Crossing the line...

Ok this probably shouldn't be a posting so i will try and roll it into a more interesting one when events permit.

Anyway so this unfortunately goes back to my war with the mice. I thought we had come to an understanding. I killed most of them but there were a few still there and I thought I would keep a few alive to inform their compatriots of the awful consequences of messing with my weet-bix and vita-weets. Unfortunately Josef Stalin was right, to really kill a man you have to kill his entire family to ensure a son won't come back to avenge his father...

So flashforward to about 4am this morning, tucked away safely in my flowery blue mozzie net, when i felt something brush against my head. I wake up, something wigs out and starts running vertically around the mozzie net. I wig out, jump out of bed and hit the light. There is a fat mouse running along the walls of my mozzie net trying to get out and pissing down the net as it runs loops.

Unable to deal with this I march out into my kitchen, grab the peanut butter and set the mouse trap again. I return to my bed and found it has escaped (thankfully, beating a mouse to death through my mozzie net isn't exactly the activity of choice for the wee hours of the morning.

Why was this mouse inside my mosquito net? Was it an assassination attempt? Will i catch some horrible rat disease... I don't know but i do know I didn't want a war

...but its on!

Atlantis

So after Sihanoukville I shot up to Phnom Penh in one of the share-vans. I rushed home first to pack my bag and as it turned out it was a Chinese Ghost Day so the town was abandoned with only a handful of taxis running. Rummany was also having a party for her staff at the house so she insisted I drink some ABC (think tooheys old with cigarettes stubbed out in it). But I digress.

About half way up it started to sprinkle. About that point we reached my personal best of being crammed into the taxi, counting 24 people in the van, each contorted to accommodate everyone kind of like a big jig saw (including four people on the ute). Luckily the Kampong Speu van drivers don't seem to have embraced the South Asia everyone on the roof idea (although when the vans are moving the garment workers they are like at least thirty in and on the van. On the way up we see two traffic accidents and one body lying on the road.

So we arrive at the outskirts of Phnom Penh and it starts pissing down. The drainage canals along the national road have filled up and overflowed and people are armed with brooms trying to sweep the water that is creeping into their houses. We continue past the airport through the flooded roads, right when a truck overtakes us through the deepest part of the water. The boot of the van is tied down but ajar because it is overloaded. A tsunami of brown, muddy and smelly water is swept up by the truck , through the boot and soaks everyone in the back rows, including me unfortunately, and all the luggage (including my own). Gross

Dejected, we inch along to reach the 'terminal' at Central Market, which is underwater. I manage to find a moto driver to take me to the hotel. All the streets are flooded and the bike conks out a few times. People are still driving like crazy. I finally get to my hotel soaked, my luggage soaked but luckily my laptop okay. I then head out for dinner at Kurt and Hera's and the moto driver can make it through a few streets but the water is too deep in some places and his moto keeps conking out. He gets me as close as he can and I wade knee depth to their house the rest of the way.

Flooding is a usual occurrence in Phnom Penh in the wet season, but i have never been caught in it this bad, living in a drought prone province has its advantages. Large parts of the city are former lakes that have been filled in so all the natural drainage is gone and the water has no where to go.

Anyway, next day I headed out to Singapore for the weekend to see the fam, and Su, Rohan, Jayden and Lawrence were all visiting as well so it was a full house. Continuing the water theme, we went to a pretty cool (if a little tame) water park. Amali and I are really getting along well now, last time she was very shy, and Dilan is throwing the cutest temper tantrums. Plus Tara bought me Vita-Weets! Am heading back there next month as well! They must be very sick of me.

Early Monday morning I head home, take a shower and back to work then the rest of the week in Pursat and Kampong Chhnang. The Belgians leave this week which means I am all alone, sigh!

Also enjoy this video of birds flying into windows.

She Sells Sea Shells By the Sea Shore

Hopefully a quicken

Last week, Sovanna, Rina, Sokhom and I popped down to the seaside municipality of Kampong Som, also called Sihanoukville famous for sex, drugs, sun, pedophiles, skanky backpackers and seafood.

We didn't go there for any of those reasons. We will be working with Save the Children Australia (SCA) in our support to people living with HIV program in the area. Sihanoukville is a magnet for migrants, sex workers etc. so there are quite a few people living with HIV. SCA works only with kids so they fall under the category of what we call Orphans and Vulnerable Children (children orphaned by HIV or at risk of trafficking or falling into sex work due to poverty. Although i think they do good work, they pretty much are are a social support for poor children when our food should really focus on HIV+ with a small component for orphans.

