Hello from Cambodia 11

So here we are 6 months in and really beginning to feel like ex pats. We returned from Kampong Chang and the language course with Jon’s Khmer much improved and Chris’s not. We have come to terms with the budget cuts and have started with determination on our mission to make the schools of Phnom Preuk District in to models of excellence for the whole of Cambodia!

The first workshop went quite well. We were supposed to be doing a small session for 3 or 4 volunteer teachers but the principal got a little excited and we ended up doing the workshop 3 times for 5 each. Well that was the theory but only 2 turned up for the last one. Yesterday we were expecting 16 teachers to a workshop on Group teaching and got 9, excluding the baby who was breast fed half way through the session. One teacher wandered in 20 minutes late having gone to the wrong venue, then after a phone call (their phones are going off continually and they think nothing of having long conversations while you are speaking) he wandered off to deal with some private business. The Khmer sense of lack of urgency and punctuality takes a lot of getting used to. However at least we feel that we have got started and are achieving something but it’s going to take a long time!

Our dynamic plans, however, have now fallen foul of the 10 yearly census. The government are using teachers as recording officers and most of the schools in the country will be closed for 2 weeks. We never really know what’s going on. We got into the office one day to find it empty and were told that all the education officers would be spending the week at a workshop to train them for the census so we went home as there was nothing for us to do. Quite often we are the only people in the office especially when there is a crop to harvest and their farming commitments take priority over the education system. This also applies to the students. An unexpected heavy shower of rain means that the next tapioca crop can be planted and 75% of the children do not come to school, as they are busy planting it.

Last week Jon was invited to a Chemistry workshop run by a Japanese woman volunteer who works at the Teachers Training College in Battambang. This is teaching with no resources and it really tests your imagination. How do you produce hydrogen if you don’t have acid in the bottle on the bench (or even a bench) or a Hoffmans Voltameter? Well you improvise; a bit of aluminium cooking foil in a plastic bag with toilet cleaner (21% HCl) added, plastic tubing from the local garage, a washing up bowl full of water and a plastic water bottle to collect the gas in. The scientist amongst you can figure out the details.

Electrolysis, no sweat, stick a couple of bits of wire through the bottom of a plastic storage container and seal with super glue. A splash of battery acid and some water and connect up to a moped battery. Jon and Sophea (who used to be a mechanic before he became a head master) improved on this piece of kit by using a couple of syringes that were lying around(!!) Quite a good pop was obtained! Jon really loved being back in the lab again but as our project concentrates on primary education he isn’t officially allowed to be messing about with secondary science, but he’s not going to let that stop him.

Many thanks to every one who has sent us emergency supplies, especially the clothes. The dust here is getting so bad that we have to change our clothes twice a day. Thankfully our cleaning lady also does our washing, by hand in a 25 litre paint tub, at the communal pump, but the severe scrubbing the clothes get dosen’t help their durability. Also she seems to add toilet cleaner to the wash to get that Percil white look, and this has had a few disastrous consequences. Its times like this that a grasp of the language would be useful. Eg “ will you use Comfort fabric softener in my wash please.”

The cosmetics have also been very welcome. It is very difficult to remain chic and elegant here when you are a perpetual sweaty mess. Therefore it is a real treat to pamper yourself sometimes with creams and lotions, put on a dress, make up and high heels and pretend you’re off for a posh night out at the Grange. (and that’s just Jon). In fact what we actually do is cook ourselves a bowl of vegetables and rice, open a can of local beer and settle down to watch an episode of 24 Series 2. Actually its not that bad, we are beginning to learn how to relax and after years of stress and over-work at Parmiter’s having nothing to do comes as a welcome change.

Our translators are continuing to be, not only invaluable in steering us around the minefield that is Cambodian etiquette, but also good friends. However sometimes things “get lost in translation”. Sophen claimed that the bats (see later) were as big as kitchens (chickens) and that the participants at the workshop would need snakes (snacks). The most surreal moment was when we texted Sophen to ask him why the children were going to school on a Sunday. The reply came through “They are going for the understanding of mince”. Was this like the “Diet of Worms”? Now we know that Buddhists are a bit mystical; but mince? What he meant was “mines”. Seems there is a big push by C-Mac, the Cambodian de-mining group to get the kids to understand about not picking up unexploded ordinance etc. We have a big problem here as Battambang is the most mined province in Cambodia and the kids need all the education they can get. Some times S and S provide us with just a little too much information. When we asked if there was a bakery in the village where we could get fresh bread, they replied that it was next door to brothel. They seemed surprised that we didn’t know where the brothel was and insisted on giving us a guided tour to both of these 2 village landmarks.

