Shut up and shovel

Vernsai Village, Ratanakiri.

To the edges of CambodiaSince the dengue’s finally making a retreat, I’ve been making the most of my time of unpaid leave to explore the corners of Cambodia that otherwise I might never have had time to see due to the difficulty of getting anywhere fast in the wet season. Last week, I visited the Mlup Baitong offices in Stung Treng and spent a couple of nights in our CBET village, Preah Rumkel, from where you can look back south and see the Laos border (how the land is laid out so that we’re still actually in Cambodia I’m not sure because we definitely passed the border in the boat and we couldn’t drive because I didn’t have my passport...). Today, I’m on a field trip with another volunteer’s organisation, NTFP, in Vernsai village an hour and a half north of the already-remote Ban Lung in Ratanakiri province. It’s hard to believe that this quiet backwater cluster of houses which becomes almost isolated in the wet season due to the poor condition of the roads is in the same country where new KFC takeaways and multi-national banks are opening up every day in the city.

As in most of Cambodia, the biggest problem facing peasant farmers here is land grabbing by the government and government-endorsed foreign ‘investors’. Land which has been farmed sustainably for centuries is commandeered by companies flash with cash and already impoverished Cambodians are left with no ways of making a livelihood or supporting their families. Fighting this process is a long and arduous journey and as yet there’s only one small piece of land in the whole country which is protected and legally belongs to the community who live there; even this is still under threat from illegal loggers who can pay bribes to the necessary people. In Ratanakiri and Mondulkiri provinces, where well over half the population are indigenous and often only speak their own languages, exploitation of the vulnerable and unrepresented is even more rife. Imagine trying to combat this corruption and empower a community to protect their own rights to farm their ancestral land when even the concept of land ownership is foreign and maybe you’ll begin to see how complicated the issue of secure livelihoods is in Cambodia.

Shut up and shovel

In Vernsai, I’m sat watching the morning fishing boats come and go but already at only 9am I’m uncomfortably full of food and drink because, yet again, my lack of language skills has ended up with me being plied with more food in a few hours than the average Khmer person eats in a week. I’ve already been taking advantage of being in the north of Cambodia where the coffee is chocolatey, strong, and addictive, always served with a big helping of condensed milk.

I’ve been talking with (or, been talked at) by three men who may be from China, Vietnam or Laos. I’m not sure which but they speak some Khmer, Laos, Vietnamese and Chinese but no English. As with most people I’ve met in Cambodia, they’re friendly almost to the point of being intrusive but keep offering to take me to see their homes, meet their cows, children and wives (in that order!) and I feel like I’ve been unforgivably rude when I make my excuses about waiting for my lift and refuse the trip.

This being Cambodia, the conversation eventually turned to food but I was caught off guard by a question I really should have understood, “have you tried coconut juice?” (Of course I have – how can anyone be in Cambodia for a week, let along 5 months, and not have been pumped full of the stuff by overzealous landlords, work colleagues and neighbours? But that’s besides the point.) As usual when I don’t know exactly what I’ve been asked to try I answered “ot tey, ot squall” (no, I don’t know it) which usually gets me off the hook and the conversation moves on without spending ages trying to get me to understand the word for something that, when it’s finally produced, is often a random inedible looking leaf or knobbly tuber but rarely anything worth getting excited about. However, this time, it landed me with a coconut bigger than the size of my head, paid for by the Chinese (?) man. I’m always aware of how much more money I have than most people here so this sort of act of generosity isn’t to be taken lightly. Also, since I’d been incredibly rude in turning down the offer of a trip to see his cows, I smiled, pushed down any thoughts about my waistline and how full I already was and nodded an “mmm, chnang” (delicious) which was met with huge smiles back at me and a bunch of tamarinds being pushed into my bag. You’ve got to love this country.

Not all the food I’ve been plied with these last few weeks has been quite so tasty. When I visited Preah Rumkel, the CBET site of Mlup Baitong in Stung Treng, myself and Chhe, a MB colleague, were invited to the village chief’s house for dinner. Being the only house in the village with electricity (from a generator) it was obvious which house we were headed to as Chhe wobbled along on an ancient moto with me desperately clinging on to the back and hoping that in the pitch black we weren’t going to hit a passing water buffalo, drive off the river bank into the Mekong or, more likely, fall off the rickety planks across the 3ft deep channels which dissect the path. I’m certain walking would have been much safer but Cambodians will generally think you’re crazy if you suggest going anywhere on foot when there’s a perfectly good moto to use.

