In Love With Srae Ouk

Last week I had another smattering of field trips which was great. The first one was with my boss Mony and Sokhom was driving and we went down to Takeo do do some food distributions in the TB and HIV programs.

Overally pretty uneventful except for Mony insisting we get smashed at dinner and the waitress there being rather...friendly. They showed me Ta Mok's House as well. He was one of the high ranking Khmer Rouge guys and its a house built on an island in the river. Rumour has it that it has many secret rooms and other oddities and that he killed the construction crew after each floor was completed to keep it secret. Nowadays the army seem to own it so you can't go in and see for yourself.

A few days later I headed up to Kampong Chnang with Ratha and Sokhom to check on the Food-For-Work program. I am technically meant to be running that program but in reality Ratha runs it pretty well on his own. I felt guilty so we went out to check on a few new projects.

One of the projects was quite remote in Krangski Commune and took hours for us to reach there. It was really quite amazing because its probably the most unpopulated area of Cambodia i have ever seen. It was pretty much all forest and predictably we got lost on the sandy trails.

So we finally arrive and the Village Chief was drunk (at 11am!) so it made for an interesting interview but the project seemed okay so we approved it (although it was very large - more than 50Mt of rice worth). We had a slightly more successful trip out to the provincial town but it took so long we couldn't visit any more sites.

The next morning we had to do more early morning school visits and I successfully bargained Ratha down from 4am to 5am (or did Ratha bargain me?). The schools were interesting because they had these massive Boddhi trees in them. Boddhi trees are holy trees because it is said that the Buddha acheived enlightenment underneath one. Apparently in the war there was an agreement that no one could fight near the Boddhi tree. Sokhom also told me that at night ghosts came out of the tree so you couldn't sleep near one. Kom is a bit scared of ghosts, he once told me he could never sleep in a house alone and would rather sleep in the office than at the shared house if everyone was out doing field trips.

We also went out to check on another project in Srae Ouk. I have waxed lyrical about this village before in other posts so I won't go on : ) What was funny was as we are driving around we turn the corner and see three Indians on a motorbike. I think I have mentioned this before but someone brings Indians out to travel across the country selling mozzie nets and shitty watches. Its quite bizarre how this makes any business sense. Mony once told me people think its a spying ring organised by the Indian Government but then he quite rightly questioned why the Indians would be spying on dirt poor Cambodians...

We popped into Thaym's house (the guy who always gives us coconuts and a chat) and to no great surprise he gave us some coconuts and a chat. His wife is massively pregnant and is ready to burst so I am hoping to see the bubba next time we drop by (which I hope to do a few times before leaving Cambodia).

On the way back to the office we swung by the Phnom Penh warehouses to pick up some new advocacy and ration posters for the TB program. While I was there I dropped in to see Nasser, who a french guy who used to be the logisitics officer but was seconded to the warehouse to run the emergency depot. It was great to chat and it turned out he was being flown out that night to the Comoros Islands (near Madagascar) to do an assessment. Apparently there is some disaster there that was not even reported in the mainstream media.

In other news I had a pretty good weekend. I went there with no plans and my time filled up including making a new American friend, Pat who is friends with my other American friends. Its getting hotter and hotter and this week we have a visit from a Japanese company - 70 Japanese executives turning up in rural Cambodia at 6:am in the morning to see the school breakfast progra! Thatsá Lota Landcruisers!