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!