Campaign Time!

My beautiful flowery mosquitoe net at home

Hopefully a short one this time.

Spent the week in Pursat province doing TB food distributions, HIV home visits and some meetings with the Provincial Education office.

Pursat is like 4 hours from Kampong Speu. Pretty uneventful trip this time apart from being stuck in a cowjam briefly (this is a national highway which almost all freight from Thailand comes through!).

We also stopped for our customary 'inside of cow with rice noodles' snack at Kampong Tralach.

Its funny on these long car rides is when you have some very strange conversations. For instance Hay was telling me how he is recording a CD in Phnom Penh two songs a week and he will try and release it just for fun (he does have, as they say, a voice as sweet as jackfruit). Other random stuff was pointing out a monkey brain export factory. Apparently this company buys monkeys from villagers and removes the brain and send the brain to China for traditional chinese medicine, the going price in China being US$70 per brain!. These car trips also remind me of my really bad sense of humour, i swear that will be the hardest part of returning home.

Distributions were as usual. Except I found perhaps the most beautiful health centre in Cambodia at Chouk Meas. I don't know if the director is spending all his money on the garden but it was a tropical paradise with butterflies and fish ponds. Normally health centres are pretty depressing places, muddy, dilapidated and full of cow shit.

After one distribution, Hay and I had to wait for the WFP car at the dried fish market at Krakor. This area borders the massive Tonle Sap lake. In true Cambodian style there are like 50 of these stalls all lined up together.



Thursday marked the first day of the election campaign which is being held on July 27. WFP has suspenced all distriubitons in this election campaign to remove any chance of our food being perceived as political. Certain parties have a habit of turning up at free food distributions and claiming responsibility.

What this means is that there is campaign flags everywhere and election campaigning involves hiring a truck, filling it with people and driving around the cities with loudspeakers attached. Or if you are the CPP (the party that has ruled Cambodia very controversially since the first elections after the UN administration), you give out 10,000 riel and two sarongs.

Its going to be a long month.