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.