This blog is going to be brief because it has already been written once in draft form and that disappeared when Chris’s bag was snatched from her grasp by a youff on a moto while she was in a tuk tuk in PP. The bag not only contained her phone, camera, I-pod and one hundred dollars but more frustratingly her family photos, address book and reading glasses. We had been back in PP for a 3 day conference of all the VSO education volunteers which was to culminate with the Water Festival holiday. This is a huge annual celebration of the end of the rainy season when the Tonle Sap river changes direction and starts to flow back towards the Meekong. It is marked by Dragon boat races in which all the champion boats from throughout the country compete. It is quite a spectacle however as over 3million people flock to the riverside to watch the city becomes even more frenetic than usual. The prospect of having to deal with these crowds together with the trauma of the theft meant we decided to give the festivities a miss this year and instead return to the safety of our little house in the country and spend the holiday watching a good film on the telly, (are we getting old). Also CNN weather was predicting that we would be in the shadow of a cyclone that is supposed to be hitting Vietnam this weekend and we want to get home before it rains.

Rain is really a big deal here and it can control your life. While we are in Phnom Preuk we have been visiting schools with are lovely assistants Sophea and Sophen who are both in their mid to late twenties and are respectively a head and a deputy head of local schools. We have seen schools that vary from clean well maintained institutions where the pupils are bright and well taught by highly motivated staff to those which are literally no more than cow sheds where often the staff do not turn up leaving classes of 50 6 year olds unsupervised and un taught all day. We travel about the district on motos, this has proved interesting. Sophea had been complaining that in the wet season he could only get to his school by walking the last 2 kms because the road was too bad. We thought he was exaggerating until we went there. The road had been churned up by tractors so we had to negotiate ruts over a metre deep (see photo).
The following day we visited our neighbouring district about 40km away. The trip should have taken about an hour but then it rained. The road turned into a slippery morass which could only be passed at a walking pace, picking your way around water filled pot holes. The journey took 2 and a half hours and Jon says its like coming down a black mogul run at Chomossier. (a skiing reference). Chris, true to form refused point blank to ride her moto and instead went pillion behind Sophen, hanging on like grim death. We arrived for the appointment with the district director of education covered in mud and had to sluice ourselves down with water from the village cistern before we were in any state to meet him. Apparently the correct dress form for travelling around here is to roll your trousers up to your knees and wear flip flops.
Photo: Sophen is on Chris' far right and Sophea is between them.

It is wedding season. This is because everyone has more money as they have sold the harvest and it has stopped raining (!).Weddings are huge 2 day affairs, families hire big brightly coloured marquees and set them up in the road outside the house if they have no land. They also set up sound systems with banks of speakers, that wouldn’t look out of place in Wembley Arena, through which they blast Cambodian pop music for 2 days starting at 5am until about 11pm. Everyone dresses up to the nines with the bride having at least 10 different dresses. The young women look like Barbie princesses immaculately made up and coiffured wearing tightly fitted florescent pink or lime green long dresses which are decorated in lace, sequins and frills. (unfortunately the photos are in the stolen camera). We were deeply honoured to be invited to 2 weddings last week. Sophea is marrying his childhood sweetheart and the landlords daughter is also getting married. They were both going to be huge affairs with over 600 guests but much to our disappointment we had to go the meeting in PP instead. Although on second thoughts the non-stop music from next door could have got a bit wearing after a while.
Photo: The family; r-l Touch, Mum, Oeurn and Granny.

We are getting on very well with our neighbours and have taken to sitting on the bench outside the house of an evening watching the world go by in companionable silence. Our cleaner / concierge Touche became a grandmother for the first time on the same day that Chris became an Auntie to Jessica Rose. We shared the excitement of the birth of our new family members and unable to spoil the baby in Brighton we bought a hat, mitts and booties for the little Cambodian boy as proxy. Just a thought, as they grow up, how will the lives of these 2 new citizens of the world differ?

Photo: Touch and Chris.

Photo: Goodnight from Cambodia.

Hello from Cambodia 6

So here we are in a new house, in a new job, in a new town, in a new country, in a new continent all of which are very, very, very different. The journey from Phnom Penh (PP) to Phnom Preuk (PPk) with an overnight stop at Battambang (BB) took two days. We travelled on from BB in a battered right hand drive truck which was very scary when overtaking a massive lorry on a bend! All our worldly possessions including 2 motorbikes, 2 bicycles, 2 comfy chairs and 2 bookcases were all tied to the back and a young lad perched on the top of the pile, in fact for most of the way he sat on the saddle of one of the motos. The trip took 6 hours non-stop on appalling roads but the truck only broke down once and unusually we were only stopped once by the police so they could claim a “fine”. When we arrived we were delighted with the house as the landlord had almost completed all the promised renovations eg installing a staircase and electric ceiling fans. However Jon despairs of the finishing eg plaster splashed all over the walls and ineffectual grouting (most of which is on the tiles rather than between them). Unfortunately not all of the works have proved successful eg the plumbing in the upstairs shower room was suspect resulting in water pouring through the kitchen ceiling. They decided to dig up the tiled floor to investigate (this is after Jon spent 4 hours on his hands and knees with wire wool tidying up the grouting). Work is still ongoing as we write 3 days later.

