Well...Back to Work then

So back to the Bodge...


Well immediately before I went to Vietnam I had an interesting dilemma. My leave balance is seriously in the red so I had concocted a plan not to let the country office know I was leaving (My boss Mony, of course, knew I was going). Things were going smoothly until on Wednesday I had a phone call from the Deputy Country Director asking me to babysit a German TV crew covering a story on inflation in Cambodia. I managed to get them to come early in the morning so I could fly that afternoon, but I ended up having to tell her about my holiday but I think she was pre-occupied so she didn't really care.

So early the next morning, we met the crew (who are based in Singapore) and Sovanna, Pleip and I took them out to some dry season rice fields. Now as you know almost all rice production in Kampong Speu traditionally stops at this time due to lack of water, but Sovanna was able to locate one to satisfy their need for a shot of rice fields.


On the way there we passed through the Kampong Speu Airport. Yes you heard right. Actually its just a large cleared dirt area that was used in the civil war to train pilots in light aircraft. Now its nothing but I heard its quite a spot for flying kites on a Sunday afternoon.


The scenery of the place we arrived was quite beautiful and quite a change from the dry brown rice fields we normally see.

So we headed off to locate some people working in the rice fields. It was really fun jumping over flooded rice bunds and walking along precariously placed sticks to cross the canals. The crew were shooting for a little while and eventually I had the heart to tell them that they were in fact shooting an uncleared rice paddy full of weeds, not rice! Eventually they found a farmer who surprise surprise was doing okay financially because he could do a second crop. We decided to take them to someone who wasn't producing any rice at the moment to see the real story of inflation hurting poor people.

Fast forward to after I got back and we had another journalist to accompany. Thomas Fuller from the New York Times and International Herald Tribune wanted to cover the suspension of the school feeding program because the price of rice has gone up so high.

Nice guy, great story and very very thorough (we must have spent 5 hours accompanying him). At first he made a bit of a comment about our landcruisers but after riding on one of the rural roads which was bad but not particularly bad he made a point of saying he now understood why we need them. We pretty much just sat around while he interviewed people and took pictures.

A week later I headed out with Rina and Vuthy to measure a food-for work pond. It was pretty enormous and really hard to measure so we think we will have to call for the help of the technical field monitor. The real story is that the walls of it were about two metres high and made up of the uncompacted dirt. So as we are leaving, saying goodbye to the village that had assembled on the top of the walls, Matt decides the day has been a bit boring. So as he is walking down the wall, he slips a bit and then goes tits over ass in front of the whole village. How embarrasment! Not much damage done just some small cuts, but the people found it hilarious. I guess it was bound to happen when you weigh three times as much as the average Khmer person. And after all the precarious ladders, tiny logs for bridges and crumbling rice bunds i have climbed across I am glad I fell onto the ground, not into the pond!

The weekend after I got back it turned out that my cousin Justine and her boyfriend were in town. They have spent like 6 months travelling the world and were now in little old Phnom Penh. So I met them on Saturday night at their hotel and then the heavens opened. I haven't seen rain like that since last year. And this is the dry time of year! As it eased we went to head out to find... The streets were flooded! So we quite wisely ate dinner at the hotel. The next day I had breakfast with Vannak (driver who recently left our office) and met them at the Royal Palace where we learnt a valulable lesson that picking flowers is sinful!ALso interesting was this map of the Angkor empire at its height (sorry i can;t be assed turning the photo around). It spread all the way in most of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia. Cool!