Our highlight this month was a trip to Phnom Sampov, a mountain about 15km south of Battambang city. This is renowned firstly for the amazing caves from whence millions of bats emerge every evening at dusk. For hours and hours they steam across the sky making a strange smoke-like trail as they weave their way into the distance. The mountain is more notorious as the site of the “killing caves” where the Pol Pot regime murdered the educated people. It is very chilling to note that no one in Cambodia can match Jon’s claim that he has been teaching for 31 years because anyone who was a teacher in 1977 would not have survived.

That evening we went a wonderful circus performance in Battambang. The Ponlun Salapak was originally set up 20 years ago in the Cambodian refugee camps in Thailand to give disadvantaged kids a chance to study art. Some of these kids later set up a school for orphans and street children in Battambang and with help from a French NGO it has expanded its range to encompass a circus school as well. The children were hugely talented and very inspiring.


It’s the dry season here at the moment so getting around is not so bad. It now takes us 3 to 4 hours to get to Battambang by taxi as opposed to the 6 and half it took us when we first came and it was a bit wet. Come the rainy season and we will just have to say put. Chris has come on leaps and bounds in the moto stakes and last weekend drove the 25km to the next town down the border. She was dead chuffed and rightly so, the road, in the broadest sense of the word, was still full of ruts and rocks and she did get up to 40 kph at one point.

The motos are great and dead easy to drive, no clutch and very light. Jon is certainly going to buy a motorbike when he gets back. He’s even done some repair work when he cracked part of the engine casing by riding in to a ditch. Sophea said take it to the local moto repair shop but you know Jon he’s got to have a go himself. He didn’t do a bad job but the repair shop would have done the whole thing for 5000 riels (about 65p). They don’t charge for labour here the mechanics earn about a dollar a day (4000 riels). He has also fixed a puncture. The big mistake was letting S&S help to fix the next one he got a week later. All was going fine until they put the tyre back on and pinched the inner tube to produce yet another puncture. They gave up at that point and we took it to the local repair shop where the boy fixed it for 1500 riels (do the maths).

Continuing the series “The Flora and Fauna of Cambodia” we come to
Reptiles and Amphibians. Our house geckos, Hugh, Carol and Richard, continue to flourish though they do tend to squabble a lot. More dramatic is the Tokai, a 15 inch lizard that lives in the ceiling of our office. We rarely see him but he makes an incredible racket with his “croak” from whence he gets his name (tok-ai). Well the other day he came out on to the wall in pursuit of Mrs Tokai and the two of them scuttled about above our heads. Sophen and Sophea were really worried by this as apparently if a Tokai bites you it takes the combined efforts of 7 widows to get him to let go! The unexpected rain the other evening brought out the frogs, keeping us awake at night with their noise and invading the chicken, whoops sorry that’s kitchen. The other day Chris came across a lizard who had had a close encounter with a moto. His amputated tail was still wriggling about on one side of the track while he watched it from the other side (weird). We also have a beautiful multi-coloured lizard that sits and suns himself on a tree stump outside our office and makes no noise at all. As a post script we have included a photo of the giant flying beetles that bombarded us in swarms last night on the balcony. They dive bombed our heads like a scene from the birds and one crawled up under Chris’s skirt but she did not discover it until she undressed for bed, the screams were heard in Bangkok.

Another surreal moment yesterday was when Jon emerged from the shower wrapped only in a towel to find 2 monks, resplendent in their saffron robes and shaved heads, half way up our stairs. They had popped in for a visit and a chat and to practice their English. This included showing off they new super duper mobile phone and proudly playing a down load of Ronan Keeting and Westlife singing Father and Son. So much for Buddhist mysticism.

We are thinking of you all as spring approaches, we miss the daffs. Keep sending all your news. Happy St David’s Day. J and C

(Just a note, our email addresses are: chrisgreen56@hotmail.com and jondeg1@hotmail.com)

PS. The baby that Jon is holding is Touch, our cleaner's grandson.