Most people in Preah Rumkel speak Laos as their first language and Khmer as a second language. However, since Chhe only speaks a little Laos and I speak only a little Khmer with no hope at understanding Laos, the evening started off in a slow and clear Khmer which was easier to understand than any other I’ve heard from a non-barang person. This made the fact that the whole extended family had been invited (not implausibly with the sole purpose of meeting The Barang) a little less intimidating.

However, within 10 minutes of us arriving, a 2 litre bottle of home-brewed rice wine in an old Jonny Walker bottle had been produced and placed in front of Chhe and I with one shot glass between us. Without too much hesitation I bit my lip and began thinking up my reasons for refusing it.

1) Rice wine is notoriously pungent and the cloudy beige colour is distinctly off-putting.

2) I hadn’t drunk alcohol for nearly 2 months and I’m a lightweight at the best of times. I didn’t fancy getting merry and possibly ill again when I was an hour and half boat ride from Stung Treng in the jungle.

3) Being told quite so many times that I’m a bad woman for drinking beer and that Khmer women don’t get drunk, I don’t want to cause offence or be too culturally insensitive in a traditional village where I have to work in the future.

4) Chhe was already downing his second shot and the moto ride here was hard enough sober never mind if we were both drunk.

Despite so many good reasons for me saying no, there was never really going to be a choice so I was welcomed in to the men’s drinking club like it or not. It didn’t actually taste as bad as I’d feared, although that’s probably due to the first shot burning off my taste buds, but even just a few tiny shots was enough to make my Khmer tongue loosen up and the room spin. Unfortunately, Chhe, always the centre of attention, seemed to be handed a shot after every bite of dinner and soon stopped translating anything into English. The chief seemed to forget he was meant to be speaking Khmer and kept ardently trying to tell me things in Laos and the other boys in the family forgot their inhibitions and started trying to teach me Khmer dances. Add to this image several screaming kids, a TV playing bad karaoke songs through a wall of professional speakers loud enough to make the floor reverberate, half the village peering in through the door trying to watch the TV or/and The Barang, flickering fluorescent strip lights from a generator which couldn’t keep up with the music and lighting demands and ever flowing rice wine.

On top of this, trying to navigate my way through the food was a joke as, with the exception of the rice, I’d never seen anything like what had been prepared. By my right hand was a pile of leaves which, from their appearance, might as well have just been a random handful pulled from the nearest hedge. Some were delicious, others were revolting and since no two looked alike, you couldn’t be sure what you’d be getting in the next mouthful. The leaves were used instead of cutlery to scoop up what turned out to be the Laos-style prahok (fermented fish paste – much tastier than it sounds but you really don’t want to get a mouthful with the guts in it). I really can't tell you what I was eating, partly due to the rice wine, partly because Chhe forgot his English and the family only knew the Laos names anyway, but mainly because it was all so new. In the end, the only thing to do was shut up and shovel it in. With all senses on overload, it was definitely one of my most surreal nights here yet.

Khmer Khristmas Wishes.

Monday, 5^th January 2009. VSO Programme Office, Phnom Penh.

It’s been a long time since my last update for a number of reasons, most of which stem from the fact I’m still laid up with dengue. 7 weeks and counting. So, not only have I been drained of all energy to the point where talking seems like too much effort (those of you who know my motor-mouth can tell this means it’s serious) but I’ve also been doing nothing worth reporting. My days have been taken up with sleeping, watching mindless DVDs or CNN (equally mindless) and comparing symptoms with volunteers stuck in the office/sick bay with various infections, broken bones or malaria.

After finally getting more or less back to health 3 and a half weeks after the initial onset of dengue, I went back to work in Kampong Speu for a week. The house was covered with a good centimetre thick layer of dirt but lingering disease and a good ounce of laziness meant I didn’t do too much about this in the short breaks from a busy week at work. I’ve already gotten into the Khmer way of cleaning – why clean it if it’s not in immediate use? If you don’t walk on, eat off or sleep on a particular surface on a daily basis, it can stand to have a bit of a covering of red dust.


As expected, being back in K. Speu was full of small joys like reading ទឹកកក (teuk kawk) and knowing that it meant I could buy ice for my cooler box, bigger successes like finishing the first draft of the CBET 2009 annual plan with activities that match objectives and indicators that match activities, and, obviously, major frustrations. Most of the latter revolved around my incompetent line-manager and his selfish attitude to knowledge. If he doesn’t share what he knows or what he’s told from head office with junior members of staff then it means every decision, from the planning of budgets to the use of paper clips, has to go via him. I suspect he’s going to be the cause of many major gripes in the future so I’m saving all my niggles for a detailed rant later.

