Blitzing the River Plus the Governator

My name in Khmer

So the hot topic of recent weeks has been the suspension of the school feeding program due to high rice prices, but also the amount of fraud and theft in the program. It was decided to do a crack down blitz on out two provinces with school feeding program (Kampong Chnang and Kampong Speu).

So last week it was a blitz on Kampong Chnang, especially the river schools (schools located on islands) and I headed up with almost all the team up Kampong Chnang for the week. The whole week was pretty hard going, starting work at 4:30 or 5 and finishing about 5pm but we uncovered some discrepancies. Overall all teams visited 43 schools, of which 9 had serious diversions.

Before we did that though we had a special food for work distribution at Srae Ouk Village attended by the Provincial Governor. Srae Ouk as you may remember is the Cham Muslim village which I have been to many times (but is dirt or perhaps sand poor).

It went well. The Governor arrived with an entourage of 5 cars and there were police and military everywhere. I guess maybe they have to be paranoid about security, but there was one incident where one guy tried to give him a coconut and the police made him throw it away and cut another one open fresh under their supervision!

Piseth made the speech so I just pretty much sat there. We were a bit worried the speech would be overly political as there is an election coming up but it wasn’t too bad. The guy seemed quite good and he spoke English so we had a chat as well.

Oh that reminds me of an interesting bit of trivia. Apparently my name is the Khmer equivalent of Mohammed (as in the prophet of Islam). So I reckon every time I go to a Muslim community they think I am a brother. Better hope I don’t get asked to lead no prayers or the gig is up!

It was also great to be able to head out on rickety small boats to visit schools on the islands. There was one school Ratha and I went to which was a little tricky to find. First we went to this port to see if there was a way…

But luckily the stinky port wasn’t able to get us there, so we went to the nice bucolic port. Anyway, stepping over three of four boats to get to our one I was sure I was gonna tip it over, so losing any street cred I had with the fisher people, I hit the deck and shimmied along on hand and knee. Better that than flipping the whole thing right?

Because the river level was a bit low we got a big bogged in water weeds which the driver soon sorted out. Anyway, I will let the photos speak for themselves.