Hello from Cambodia 10

Happy New Year.

This blog is being written in our room in the Mekong Hotel in Kampong Cham. We are back here for 2 weeks for the second part of our language training. Getting all 17 of us (David has dropped out) back together again at this time has probably been a very good idea. We are all realising that the honeymoon period is over. The initial excitement of being in our placement has faded and optimism has become rather jaded as we are coming to terms with the enormousness of the problems we have to face and a realisation is dawning that we are not going to be able to revolutionise the Cambodian education system by Christmas. There has been a lot of group hugs, metaphorical and real and mutual affirmation that there is some point to our being here. (See photo of Baz and Mairead (the long and the short of it) Also by discussing our problems with each other we realise we are all encountering the same frustrations and try to devise some strategies to make something happen in this infuriating country.

We remind each other that at the VSO training in England and since we have arrived here we have continuously been told not to expect anything constructive to happen in the first nine months and we should just observe and build confidences and “drink tea”. As most of us were quite dynamic, hard working professionals in our previous lives where we are used to making things happen fast, it becomes very frustrating when through apathy, misunderstanding and mistrust your best laid plans keep smashing into brick walls. It hasn’t helped that due to cut backs by VSO London, our budget has been greatly reduced so many of the projects we had planned have had to abandoned or severely pruned.

Moaning aside, we have had a lot of fun. We are taking advantage of the fact that gin and tonic is very cheaply available in KPC as are Snickers bars and digestive biscuits. The evenings have been spent playing Helen’s Game and Werewolf, which is a Dutch form of Mafioso. We are also taking the opportunity to give each other mutual support when taking our first course of de-worming tablets. We have included a few photos of the sights of KPC. When we arrived we were surprised to see how much the water level in the Mekong had dropped since we were last here exposing the base of the huge bridge that the Japanese built opening up eastern Cambodia. Every morning and evening the river was swarming with little boats illegally drift netting tiny fish. Also the drop in the water level means they have been able to build the bamboo bridge that runs between the town and an island in the river. Every year this is swept away in the floods and replaced in the dry season. It appears very fragile and wobbly but is strong enough to support a car.

We came here via PP where we had a 2 day education Inset, which was just about as exciting and useful as Inset in the English education system, with the added disadvantage that half of it is delivered in a language you don’t understand – or perhaps that isn’t such a difference. As we travelled on to KPC through the paddy fields of the Mekong flood plane it struck us that Cambodia was lush, green and very beautiful, something we had forgotten in the brown bean fields of Phnom Preuk. Much as we love our little adopted town, returning to the clouds of dust generated by the unmade roads which coat everything with a thick brown film is going to be very difficult after the pink and purple bougainvillaea of KPC.

(Photo:What you can but to eat on the road to Kampong Cham)

The language training has been constructive specially since Chris changed to a more differentiated, child friendly group (see photo). We are now aware of the, potentially disastrous, mistakes that you can make by slight mispronunciation. Eg. Can I help you? = Khnom chong chuey te? Whereas Khnom chong chouey te? Means can I f..k you? Also hot and penis are only the slip of a vowel away from social suicide.

Even though we have been here for nearly 5 months we don’t feel we are any closer to knowing Kampuchea. On the surface, the preponderance of motos, western clothes, TVs, mobile phones and Coca Cola suggests a confidently emerging developing nation but just scratch below the surface and you find extreme poverty, high illiteracy, endemic corruption and a national fatalism that makes you despair that anything will ever change. People who have lived here a few years say that massive progress is happening, but when you see entire families living in a dirty one roomed shack with little or no life chances it is difficult to feel optimistic about this place. We hope that our work in the education system is a tiny step towards improving the prospects of the next generations, but realistically until there is a change in the political system and the corruption that is emasculating the country at every level it is unlikely that Cambodia will ever be able to pull itself out of its third world status.

For those of you who are still wondering what the hell we are actually doing out here, which probably includes us, here is a potted explanation. We are working with the district education office in Phnom Preuk helping them to implement a programme that will result in all Cambodian children receiving an education. Practically this means we work with individual schools on schemes which will increase the numbers of children actually being enrolled and reducing the numbers who drop out before they reach Year 9. We are also helping teachers to use a more child centred methodology in a more child friendly environment. Well that’s the idea anyway. How this is achieved with a highly de motivated work force trying to battle against minimal funding is another matter. We will let you know how we get on. While we were in KPC we visited a “model school” which was very inspirational but also very daunting. Here are photos of a “model” classroom and one in a school in PPk, spot the difference.