Our mission was to spot check their proposed beneficiary list. It was interesting because I have never really worked in urban slums before (although we did do a field visit to slums in Kathmandu when i was with AusAID). We mainly focus on the rural areas where the poverty is chronic but less 'in your face', like people living on top of each other, little or no sanitation, rubbish everywhere, drug use etc.

What was really odd though was that the SCA guys kept filming us on their mobile phones which was weird. At first I thought they were just taking photos so I continued my discussion with Sovanna about the weakness of the program as we were walking to the first household about twenty minutes walk in the slum. Then I realised the guy was filming it...whoops. It made the interviewing the proposed beneficiaries really weird because I kind of felt like I had to say something really profound each time because I was on film, which kinda got exhausting over 26 household visits. Look out for it on youtube I guess!

One particularly amusing moment was when we were interviewing a lady and I asked what her main source of income was. Sovanna turned to me and translated her answer which was 'She sells sea shells at the sea shore' No Shit. And he said it perfectly. Then all the other SCA guys started pissing themselves laughing, no doubt having heard that tonguetwister before.

Their program is really interesting because they use these selection committees chaired by monks but also including teachers, village health volunteers etc. Food distributions will be based at the pagodas, so a few times we had monks showing us around. I am always a bit awkward around monks, I am not really sure how you are supposed to greet them. And they are almost always so young (because surprise surprise most monks were killed by Pol Pot).

And due to this ignorance I am going to be bald in my next life. I was standing against the car waiting for the monk to get his documents from his house and Sokhom and Rina were sitting in the car looking at me and laughing. I walked over to see what was so funny and they said you can't have your hat on in the pagoda grounds or you will become bald in your next life. As if I am not having enough trouble in this life!

Driving around you see Sihanoukville is much more than just the seaside bungalows and resorts most of us know it for. There are many little shanty towns a stones throw from where the beaches are. There are also giant tracts of empty land everywhere that have been gobbled up by land speculators.

At the end of the day we drove over to the beach to have a look. We stood around for ten minutes, observed the water skiers and khmers indulging their passion of fully clothed swimming and sea food, dipped our toes in the water and headed off to our own seafood dinner.

This post has no photos because I didn't feel comfortable taking them in the slum areas.

Peace!

Cambodia in an article

I think this article from the Phnom Penh Post says a lot about Cambodia. The obscene wealth of the politically well connected (the Cadillac Escalade), the cheapness of life ($4000) and the impunity in which the politically connected can operate in collusion with the so called authorities (police removing the license plates of the offender).

Cops cover powerful SUV killer's identity

Written by Post Staff

Friday, 08 August 2008

PHNOM Penh authorities remain silent on the identity of the man who slammed his black Cadillac Escalade SUV into a motorbike Sunday night, killing its driver before fleeing. Bystanders and police said the SUV with license plate 2H-0678 was racing along Sothearos Boulevard at around 11:30 pm when it collided with the motorbike driven by Sam Sabo, a crane operator, tearing off his left arm and left leg. The crash occurred in front of the Regent Park Hotel, but the Escalade continued to the Ministry of Justice before pulling over with a flat tire. Hun Chea, nephew of Prime Minister Hun Sen and son of Hun San, the capital's former traffic director, was seen at the broken-down SUV. Scores of witnesses were on hand. A source close to the family confirmed Hun Chea owns a black Cadillac Escalade SUV. Repeated attempts to contact Hun Chea were unsuccessful. Numerous traffic police passed the scene without stopping, but the wreck drew the attention of about 20 military police, who removed the license plate from the SUV. "After about 30 minutes, the number plate was removed by the armed police," said witness Makara, 17. "I heard the police tell the car driver, ‘Don't worry, it wasn't your mistake. It was the motorbike driver's mistake.'" One military policeman at the scene said, "It is very difficult and complicated because this accident involved a big person. They will hide the story." Seng Chanthorn, a Phnom Penh traffic police official, said Wednesday the victim's family had agreed to receive US$4,000 from the driver in exchange for a thumb-printed promise not to file a court complaint.

Pursat mums and bubs

So...

At the start of this year there was a realignment of province allocations for each sub-office and we gained a new target province, the province of Pursat located along the Tonle Sap in the North East. Its a big province that is almost half taken up by the wilds of the Cardamon Mountains (which have been devastated by logging in Kampong Speu, but remain somewhat inaccessible in Pursat).