So, feeling a little tired, I was looking forward to a restful weekend in another province with such luxuries as internet and running water. However, by Sunday night I was back in bed with the same excruciating headache and deathly fatigue as I’d had a few weeks earlier at the start of the dengue. I managed another day of work in the PP office but by the end of the day was resigned to the fact that it really was too early to go back to work and that I’m just not fit enough for full time work yet. Facing a lonely, depressing Christmas in the programme office lit only by dingy, flickering fluorescent lights and greeted only by the rats in the kitchen, I took up Claire’s offer of being looked after in her house in the quite riverside town of Kampot, near the coast.

The Christmas spirit never really arrived (unless I was sleeping and missed it which is entirely possible) but garlic bread for Christmas dinner was a worthy treat and some Santa hats appeared from somewhere. Even the repetitive Khmer karaoke music was switched for Jingle Bells for a couple of days. Unfortunately, the sad looking pot-palm draped with scraggy tinsel and a few fairy lights didn’t exactly live up to memories of Christmas trees at home but it was appreciated all the same.

A few days later, after much lazing in hammocks and many episodes of The L Word and Skins (thanks Sarah!), Claire, Meghan and I set off to Sihanoukville for New Year’s Eve to meet up with some other volunteers from around the country. Having been told by the doctor that I have liver damage and alcohol is out of the question for 2 - 3 months except for “one glass of wine on Christmas and one glass of wine of New Year’s Eve”, I wasn’t particularly looking forward to a sober night among a big group of volunteers who are not exactly known for their good behaviour or restraint! As it turned out, I had one of the best New Year’s I’ve ever had even if I was in bed shortly after midnight with only half a gin and tonic to my name. Even the rain didn’t spoil the beach party and, if anything, only made it more fun because everyone was so wet and dirty anyway that going in the sea seemed like the only sensible thing to do!

The two next days were spent lounging in satellite chairs (ubiquitous in Cambodia and far more comfortable than your average deck chair) and now I’m back in Phnom Penh for yet another doctor’s appointment. So, the waiting, resting and film-watching continues. So far toady I’ve slept through Quantum of Solace, turned off Wanted after 15 minutes and am currently ignoring Lions and Lambs. I did read an interesting article about indigenous rights in North East Cambodia though so maybe my brain won’t go to fluff too quickly and now I’m about to have a good English fry-up cooked for me by Richard who’s doing a marvellous job of nursing me and Bas (malaria-fied) although he does keep refusing to put on a proper blue dress and pinafore.

'Tis the Season (for Dengue)

VSO Programme Office, Phnom Penh.

My toes ache so much that I’ve considered trapping them in the door just to change the feeling in them. Yesterday it was my heel that was causing all the pain and the day before my forearm. I expect that tomorrow it will be my little finger or some other equally trivial part of my body which I usually never give a second thought too until this “Break Bone Fever”, otherwise known as the Dengue fever virus, decides to manifest itself there.

Anyone who saw me at 6am last Thursday would be forgiven for thinking that I had just crawled in from an extremely heavy night in Heart of Darkness and the other watering-pits of PP. Clutching my head, bouncing off walls on the way to the bathroom, each time uttering progressively worse expletives, and eyes so bloodshot Frankenstein’s Monster would have run scared – it must have looked like the worst hangover in history. The truth is that for once I’d been tucked up at 7pm after taking antibiotics and hoping to be back at work the next morning. Now, having been confirmed to have dengue, it looks like I’ll be off for at least two weeks.

Caused by a virus carried by the Aedes mosquito, prevalent in both urban and rural environments during the day, there’s not much you can do to prevent dengue except for walk around in a giant mosquito net every second of the day. Being a little too fashion-conscious for that, I’ve chosen to stick to just wearing DEET mosquito spray but unfortunately this hasn’t been enough. Now, I’m just one in a long line of volunteers who’s been on virtual house arrest in the Programme Office during these months of “Dengue Season” whilst I rest and wait to feel better.

