Random Musings

Ok so I am going to share with you some random stories and pictures and videos

Hookers

Ok so I wasn’t going to share this but it happens so often now its actually getting quite annoying. Maybe an explanation is in order. So maybe it’s the guys I work with but when we are on field trips we always go to restaurants where the waitresses are hookers as well. And because I am usually the only foreigner there (or at least the youngest one) their attention turns to me. Nothing is more awkward then having dinner with your colleagues while a waitress is sitting there spilling all kind of sexual innuendo! Prime culprit is the Monorom Restaurant in Kampong Chnang town. Now far be it from me to cast moral judgement on the oldest profession in the world, but I just want to damn eat!

Old Dude

There is this old guy in a wheelchair that lives next to the office that is always parked out front every morning as I ride past so we have a chat. We first met a few months ago when a bus load of Koreans arrived at the Methodist Church across the road (which is pretty much abandoned at all other times) and we all came out to gawk. A few months ago his daughter-in –law passed away from complications from AIDS (his son had died a few years earlier) and he sent me an invitation to the funeral addressed to ‘being kind Matthew’ (unfortunately I couldn’t make it). Anyway so a Fridays back I popped in to have a chat. It turns out he used to be in the army then worked as a teacher, and then worked as chief of police in Phnom Penh and has since retired. It was great sitting in his garden and chatting for a bit and was a total pick me up as I was feeling a widdle bit homesick.

Sihanoukville

I mentioned a few posts back that I spent a weekend in Sihanoukville at the beach with Loiuza and the Frenchies (Alice and Annie). Some pictures have emerged so enjoy! The garden pictures are at the guesthouse and the beach is well…the beach.

I like this photo cos this lady is selling lobsters (well not real lobsters, they are like halfway between a big prawn and a lobster). I had always been curious as to how one actually eats this on the beach so I bit the bullet, ignored the old adage about seafood left in the sun all day and dug in. I was especially happy because I was able to have almost a complete conversation in Khmer with her about a variety of topics so I was totally stoked!

Jrook

A big fat pig wandering around one of our schools. Damn I hate pigs!

Early Morning Visits

A 4:30am video to share my pain J

Rainy Season and Heat

So after the Royal Ploughing Ceremony (the royal oxen are led out and presented with a range of foods to choose from, whatever they choose will signify the success – or failure- of the next crop, I missed what the result was but last year they said it would be a bad crop and it was a bumper one so I don’t read too much into itJ) it is now officially the rainy season…

Which means the beginning of this…

No that’s not explosive diarrhoea it’s the infamous mud stripe… it's gonna be a dirty wet season again! It’s also bloody hot still, with temps reaching at least 35 each day. In on Sunday it was 38.5 in the shade. And the power outs aren’t completely finished yet which compounds the problems but when it gets that hot its useless using fans as they just blow hot air back at you. And although I have a water tank now, it heats up so much that you have to have scalding hot showers!

Well with the rainy season comes the planting season which is always beautiful to watch (although back breaking labour for the people actually doing it).

Ampe Phnom

Kampong Speu's claim to fame is Ampe Phnom, this temple that is overrun by rabid monkeys on one side of the river and a whole bunch of ludicrously priced hammock restaurants on the other. On Sat Louiza and I decided to head down for something different. So it was all very nice enjoying the breeze on a 39.5 degree day by the river (which as you can see is much shrunken over the dry season but no doubt will fill up soon again).

In the next bungalow there was this Khmer family eating and then a fortune teller came by and started reading their palm. I must have been quite obvious in my eaves dropping and they invited us over to have a go (they spoke a little English cos they were day trippers from Phnom Penh).

I had always wanted to get this done and its done it two parts, one using a deck of playing cards and the other measuring your palm and knuckles to tell your future. Apparently I will be rich (I wonder if he tells that to everyone?), have two girls (apparently he meant two girlfriends or wives hmmm, I asked him how many kids and he said thats up to you which was a refreshing answer), that I am happy on the outside and not on the inside, by age 30 I will get what I really want and that people like me wherever I go. Altogether not that illuminating but a fun experience!

Louiza had hers done as well and found it very amusing when they told her she will marry a rich man.


