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!