My pet project has been to try and launch the maternal and child health, food for work and school feeding/food scholarship programs here which are in various stages of success. Its a bit sad that i wont be able to see them through completely.

Anyway so the maternal and child health project has kicked off here for a while and Hay mentioned the other week that we hadnt been up there for a few months now so after a false start on Tuesday he, Vuthy and me shot up there.

I haven't had the opportunity to do much work with this program but its probably the most enjoyable of all the food distributions, mainly because you are surrounded with many awestruck kids gawking at you which is pretty funny. And they are just so gosh darn cute! And Cambodian kids are so well behaved compared to Australian kids, if any of them start acting up they receive a firm slap on the bum or across the head.

We work with a local organisation called Reproductive and Child Health Association (RACHA) which get their funding from the United States. They do really good work and we are very pleased with them.

The first distribution was at a part Chamic (Islamic) area which made for something different. In fact on the way in I saw a woman working in the rice fields wearing a burqa (as if transplanting rice isn't hard enough! - but most women here just wear a colourful Hijab or scarf). We gave the pre-distribution speech which was a little bizarre because Hay insisted I use the megaphone so i talked through it in English (and no-one understood me obviously) and then handed it to Hay to translate. It would have been easier for him to just give it but hey.

I thought this time i would try and get some photos of beneficiaries since i have hardly any but the people here seemed very shy, especially the Chams so i took a few sly group shots so as not to embarrass one person too much. I find taking individual photos of strangers and their kids a little weird. The top photo is Khmer and the bottom is Cham.

Towards the end i was playing silly buggers with the megaphone and accidentally turned it on and scared the crap out of this poor pregnant woman in front of me. Lucky she didn't go into labour!

That night we went to dinner together (Pursat is very famous for its great fish dishes) at Lim Siv Eng. Lim Siv Eng is one of these restaurants/souvenir shops. Pursat is also very famous for green marble carvings and there is this particular one i have been eying off for a while which i really liked (its a statue of Hanuman slaying a crocodile). So the marked price was 90 bucks which i thought was a bit steep. I mentioned to Hay and he did his best bargaining technique (feigning indifference, insulting the quality of the work and the materials) and got it down to $50. Sold! Now the dilemma of getting it home!

We also watched this very amusing shadow puppet show on the TV about a wise condom and some very unwise men who refuse him and end up getting AIDS. Well it seemed amusing at the time but a clever way of combining modern messages with Khmer artistry.

The next day we split up and Vuthy and I went to monitor one distribution and Hay the other. So we were following the food truck to the distribution point (after one woman offered me her daughter in marriage when we dropped Hay off) when we got waylaid for half an hour behind a broken down water buffalo cart transplanting rice seedlings...

And its very uncooperative water buffaloes.

I love water buffaloes (not really sure why) and have always wondered why there aren't any in Kampong Speu (Vuthy quite cleverly pointing out that they are water buffaloes who just love wallowing in water of which Kampong Speu has very little).

So the distribution went okay. Vuthy pointed out this yellow sign in Khmer posted to a tree. Guess what it says...


'Jesus died instead of us' - Sheesh can't get away from bible bashers even in rural Cambodia. Sometimes you find these churches built in really random areas almost totally abandoned (like the one opposite my office which is only used for volleyball and occasional musical performances by shipped in Korean missionaries). Christianity never really took off here.

We finished early so i suggested we drive over and have a gander at the tonle sap lake. The lake is now flooding surrounding areas (as it does every year) so this was as close as we got. See how the road just kinda, ends.

That night we had a really interesting and drunken conversation about the 'Golden Voices' , the really good singers in the 60's who were later all killed by the Khmer Rouge. Even now people are more likely to listen to these singers on the radio than the modern music. We then had a bit of a chat about Khmer Rouge times as we sometimes do. Vuthy suffered pretty badly in those times (losing all his family) so he doesn't talk so much but Hay likes to talk about it - telling me how those three years felt like 300 years and how he never could have dreamt he would be sitting in a restaurant in Pursat eating a plump roast chicken.

The next day i went down to Kampong Chhnang to meet Mony and Piseth to have our quarterly meeting with the department of education. Most of it was in Khmer so i didn't really follow but it was nice to see my statistical analysis being used when we were talking about phasing out of some schools.