Fairy Lights

In an amazing discovery Louiza was the inspiration behind the activation of fairy lights on my balcony…festive! As it turned out it was only for one night when Louiza moved as Rummany felt that I didn’t need them when I was living alone and only lasted one night as she felt they were lights only for welcoming : )

I guess that leads to another point… for the last few months I have had a housemate, Louiza the Belgian. I think I forgot to mention that? Anyway she returns home in a few weeks anyway.

One Night in Bangkok and A Few Days in Pursat Province

So as it happens, Lindsay (my old flatmate in Canberra) is working with the International Labor Organization in Bangkok under a similar deal as me. In fact it’s a little weird that all my flatmates have worked overseas in similar work (Nadija in Samoa, Dylan in East Timor). Anyhoo a while back I decided time was running out for me to go over and visit so in decadent expat style I booked a weekend in Bangkok. So it finally rolled around and I was all set. Except I was working in Kampong Chnang all week and returned to work and found that Air Asia had sent me an email with no subject line and just an attachment (my itinerary). Thinking it was just a courtesy reminded I though nothing of it. But later that arvo when I went to print it off I noticed that the flight was for the afternoon of Saturday (not the morning). And as it turned out it wasn’t my own incompetence (which was the most likely candidate) but they cancelled the morning flight. So that meant that I had a 21 hour holiday in Bangkok, arriving early Saturday evening and leaving early Sunday afternoon! Possibly the most expensive per hour holiday I have had. Anyway it was great to catch up with Lindsay, have dinner, go to lots of bars and the next morning nerding it up at bookstores and soaking up air conditioned shopping centres!

So we are in this peculiar situation at work. We run two projects, one called Protracted Relief and Recovery (PRRO) (which covers education [school feeding, vocational training], health and nutrition [food support for people with HIV and TB or both] and disaster management [food for work, relief]. There other is a Maternal and Child Health (MCH) project. Now PRRO is massively underfunded (leading to, as avid readers will know, the suspension of the school feeding program) but the MCH project is actually fully funded but we are unable to meet our targets due to lack of partners.

We run the project through an organsation called the Reproductive and Child Health Association (RACHA), a local organisation in Pursat Province. They made a proposal to expand their program into 48 new villages and the head of Health and Nutrition, Mory (who is very nice but a total micro-manager) insisted on approving each village (normally the partner approves them and we spot check them according to the criteria used). So Mony proposed I go and spend the week fighting with her about methodology (of which neither of us had any).

We attended one distribution of an already selected village and did some random surveying and the partner staff did some instruction on complimentary feeding.

It was great heading up there, and although frustrating at times, was very informative. The area we went to was really remote, pushed right up against the Cardamom Mountains. The roads were generally pretty appalling and muddy

for which I thanked god we had the 4wD (which we got into a few tight spots with).

There were also many cleared minefields (and I presume uncleared minefields) as this was a front line for fighting between KR and government and later Vietnamese troops. What was striking was how recently they were cleared which makes u wonder how many people had been affected by them. This one, for instance, was only cleared in Feb 04 (as I was going into my last year of Uni). As you can see, now it is a productive rice field.It was amazing how one relatively rich village can be less than a km away from a real dirt poor village. In fact there was one village in particular that really shocked me. Households were living on about 500 Riel a day per capita (12.5c) in houses about 5m² and rice fields only productive enough to meet about 4 months of their yearly consumption. Also many of the men of the village had immigrated to Thailand to work. What really affected me (and I have to say I am not easily emotionally moved) was the stunting of the kids. Stunting means that kids don’t have enough nutrients as they are growing up and end up physically smaller and weaker than they should be. Sadly enough it’s relatively common but there were a few cases that were really tragic. There was one kid who looked about 8 and was 14 years old, and other guy who was my age (25) but who looked about 14. I guess what really upset me is that this damage is irreversible and will effect these kids for the rest of their lives (as if general poverty weren’t enough). Most of what we see in our work is poverty but you are left feeling that if the right conditions prevail then people can remove themselves from poverty, for these kids there is no going back. All we can do is try and help the next generation.

Anyway enough of the bleeding hearts!