While I feel ill and that’s obviously never pleasant, the timing is also particularly bad. I’ve only done 3 day in my office at work and really just want to get stuck in. The real reason for me coming out to Cambodia to start with seems to be getting further from my reach with each passing day. I know I have to be patient and I’ve been told by so many serving volunteers “don’t stress – work’s never as exciting as it sounds when you have to do it” but still, I’m getting frustrated. At least my colleagues in Mlup Baitong are all sympathetic. Most of them have had krun chiam – blood disease – before so know that I’m not just being a pathetic foreigner and I really do need to rest. Even though I sound miserable, I really am in the best pace to be ill. There are people in and out of the PO most of the time so word has spread quickly that I’m ill and in between the DVDs and the Disney Channel I’ve been having phone calls and messages to keep me entertained. In fact, within half an hour of coming back from the doctors with my results, I had texts from volunteers in 4 different provinces wishing me a speedy recovery (if you ever need a message taken from one end of Cambodia to the other, VSO vols are by far the fastest way to do it – we should start our own communications service). So, having already had two visitors today, Richard and Alan, I’m worn out from socialising and plan to go back to bed for another few hours.

Home Sweet Dusty Home

Village 5, Treng Treung Commune, Kampong Speu.

My aircraft hanger of a house (second gate on left in picture) is starting to feel and look more like home. The front room is still bare except for the two rucksacks I haven’t unpacked, my bike and the huge heavy bench and chairs which sit at the edge of the room. I keep meaning to move them into a circle rather than a straight line so it at least looks like maybe people will socialise around them but the space is proving useful for me skipping and Becca, the German volunteer at Mlup Baitong, to work out in. I suspect the front room will remain a garage/gym for the rest of the year. It’s far too dusty from all the trucks outside to be pleasant and it’s difficult to stay away from prying eyes in that room even when the 8’ tall double glass doors are shut.

Instead, I’m spending a lot of time in my tiny kitchen at the back which feels like mire with all the ‘luxury’ items like pasta, sesame oil and, of course, peanut butter* from Pencil market in Phnom Penh. I’ve got a 2 ring gas stove to cook on although one hob doesn’t work unless you poke it with a knife first. I’m not sure what this does to it that makes it work but it seems to be the magic trick so I’ll carry on doing it. I’ve also got a charcoal-burning pot in my back yard but I haven’t had time to find where I can buy charcoal yet. At the moment it’s just decoration which makes my home look more typically “Cambodian”, along with the reed sweeping brush, string hammock and multitude of plastic plates, sieves, draining trays and boxes specially designed to keep ants out of cans of condensed milk. I never knew how much every kitchen needs these “bits of tat” as I’ve previously dismissed them until I was trying to balance dirty vegetables, soaped vegetables, rinsed vegetables and a bowl of pasta on 6 inches of work surface in front of my toothbrush and wash bag (the kitchen sink is the only one in a house with 2 bathrooms which is actually connected to a water source). Nevertheless, I still fail to see how every third person in the market can make their living from selling these life-saving-bits-of-plastic-tat.

My bedroom is also starting to take shape out of the grubby mess. I have a huge desk/dressing table and a big double bed neatly enclosed with the VSO standard issue mosquito net and a fan (in the same sun-faded blue as all the plastic-kitchen-tat). There’s no chair for the desk or anywhere to put my clothes so I’m still living out of a rucksack but hopefully that’ll get sorted soon.

So, that’s my house. There’s also another 2 bedrooms but they’re so full of dirt that I can’t even bear to open the doors at the moment but don’t that put you off visiting. The door of house 2, Village 5, Treng Treyung Commune, Kampong Speu is always only 3 hefty padlocks away from being your home away from home in Cambodia.

* You do not know the use peanut butter has in a multitude of recipes until you’ve been stuck in the Mekong Hotel for 6 weeks.

Forty Barangs on a Boat – “Go Go VSO!”

VSO PO, PP (there's never too many acronyms in Cambodia)

Piling into a cattle truck in our luminous pink t-shirts and spotless white caps the VSO boat-race team, all 40 of us, looked more like a gaggle of overgrown nursery-school kids being on a day trip than serious contenders in Cambodia’s most prestigious sporting event – the Phnom Penh Boat Race. Years ago the annual race down the Mekong was held to identify the strongest and bravest Khmers who would serve as the king’s personal guards. Today, the prize at the end of three days of racing is monetary rather than a job promotion but the prestige remains the same. Provincial teams qualify throughout the year in a series of trails and Phnom Penh teams are given places based on previous years’ merits, ability to pay and the closeness of their relation through marriage to those in power. Unsurprisingly, Hun Sen’s cronies had two boats in the race. Then there was us. And the Army boat. And the Navy boat.

Luckily, we weren’t actually pitted against the Cambodian Navy but against Kandal Province, who, kitted out in their professional looking red and blue uniforms only served to make our bright pink affairs even more laughable. One benefit did come from them however; it made our impending failure seem less great as it was made clear from one glance at us that we were not in this with any expectations of serious sporting prowess. They must have jumped for joy at being drawn against the only Barang boat in the competition. It was effectively a free ticket into the next round.