I spent the weekend in Phnom Penh which was great. Cristy, Sharon and I hatched a plan to buy these wooden busts of a Khmer king (Jayavaraman VII) from Angkor days. With the help of our Khmer-Australian friends we bought them for a pretty reasonable price and Cristy and I spent Sunday packing them up to ship home. I will probably start shipping some other stuff home as well.

Today I finally got round to dropping some stuff Mark and Tara wanted donated to the orphanage here in Kampong Speu.


I went over to see the baby area as well. This is a girl who is 12 days old and whose mother died in child-birth. She is not yet named and is so tiny. I will try and check back on here i reckon to see what they end up naming her.

A lil bit o evryting

Another blog posting!

Sorry these will probably start coming more and more and longer and longer as I begin to panic about leaving Cambodia in a few months. It kind of scares me a little that things that have become so second nature to me will be over in a few months and I am thinking about things like shipping stuff home and having experiences and seeing things I haven’t got round to yet. My replacement was chosen on Friday and Mony is really cut that it’s gonna be a woman. I have to admit that the office won’t be the same but I have to admit that it might not be an entirely bad think to de-bloke the office a little.

So this past week has been a bit busy as they all seem to be these days! On Tuesday and Wednesday I went with the new volunteer, Lucy, who is working in NGO Food-For-Work and relief in Phnom Penh. She is a pretty sharp character and we get on well so I am glad, it’s a shame we will only have a few months crossover. We had some of our last food-for-work food distributions up in Kampong Leng, Kampong Chhnang province so we invited her to observe.

We had to hire a boat to get there which is always nice this time of year. You can see some areas have begun flooding (in a good way) so it’s interesting to see trees that were in rice paddies now partially submerged. The food had to be transported by truck to Kampong Chhnang dock, then on a boat then on trucks on the other side.

We got there and the funniest thing happened. Lucy is white so all the attention went to her, all the kids were playing with her, the guys hitting on her and the women commenting on how white her skin was and therefore how pretty she was. It was quite hilarious as I was all but ignored and reduced to translator! I gave the WFP speech to the participants then the commune chief motioned that they wanted her to speak! I will put it down to wanting to see the white foreigner speak not my poor oratory skills. It’s kind of like that all over Asia I guess and I don’t really take it personally, in this area they don’t see too many foreigners because it’s quite hard to access. In face it’s a blessing because people kind of leave you alone; I think they assume I’m from another Asian country and therefore less interesting. It makes restaurants, markets and bus trips much more bearable when people aren’t gawking at you the whole time. Still, it kind of struck me in a way I haven’t seen before (mainly because I have never been to a quite remote area with a white woman before).

The trucks we had hitched with drove off after the distribution so we had to take a moto-taxi ride back to the dock.

On Thursday I attended a HIV food distribution in Takeo province right up against the Vietnam border with a few of the boys. It’s quite a long car ride so we had a conversation about the election. Samdech Akak Moha Sena Badei Decho Hun Sen’s ( who became the world's youngest prime minister in 1985 at 32 ) Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) had a crushing victory with preliminary results showing that have 90 out of 123 seats which is well above the amount needed to govern and unilaterally change the constitution. In Kampong Speu province they won 5 of the six seats (something that my election monitor friends suspected as they observed about 80% to CPP in the counting. I think everyone expected them to win but such a crushing victory was unexpected. The nearest party is now Sam Rainsy Party, a reformist party, on only 26 seats (there apparently was a bet in the office that they would not increase their current seats and they did by two so Ratha and Sokhom had to buy the office two cases of beer – my kind of bet). It seems a lot of people were influenced by what is happening in Preah Vihear temple (Thai troops in Cambodia) and voted for Hun Sen because he is seen as a strong man. I was even surprised that some of my colleagues voted for him even though they know very well all the corruption etc. Most of the gains came from the implosion of the royalist party, FUNCINPEC, which went from more than twenty seats to only two.

At the end of the day the election had many flaws (vote buying, people not on the ballot, media control by the CPP, bribing opposition politicians to defect, government resources being used for campaigning etc.) but at the end of the day I am pretty sure they would have won in a free and fair election because people in the rural areas see them as the party that liberated them from the Khmer Rouge so are eternally grateful. The election was reasonably peaceful with only five deaths attributed to the election (all belonging to opposition parties). One person quipped their victory means WFP will stay in business because the people will stay poor, implying that people in rural areas will continue in poverty and so focussed on day to day living they do not have the luxury for political analysis. CPP also has an iron grip on the commune councils which is like local government so their machine is well oiled. It is said they control all power, the army, the government, the courts, the royalty and the village/commune chiefs. Well at least the police will change back in their uniforms to collect their bribes (I observed in the election campaign my share taxis to Phnom Penh paid their entry bribe to someone at a police post wearing plain clothes, instead of the normal uniformed police officer).