Inside the Media with Al Jazeera

Due to the suspension of the school feeding program, we have attracted a shit load of media visits (Bloomberg, New York Times, Associated Press and a bunch of Khmer, Japanese and German media). This has led to some internal debate as media exposure is vital for attracting new donations, but these people arrive wanting to film a mini-Darfur in Cambodia but are disappointed, life is more difficult for families but I don’t believe people are starving to death because they don’t get breakfast at school.

Anyway a few weeks back we welcomed the 8^th media engagement at our sub-office, this time from Al Jazeera News Network. Al Jazeera, more famous for broadcasting the latest messages from Osama Bin Laden, has an English language news network ala CNN that broadcasts all over the world. Their Asia current affairs show had come to Cambodia to film a story about kids dropping out of school.

So being a little canny, I decided to take them to Srae Ouk which you might remember is the mixed Cham/Khmer village. The rationale was that we want to attract donation from the Middle East (last year the Queen of Dubai gave us US$1m) and well let’s face it, the Arab governments tend to only give to other Muslims. We chose O Loy School (strategically situated next to the village Mosque) and in the event the crew was completely uninterested in the Muslim angle as they were a global company…oh well worth a shot!

So the few days before we drove around trying to identify a suitable student. The media like to focus in on a student and go to their house etc. After a few candidates we chose Vijit, a 16 year old kid in grade 4
(many Cambodian kids repeat a lot of grades or enrol late for various reasons so it’s not unusual to see quite old kids in young grades especially in the poorer areas. Vijit had been attending school sporadically since the suspension of the program because he had to earn money clearing land for others. Having settled on Vijit we went to drive up to visit his grandmother (he is an orphan) who he lives with, to ask her permission as she was working on the WFP food-for work road. But on the drive up we encountered a small problem. The drainage culvert had not been installed and the rice fields adjacent were flooded and too muddy to get through.

Piseth spotted what he thought was a way around, tried to go over a high rice bund and …

We got stuck! So after determining we couldn’t get out by ourselves we requested the other WFP car in Kampong Chnang that was working nearby to come and winch us out. In the meanwhile we were directly outside this woman’s house that incidentally had a rather peculiar living situation. As it turned out, this woman and her sister were both married to the same guy and had houses about 5 metres away from each other. She had 5 kids and her sister had 4. When one sister got pregnant he moved to the other house until she got pregnant and moved back. As you can see there houses were very basic and there was no way he could provide for all these kids. Apparently he wouldn’t let them use birth control; it would have been quite funny if it weren’t so tragic. And this was a Khmer family not a Muslim family, Mony mentioned that sometimes it happens in Khmer culture but not often.

Anyway, after a while the other car arrived and winched us to safety.

The next day Al Jazeera came and it was just fascinating to watch them in action, planning the shots. Its amazing how much they had to shoot to get a final piece that will be 6 or 7 minutes, for instance they got this girl to ring the bell like ten times and filmed from different angles . The school was actually pretty interesting so I am glad we chose it.

Oh and this is their well, and they use old vegetable oil cans from the school feeding to draw water -recycling!

In this class there are not enough class rooms so one grade sits one way and faces one blackboard and the other the other way. There is only one teacher and he runs from one blackboard to another! This other class had more than 40 kids in it (and about 20% of kids were absent that day). It was really interesting to see the kids do their times tables, I remember the very monotone way we did it at primary school, but these kids seemed to make it so much more interesting!

I found it really interesting watching the piece to camera shots (you know when the reporter talks directly to the camera explaining something). The correspondent was this lady called Fauzia Ibrahim and she was pretty cool. I think she was Malaysian but used to live in Australia and basically said life in current affairs reporting was pretty much like that show Frontline.

So from the school we went to the fields to film Vijit clearing the fields for the camera. Just as we get there Mony says I think I can hear rain. I listen and say nah it’s just running water somewhere so we keep going. Then I notice it’s getting louder and louder, then this kid comes out of the forest on a buffalo absolutely soaked, then an almighty roar and this absolute wall of water comes down. It was incredible I have never seen it go from completely dry to so wet so quickly and sheets of rain move before my eyes. So we went to Vijit's house to take shelter from what emerged was a few hours…

Well at least the cows enjoyed it.

Anyway so we waited it out and then emerged to film the shots of Vijit working. It was amazing to see the dry fields we had walked across a few hours before were now submerged and somehow full of tiny fish and frogs!

Can’t wait to see the story!