Also our water is supposed to be pumped from a well in the garden into a tank on the roof but this keeps on running dry, probably cos the water’s running through the kitchen ceiling. This proved a little inconvenient when three fellow volunteers came to stay last weekend and we had no shower or toilet facilities, but we’re sure these little hiccups will soon be sorted out.

The dry season officially starts on November 1st and sure enough its not rained since. Also the temperature has dropped so it is quite pleasantly fresh and we are not constantly bathed in a pool of sweat. We now have to cover ourselves with a sheet at night and the cold shower in the morning has now become a feat of endurance rather than a welcome release. The Cambodians, however, are traumatised by the temperature change and the early morning finds them huddled in puffa jackets, gloves and woolly hats, its about 20ºC! The lack of rain means that the dust is building up. We didn’t realise when we viewed our new house that what we thought was a little used back lane is in fact the main road to Thailand and consequently heavy trucks laden with agricultural produce trundle passed the door throughout the day. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that opposite us is the main repository for the Cambodian soya bean harvest and day and night trucks are loading and unloading giant sacks containing every bean in the country. The ensuing dust cloud settles on every surface against which the lovely Touch, our , armed with her twig brush wages a constant battle. She also hand washes our clothes which turn a sandy brown after every moto excursion, life would be very uncomfortable without her.

The landlord and his family live next door and are very friendly and welcoming, perhaps a little too friendly and welcoming because if we leave the door unlocked they are constantly popping in for a chat. The first few days there was a continuous flow of cheerful neighbours doing a grand tour of our house regardless of whether they had been invited or not. This seems to have calmed down now that the novelty has worn off but it is still not unusual to be relaxing with a beer on the balcony in the evening and be startled by the appearance of a friendly Khmer who has let them selves in and up the stairs without knocking. Privacy appears to be an alien concept here. We’re not sure how many people, dogs and chickens of all size and ages live next door but they all greet us with a cheery smile. The only unwelcome visitor so far is the spider who lives under the fridge (see photo). It made a visit to the kitchen at night terrifying until Jon very bravely evicted her (I hope she doesn’t come back with her even bigger mates).

We have decided to cook for ourselves as we need something to pass the time on these “long winter nights” and it also gives the excuse for the daily trip to the market. As most people here have never seen a Barrang before our first visit was met with huge interest. We were followed about to the sound of oohs, ahhs and giggles, they seem to find Jon hugely amusing. We are now getting the hang of what’s for sale basically fresh veg, eggs, pork, chicken, various unidentified types of fish and bizarrely tins of Princes pilchards in tomato sauce. After a week the culinary imagination has just about dried up so its tomato omelette for lunch and vegetable and rice for dinner again! Actually its not that bad and we did produce a very successful dinner party for five last weekend using only two gas rings and a wok.
The District Office.
We’re beginning to settle into a routine at work now. We have been given a room in the district education office which, despite the lack of glass, the piles of chicken pooh and clouds of mosquitoes we are making quite homely. On Monday we held interviews for our assistants (translators). There were ten applicants and the interviews took place at our house because it’s bigger than the district education office (DOE)! At times the proceeding descended into farce especially when half way through the plumber decided to dig up the bathroom floor with an electric drill. The range of ability of the candidates varied from the young man who’s stammered reply to the first question was “I can not speak English” to the two amazing lads who we have appointed. Sophea and Sophen are both teachers and speak excellent English, you will hear a lot more about this dynamic duo in the future.

We have spent our mornings visiting the local schools, which usually involves a death defying moto ride. The schools vary from two roomed huts that flood in the rainy season to quite efficient, clean and tidy well run institutions (there is in fact one school in the district which has no building at all but we haven’t been able to visit that, for obvious reasons). There is so much to say about the Cambodian education system but we will leave that for later blogs, but here are a couple of observations so far:
Children as young as six are unable to walk the five kilometres to school because they have no shoes ie flip flops.
In the hot season some schools can not afford to buy clean water so the kids are forced to drink polluted well water, they get sick so their parents do not let them come to school again.
How on earth can we begin to do anything constructive to improve the standard of Cambodian education when faced with basic problems like these?

However we have not given up hope yet, we’ve seen some excellent teaching, often against all the odds, and we’ve only been in the job a week.

Sam Rong (left) and O Ta Sok Primary Schools. O Ta Sok has 2 classrooms divided by a wooden wall, when one class is doing spoken work the other has to be silent. There are often 40 kids in each room and when it rains the tin roof means nobody hears anything.