On Friday Sovanna and I conducted a drought assessment in Aoral District of Kampong Speu, a heavily forested area pushed up against the Cardamom Mountains, following some media reporting of drought conditions. Sovanna is just the best guy to do field trips because he’s an old dude who has been with WFP since forever and know just about everything and everyone. He worked in Aoral District a long time ago when there were no roads and you had to hike out there and stay there for a couple of weeks in amongst all the banditry and fighting (Khmer Rouge held on in this heavily forested area for a long time). Many of the roads we drove on were originally built by the people and WFP and have since been taken on as government maintained (the roads here were great because the election but in our experience they will deteriorate quickly as many trucks come here for illegal logging, we saw at least one Royal Cambodian Armed Forces truck which is well known as the main culprit for deforestation in Cambodia – when one NGO filed a report detailing it the government made the report illegal).

We stopped a few times to eat some bush food as well as we were driving through. He pointed out wild cassava etc. and we ate one berry that tasted just like a wild and very bitter olive (Sovanna was well prepared and produced a small container of salt to eat it with). After you eat it if your drink water the water is mean to taste very sweet and by god it was! There is apparently a story that a Cham merchant came to this area hundreds of years ago and the people gave him this berry and then gave him water served in a hollowed out coconut. The water was very sweet to his taste and he thought that the coconut shell was magic so he gave them all his goods and took the coconut shell. Of course the coconut was normal and the guy was tricked. In fact I’m not sure what the moral of that story is but it seemed cool at the time.

Aoral is home to many ethnic minorities as well, one of them the Suoy people. We drove through their village and Sovanna mentioned that for one week in June the village in closed to all non-Suoy people for special celebrations. If a non Suoy enters the village they have to be beaten with sticks 300 times. I double checked my diary that it was indeed August.

So this area has a history of poor rains but this year it was worse. About 90% of rice fields were untouched, when this time last year rice transplantation was taking place (as it is in most of Cambodia at the moment). But this year the people can’t even produce corn or other crops. In one area it hadn’t rained in five years and the paddies were slowly being reclaimed by the jungle. If it doesn’t rain this year then we can expect crop failure. The reason we aren’t immediately springing into action is that these people can earn money from charcoal and cutting wood so they aren’t totally screwed. Still we will monitor the situation and if needs be conduct food distributions if there is total crop failure. In fact all of Kampong Speu seems dryer this year so we will have to watch the whole province

This past weekend I stayed in Kampong Speu which was quiet but relaxing (apart from a day trip on the Sunday for groceries in Phnom Penh- lots of police and army because the ruler of Kuwait was in town). It was an interesting taxi trip up and down. Up the car kept squeaking a lot but eventually I leaned over it was a chicken in the boot causing all the noise.

I decided I would have a proper look through Kampong Speu market, as I tend to go to the smaller market. It was nice going through it a bit more in depth and bought some things to remember the Speu by, such as a small house replica wind-chime thing and some kromas (traditional cloth).

Hope to spend the week in Pursat to monitor the maternal and child health project as I haven’t seen that project in a long time (months!). Also there is a small statue I wanna buy there that I have been eyeing off for a few months now (Pursat is famous for its marble).

My friend Kurt sent me this map which shows the locations of USA bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War, apparently in an attempt to shut down the Ho Chi Minh trail. But look how far the bombing extends into Cambodia away from the Vietnamese border (including Kampong Speu). They say that American bombing caused such devastation that it was one of the reasons people supported the Khmer Rouge at the beginning in these areas. Sadly, the parts of the country not covered in bombs (some of which still remain as unexploded ordinance) in the east of the country is the area most affected by land mines laid down by the Khmer Rouge (supported by the Thais, Americans and Chinese) as they retreated from the Vietnamese soldiers.

They say the Americans dropped more bombs on Cambodia during the Vietnam War (note USA was not at war with Cambodia, but with Vietnam) that the Allies dropped in the WHOLE of WW2, more that 2.7 million tonnes of ordinance, in almost 114,000 locations in over 230,000 sorties.

Oh and just got to work and apparently one of our car's headlights was kicked out by a cow. Ha!

Bye!