On a brighter note, here is a David Attenborough, an introductory round up of the wildlife in Cambodia. Mainly it is very, very small, you only know about them when they bite you. We are all continually slapping ourselves exclaiming, “Shit, I’ve just been bitten!” Fortunately this usually results in itchy red lumps and no one yet has succumbed to Malaria (except Bas who had to be flown from his placement in the jungles on the Vietnamese border to hospital in PP. He made a miraculously recovery after 4 days) or the dreaded Dengue fever. The larger livestock tends to come in swarms. Depending on the season or weather, clouds of insects of all shapes and sizes smash themselves into any light source or failing that, your head. The most dramatic of these was the plague of flying beetles, the size of golf balls that crash onto our balcony then rocked around on their backs, like weebles, unable to turn themselves over.
Currently a recent freak rainstorm has brought out the flying ants that emerge in a blizzard that at night turns KPC into a snowscape resembling the Russia steppes in January. However on a more positive side the huge painted butterflies, the giant praying mantis (see photo) and the columns of tiny ants that march around our house have been a source of great pleasure and fascination to us. The lecture on the Fauna of Cambodia will continue in another blog.

By the way the photo of the 2 lads at the computer is of Sophen and Sophea, our lovely translators without whom our job here would be impossible.

Hope we haven’t been too negative in this blog, but as we said earlier, the honeymoon is over. We still love being here and we believe we do have a positive role to play but maybe it’s going to be a bit harder than we thought. We will see.

Hello from Cambodia 9

The draft of this latest blog is being composed on Christmas Day while sitting beside the blue sparkling waters of the Gulf of Thailand – never thought in my wildest dreams that I would ever write that last sentence.

Five of us decided that being alone in our placements at Christmas without friends and family around would be just too difficult so instead we indulged our selves in that island paradise that is Koh Chang. Getting there from Phnom Preuk proved to be more pricy then we had had anticipated as we had to “encourage “ the Thai authorities to let us cross the border and then finding that there was no way to continue our journey except by hiring a very expensive taxi. Fortunately a bit of research and local knowledge meant that the return journey was far more sooth, cheaper and incident free, except for the collapsed bridge, flat tyre and road being de mined!

Arriving over the border was a real shock. Firstly, Thailand has proper roads, with tarmac and white lines in the middle and traffic lights and sign posts. Everyone drives on the same side of the road and chickens/dogs/cows/children don’t run in front of the car and you travel at more than 30 mph. Also the taxi, what bliss, only 2 passengers rather than the usual 7 (4 in the back and 3 in the front excluding the driver of a Toyota Camry), and it had seat belts!

On entering Thailand one realises just how devastated Cambodia has been. The change of colour in just a few yards is dramatic; Thailand is green and Cambodia is brown. The difference is the dust in Cambodia 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.

The other big difference in Thailand, apart from the lack of plastic bags and rubbish everywhere, is that it is so quiet. No barking dogs, crowing cockerels, blaring karaoke, chanting monks, crying children just the sound of the sea lapping on the shore. In fact sitting here writing this blog in Jean’s kitchen back in Battambang the amplified chanting from the local Wat has now been going for 6 hours,( it 10 am, do the maths).

Next door to our little group of thatched beach huts there was a flash hotel complex with swimming pool and liveried staff. We crashed their 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).

Christmas Day started with the opening of presents which included the traditional shirt and not so traditional J-Cloths. Christmas dinner of fried rice and prawns was made complete by the mini Christmas pud (thank you Liv). The 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.

Happy New Year to you all.

Happy Christmas

from Cambodia

Love from

Chris and Jon xxxx

Hello from Cambodia 8

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.
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.

So this is a snap shot of our life so far here in the Wild West. As you can tell we are currently very content but that might all change. How many times can Jon beat Chris at Canasta before she takes the machete to him? But before that happens we are wallowing in the pleasure of learning how to relax, enjoying the sensation of reading a book, sitting in the sun or just looking at the view of the sunset without the guilt of knowing there is a pile of marking to be done. We will enjoy it while it lasts.

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.

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.