Water Water Everywhere!

Hi!

Well as in my last post we have been busy doing baseline surveying in our target areas and this time I went for my final visit to that most beautiful of provinces, Kampong Chhnang.

I just had the greatest time this trip because surveying allows you to walk around the village, go into peoples homes and talk to them one on one, instead of hundreds of people at a food distribution.

Kampong Chhnang, unlike Kampong Speu, is a very wet province, lots of rain and therefore lots of flooded roads and overflowing irrigation canals and, of course, that bane of my existence, Shitty Bridges! Its also one of the most stunning times of year with all the rice fields in full bloom.

It also means water buffaloes, my new favourite animals. Near our first stop was a school and one kid had brought his buffaloes to school to graze.
You get to wander around and see what everyone is up to in the villages. Sometimes they are hunting snakes and frogs like this kid with a bow and arrow...
I myself spotted a crab in the water where i was waiting and slowly stalked it thinking how awesome it would be to be a hunter. Unfortunately I lacked the will to jump in a pond to prove a point and knew that the crab was probably just playing with me anyway : )

sometimes washing their cows...
or for the most part, they are fishing. This is an ingenious fishing platform set up to catch the fast water flowing off the rice fields. What was amazing was that these werent rivers, but irrigation canals but were flowing with intese speed!


its just incredible how many fish there are in the rivers at the moment, sometimes people set up these little traps to catch them. Usually they only catch the really tiny baby fish but they fry them up or mash them up into prahok (fermented fish). Despite my misgivings of this there were fish in every single puddle, rice field and canal.

Also, being the season just before the annual Water Fetival (Om Tuk) people were busy making Om Buk. This traditional food is basically pounded freshly harvested rice that has been lightly roasted and usually eaten with bananas. It tastes surprisingly good!

And some of the guys couldn't help but have a go and pounding the rice.

Vuthy was assisting me in the translation and put up with all my ambiguous english so i am really grateful to him. We always seemed to get the difficult places to access, the first one across a flooded road...


Or a few km walk through the rice fields (also usually flooded)


But we had a few easy access places like this nice, sturdy and quite picturesque bridge with some kids cooling off underneath in the river.

There was also this one place where the car went under up until the windscreen but luckily the car had a snorkel. I had to get out on the way back to take a photo. Vuthy asked for a copy of the photo and now keeps it on his computer.


There were a few households that stood out. We were working in the village I constantly laud, Srae Ouk. This household was pretty badly off, mainly because they had 11 children! Poverty is a pretty depressing cycle, but at least they were receiving food support from WFP in the form of food-for-work projects this year. They had this little piglet (normally i hate pigs) that kept coming up and sniffing my feet and was really inquisitive. I found it too cute and have added baby pigs to my do not eat list (big fat ugly pigs i still eat with relish!).
This other house had this really small bridge, just a few planks of wood really but it was balanced on just one piece of wood, so everyone stepped on it and almost axed cartoon style. Thinking that if even khmers are having trouble with it i went gingerly forward. Think I had reached the end i jumped off...and landed ankle deep in mud, much to the amusement of everyone watching : )


Still, i am thankful that other colleagues did these houses.



Oh and I took some more buffaloe shots, including an attempt to make a two headed buffaloe shot. Just before i took this stupid shot, i had stopped to wait for Vuthy who was chatting to the Village Chief who was guiding us. Unfortunately i stopped right on a weaver ants nest and these unforgiving bastarted immediately started making a meal of me! So i did the only thing i could so on impulse, i jumped in the canal. Thank god it was only knee deep but it sure did surprise the others but they understood once i told them, as those ants are a well know peril! : )
and I tried to get a close up of one, the photo below shows the buffaloe just about to jump thinking i was gonna kill it. Luckily it jumped backwards not forwards therefore saving me from a dunk in the canal.

It was also American election day out in the villages so i was busily smsing mum to get the latest updates. I got the good news from her at 11:03am, just as i was wading across another flooded road :)

Oh and in case anyone knows any Estonian, I am now a star in an Estonian Millenium Development Goals. So we got contacted by this tv crew wanting to film our school feeding program. So at 5am on a Monday morning we shot off to this school to film. We just kinda sat around while they ran around the school filming. Unfortunately it was a pretty overcast day so they couldnt really film the 'direct to camera' piece very well because it was so dark in the classrooms (Cambodian schools don't have electricity) but i think they got their shots. They then came up to me and asked if i was ready for the interview, and i was like what? Sovanna pissed himself laughing then made himself scarce lest he got dragged into it. So look out for me explaning the school breakfast program then giving them a tour of the storeroom!

That Friday i headed to Phnom Penh. I hitched a ride with Piseth and Khom which was rather uneventful but for this highly amusing anecdote. So we are in the outer Phnom Penh and the song 'We Will Rock You" came on. We are all humming it, then Khom bursts out in solo " We will We will F### you" . I turn around and piss myself laughing and then Khom and Piseth have this very fast discussion and Khom says " Sorry, i thought they were saying the other one". Maybe you had to be there...