probably about ten, whose mother was getting her blood tested (the mother had just found out she was positive and of her two other children one was positive and one wasnt). I felt quite uneasy watching the strip test (basically blood is applied to a strip which indicates the presence of HIV antibodies - it isnt 100% reliable but is a good low cost indicator so if a positive result shows, they will be retested at the hospital with other methods) and felt like I shouldn't be there but in Cambodia there there isn't really such a thing as privacy so there was a bunch of people watching. Within a few minutes the mother was told ''nieng mee-un'' , she has. She will be retested at the hospital but apparently its pretty likely that she will be the 25th kid with HIV being treated there.

The centre started as a hospice for AIDS sufferers by a Cambodian and American doctor but they increasingly found that as the parents died, there was a large amount of kids left behind, both positive and negative. So they turned into a children's community. I also gush because although it is Christian organisation it works in active partnership with the Buddhist pagoda next door and its logo has both the cross and the Buddhist flag. Better than some other NGOs in Cambodia :)

Particuraly moving was the crematorium which had a family room attached and in it was the photos of all the kids and parents that had died there. Most of the kids living there had pictures of their parents, siblings and friends on the wall and went and prayed there. It was pretty moving. As we were leaving we met two pretty tragic cases, one a 2 month old girl who was the result of a rape, and her mother had just died of TB and a kid who was an unwanted birth and sold by his mother to a couple who couldnt have kids. The mother was positive so the new parents had the kid tested which returned a positive result so they abandoned him at the centre. The re-test later showed that the test was wrong and he was not positive.

The good news is though is that these kids are well looked after, they are on ARVs, they eat well and are schooled well. With this kind of care they can expect to live normal lives for a long time.

Spent the w/e in the speu which was nice, went for some bike rides (including past the prison which has a ladder hanging over the wall - better lock those doors :) )

Bye

HIV

Hi all

Just a quick post, i wanted to share with you my experiences from Monday.
We went out on a trip to some villages in Kampong Speu province to do some home visits with HIV patients who had stopped receiving food from WFP because we had run out. We hope to start again in April.

Cambodia has one of the highest infection rates in Asia, currently I think at 2.6%. Current thinking (although it is disputed) is that in Asia the trend has been that HIV enters first the injecting drug user communities through sharing needles and then into the sex worker community (injecting drug users and sex workers can be one and the same of course). Then men visit sex workers, contract HIV and take it home and infect their wife. So when 1% of pregnant women start testing postive for HIV, the epidemic can be referred to as generalised, that is spread out of specific cliques and into the mainstream population. At that same time the HIV prevalence in the sub groups (sex workers, truckers, drug users) can be massive. [Yes sociologists castigate me for using concrete definitions of sub groups when we know they are porous].

So once it reaches generalised it pretty much means that the HIV rate can climb dramatically if something isnt done. Luckily, Cambodia took the initiative with public information campaigns and providing condoms and is starting to wind it back. But what is amazing is that HIV is prevalent even in far flung villages.

The village we went to had about ten people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). WFP provides a monthly ration of rice, fortified salt and fortified oil to improve their nutrition. Improved nutrition means a better response to the anti-retorvirals and less susceptibility to seconday infections (people don't die from AIDS, they die from secondary infections that AIDS has made them susceptible to).

It was quite striking meeting these people, everyday mothers, woman and children that were infected by their male partners and fathers. With AusAID I had met with groups of positive injecting drug users in Nepal but this was different where there was no ''choice'' (inverted commas because I know that the drug users didnt want to catch HIV and were in extremely vulnerable positions, but these women didnt stick a needle in their arm).

Particularly striking was a seven year old girl we met that was born with HIV (either through blood at birth or breatfeeding after birth). You could see that she was being treated for skin infections (lesions that sometimes manifest on immnosuppressed people). We also met with several households of orphans and other vulnerable children whose parent/s had passes away due to AIDS.

Luckily most of these households were continuing to receive support from Home Based Care NGOs (a local NGO called WOSO in this case). They were having to work harder and their health was suffering but they werent starving. We hope we can resume HIV rations in April because for them, poor nutrition has the most immediate consequences.

I will try and post a happier one later :)

TNT I'm Dynamite!

Ummm ok

So i went to two weddings last week. The first one was the sister of one of the guys i work with (Ratha, the technical field monitor) so a bunch of us hopped in the car on Thursday arvo and drove up to Phnom Penh (we always seemed to be trapped behind a guy's Rav 4 type car with a dead cow in the back with its legs in the air...yummy.

The wedding was lots of fun but I got sozzled. My boss is textbook bad at the peer pressure drinking thing so we all got really hammered. The trick is to keep your glass full of ice (ice in beer - travesty i know but better than a warm beer!) so when you have to cheers (every like three minutes) and skull (every like ten minutes) its not so bad. Also had a wedding on Saturday as well which was fun though I wasnt nearly as bad (although pretty bad). The funniest part of that was that i was the only foreigner there so i got dragged up onto the dancefloor and was dancing with like 100 people staring at me!

Monday we (Piseth and I) went to a handover ceremony for some stoves that TNT had built. TNT basically sends staff over to work at some target school to implement things. This time it was Connie and Bernard from Australia to built fuel efficient stoves. So yesterday we went for the ceremony to hand them over.

The first school was Peam Khley School in SamRong Tong District in Kampong Speu. This school was in a quite remote and very poor area. Up until 2002 they had school under the tree but in 2002 UNICEF and Japan built them a school. There was also a lot of defunct playground equipment that had been donated by UNICEF but was now broken. We also had to pass over an Indiana Jones style rickety bridge in the 4WD which was fun :)

The second school was Kraing Po School in Phnom Sruoch District, also in Kampong Speu.

It was pretty cool cos i just had to turn up and make a short speech about the importance of schooling etc. I also had to apologise because school feeding had been suspended for a few months because we had run out of food. So we were handing over a stove to cook non-existent food which was a bit ironic.

We did some focus groups with the kids since we were there and found that about 20-30% had dropped out of school since school feeding stopped and all the kids used to eat breakfast at school. That day only 5-10% had breakfast at home which meant they were restless, unable to concentrate and learn and left school early.

Hopefully at the end of this week I can head out and do some impact monitoring on HIV patients, a field i was working in with AusAID so it would be good to keep up that side of it.

The weather is really starting to heat up and the house gets really hot at night so its gonna get hot from here on in! I think I might skip the wedding this w.e and have a relaxing weekend in the Speu

:) (PS for those of you that missed the news, I am an Uncle again. Little Dilan Ryan Hilton was born in Singapore! How exciting

Mystery Foods

Hi All

Been pretty average few weeks really, nothing too exciting. Been trapped in the office all week so this month i went below my monitoring target of getting out into the field so I will have to try better in March.

Next week i am Head of Office again, as my boss is going to Bangkok for statistics training (fun!). Hopefully will get out and about. Monday morning have a ceremony handing over some new kitchens at some school that TNT (as in TNT the company) built but i will tell you more bout that later.

Been invited to a flurry of weddings (tis wedding seasons - after harvest but before it gets too hot and wet). Have one tonight, then on Saturday and then the Saturday after!

I bought a basketball ring and ball for the office but there is no where to put it up without risking smashing the windows of the office...sigh!

Oh I will leave you with this photo from this party we had last week. I was told it was gonna be fried chicken but dinner ended up looking like this. It is deep fried whole rabbit, eel, deer stir fried with ants and the last dish...? well I will leave that one up to your imaginations but lets just say there is ten bucks involved.

Bye
:)


Oh I found some pics from singapore