Tales from the Wild West.
We have been living here a month now and are beginning to feel less like visitors from the planet Ogg. Our
trips to the market are now greeted with “oh here come the Barangs “ as opposed to “What the hell are they!” Most people are friendly and welcoming and go out of their way to be helpful. When our attempts to buy produce are met with blank incomprehension by a stall holder, there is usually a bystander who is able to pipe up with “They want half a kilo of onions and a bunch of bananas”. If fact a surprising number of people speak very good English but are too shy to let on, but it is worth us remembering this when we are tempted to make tactless comments to each other within ear shot of a Khmer. Also as everyone here is related to everyone else it is important to keep our views to ourselves as we could
alienate the entire village by one throw away wise crack. (ie Chris keep your mouth shut!). The surveillance network here would put the KGB to shame. On Monday morning Sophen was able to report to us exactly when and what we had been doing around the village over the weekend, i.e Saturday 10.35am visited the Wat, 11.40am narrowly missed running over a dog outside the bank, 12.10 pm bought half a kilo of onions and a bunch of bananas in the market etc….. The moral of the story being if you want to keep the respect of the village, behave yourself in public! (oh dear, it could be very hard to change the habits of a life time - Chris).
As you will begin to realise there is not a huge amount to do in Phnom Preuk, a bit like a Cambodian Bricket
Wood, we have seen all the films on at the multiplex and the clubs are rubbish, we are putting together a team for the pub quiz and Chris has joined the local gym. (that is called irony). Actually so far we don’t seem to find we have time on our hands, we are at work by 8pm, lunch break from 11am to 2pm which usually involves a trip to the market and a little sleep, back to work until 5pm then home to cook tea, play a game of cards or watch the telly and in bed by 9pm. In fact it is very like living in Bricket Wood. But the difference is that this is Cambodia and that is very very different!
The weather here is perfect. It seems to have stopped raining at last and turned cooler. We have had to buy a blanket because the cold was keeping us awake. The day time temperature is about 25 degrees which means it is possible to sit out on the balcony in the late afternoon and soak up the rays without being burnt to a frazzle or dissolved into a sticky puddle. It is weird to think of you all preparing for Christmas in grey old England, although we try not to think of the whole Christmas thing much at all. It is too hard to contemplate everyone and everything we are missing, that way leads madness. So a group of us are thinking of going to the beach in Thailand for Christmas to distract us from our sorrows. Maybe the next blog will be sent from an island paradise or perhaps not. ( A few days later ….. We have just trimmed up the Christmas tree while listening to Carols from Kings College, pity we are out of Advocat snowballs. We have been invited to the British Embassy in PP on Sunday for a carol concert and mince pies, us ex-pat, nah.)
Yesterday, Saturday, we went to the garden centre (!) to buy palms for the balcony. On our return the landlady donated us enough potted plants to fill the hothouse at Kew. Chris now has her garden, as you all knew she would. NB. The nasturtiums are growing at a terrifying speed, but haven’t risked planting the giant sunflowers yet, the story of Jack and the Beanstalk springs to mind.
A weird episode. Next door to us is a very big wooden house inhabited by a very large extended family. It was there when we went to work but when we got home it had gone! They had dismantled it and are now all living in a shoe box in the garden while they await the builders to come and build them a new home. Apparently the roof was leaking, but that does seem rather a drastic solution.
The highlight of the day is cooking the evening meal. We are gradually getting more adventurous with our shopping as we start to identify what is for sale in the market. There is a huge supply of fresh, organic fruit and veg as well as fish and shellfish imported from Thailand. The Thai cookery books are proving invaluable and we have produced some culinary masterpieces. Tonight we are planning swordfish steaks cooked in ginger and lemon grass, with aubergine in a light chilli sauce as a side dish.
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The meat situation is a little less straight forward, as it not always possible to identify the animal you are being offered, let alone what cut it is. We have not yet braved buying chicken as this involves selecting a live bird and having it killed, plucked and disembowelled in front of you. This healthy eating has resulted in us both loosing weight although some might say it is due to the reduction of our daily alcohol consumption, but whatever it is we are feeling better for it.
Being as it has been nearly six months since she had a haircut Chris decided that a trip to the hairdressers could no longer be put off. So we asked Sophen’s wife Sophala to recommend a good local salon. Consequently this morning found her sitting nervously in the chair surrounded by a crowd of intrigued onlookers while the stylist tackled her hair with a razor. The result was surprisingly good, although now most of the colour has been cut out she resembles her Mum more than ever. The whole restyle cost about 45p is about 100 times cheaper than Tony and Guy. (Rosemary- please don’t tell Padraig).
The landlord has now installed cable TV, but unfortunately most of the channels are in Khmer, so we called in the TV man. It transpires that the set top box is in the cable company’s office in the village and the
programmes that are transmitted are at the whim of the bloke on duty. So on Sunday we get wall to wall sport, Jon is currently watching Aston Villa v Arsenal, most of the rest of the week we get large Australian babes doing aerobics in the mornings and CNN in the evenings, we also get Star Movies which occasionally shows an oldie but goodie, (Star Wars was on last Sunday) but usually churns out low budget teen movies. The bizarre thing was that the TV man says if we don’t like what is on we should phone him up and he will change what each channel is showing. This is OK for us but it could really piss off the rest of the village when they are all happily watching the grand final of Cambodian X Factor and it suddenly gets changed to an old Jerry Lewis movie on HBO.
The one (?) downside of installing cable to our house is that the landlord has now got a TV as well, this means that from 5.30 each morning we get Karaoke music being broadcast at full volume. The voice of John Humphries on the Today programme is a far gentler way to be woken up. Cambodia is not a quiet country. The days kicks off with the monks chanting prayers via loudspeakers from the wat over the road, then the cockerels join in accompanied by the continuous barking of dogs, the wailing of children and the chugging of trucks on the road outside. Plus Khmers do not speak to each other, they shout, all the time. The family next door sound like they have stepped out a particularly gruelling episode of Eastenders when all they are doing is discussing what they want for tea. But gradually we are getting used to it and manage a good 8 hours sleep, (unheard of in England- Chris.)
It might seem from the above that are on some strange reality TV “I’m a volunteer get me out of here” holiday. We are also working quite hard. We go to the office every day although because sometimes no one else has turned up to unlock the doors we have to go home again. We have been concentrating on networking the local area, and “pressing the flesh” with the local big wigs such as the Commune chief and the District Governor, because without their OK we will get nothing constructive done here. Our short-term intention is to focus on the 5 nearest primary schools and following a needs analysis and baseline study we will review and implement our plans accordingly (you can tell we have been on inset courses can’t you). We had a meeting with the 5 headmasters involved and they seemed thrilled to bits, all nodding and smiles, but this means nothing here as the Khmers hate to cause upset or offence and will agree to anything even though they have absolutely no intention of carrying it out. We shall see. We have a big meeting with the provincial education bosses in Battambang on Friday and they might veto our whole plan anyway. ( NB the meeting got cancelled at the last minute, but that’s Cambodia for you.)
This is a picture that Jon took on his way to visit Samer Ki Primary School on Wednesday (mobile phone camera - sorry about the quality). Yes this is the road! and yes he did make it to the school.
If we don''t get a chance to write another episode before we'd like to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a safe and healthy New Year. We hope you will all raise a glass (we certainly will) and think of use at some time.
which settles on everything within 500 yards of the road. Also Thailand still has its forests, in Cambodia most have been cut down by the Thais or the Khmer Rouge or the Cambodian army or anyone else who can make a few dollars out of raping this poor country.
Christmas Eve party so we could see the arrival of Santa on an elephant. However we swiftly left when the karaoke carols started, grateful to return to our own stable-like accommodation and a tinsel-decorated palm tree and sing along to Carols from Kings on the iPod (much more tasteful).
rest of the day was spent swimming, sun bathing and eating from a beach BBQ in a truly festive way. We’d all been dreading Christmas away from the family and were all a little subdued until phone calls started to arrive from UK. As the messages winged their way across the world all of us would have exchanged our island paradise for cold grey damp old England and the ones we love.
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