After being pretty much towed up the river by our opponents and setting off back downstream, they were ahead of us by half a boat length after just a few strokes. Finally, we reached the end of the course (although missed passing between the actual finishing flags having veered off course sometime before) and had an official position of 3rd out of 2 boats due to our being overtaken by the winning boat of the race behind us. Nevertheless, this is a considerable improvement on last year’s 7th out of 2 boats so it’s a considerable achievement in my eyes!

Even if our race was a debarcle, the atmosphere whilst we were squeezed in the boat rafted up between some of the best rowers in Cambodia exchanging pleasantries, jibes and dodging flying bottles of drinking water which I think were thrown in generosity, is not something I will forget soon. Yet again, I feel privileged, if slightly uneasy about it, that I have experienced something that even most Khmers won’t get to take part in.

One Barang Off Her Bike

In-Country-Training is almost at an end and VSO (in it’s questionable wisdom) has decided that to practice our Khmer we should to stay with Cambodian families in homestays for 24 hours. The “objective” of this is to “learn about the Khmer way of life and build relationships with Khmer people” (because we’re not doing that by living here for one or two years anyway..?) Although I feel quite confident in Khmer class and probably struggle less than some people with the concepts, my language ability is by no means good enough to be dumped in a bamboo house and make polite conversation with an 89 year old and a 60 year old all day. I’d much rather talk to the nice beer-lady in an evening, the hotel receptionists and cleaners or the sewing-ladies in the market who I keep having to ask to mend, shorten or lengthen various pieces of clothing – there’s no shortage of people to practice Khmer with.

So, anticipating that following the introductory “my name’s Hollie. I come from England. I speak Khmer tick-tick (a little bit)” would be followed by many hours of smiling and nodding to incomprehensible questions before realizing I’d just said “yes, I’d like a plate of fried spiders please” (it’s very possible that could happen), I agreed to be shipped off with my mosquito coils and night potty.

As it turned out, the woman who myself and another volunteer, Nono, ended up staying didn’t even understand my well-practiced “my name’s Hollie. I come from England. I speak Khmer tick-tick”. In return, we didn’t understand a word she said to us either and we might as well have been speaking Chinese for all the good it did when we asked her to speak slowly. Consequently, the awkward silences started even sooner than I expected. Nevertheless, we were determined that we’d learn something from the trip so managed to sign our way through a cookery lesson in which we learnt the correct way of preparing water-lily stalks and how to cut carrots into flower shapes - skills that are apparently going to be very useful when looking for a Cambodian husband. The afternoon was spent playing a kind of group keepy-uppy with a shuttlecock with some local teenagers. Thanks to Nono’s basketball chat and the few words like “winner”, “loser” and “miss” that I learnt playing volleyball in Treng Treyung it did end up with it being quite a lot more competitive than it would otherwise have been. I never knew batting a piece of plastic back and forth could be so addictively entertaining!

Traditional wooden Khmer houses are built on stilts and are more-or-less open plan upstairs. The floors are made of thin strips of bamboo with quite wide gaps between them and the eves are open. The overall impression is of a big wooden tent and essentially, you’re sleeping outside but just surrounded by a few walls which provide privacy from prying eyes but not from prying ears! You can hear everything that goes on in the village and when sleeping on a rattan mat on the floor everything seems to be amplified several times over. In general, going to sleep with the sound of crickets and frogs is a it’s a pleasant way to go to sleep. Unfortunately, if you’re not used to it, it’s difficult to get more than a few hours kip in one go. Not great if you have to do motorbike training the next day like we did.

So, once back in Kampong Cham town, off we set this morning on our motorbikes to the old air strip to practice our off road riding (this tells you a lot about the state of the air-strip!). Before coming to Cambodia I’d only ever ridden a scooter for a couple of hours but I’m enjoying riding the motorbikes here a lot. They’re semi-automatic so even though you have to change gears, there’s no clutch control. So, once we’d got our confidence at riding around the massive pot-holes and through the smaller ones, a few of us set off “da-leing”, to explore. However, me being both a bit clumsy and a bit of a girl-racer (never a good mix) it wasn’t long before I’d realized I was going too fast down a hill, tried to change down a gear but ended up knocking down the stand instead, tried to put up the stand again and so didn’t see the pothole in front of me and ended up in a heap on the floor. Luckily, I know how clumsy I can be and have bought myself a canvas jacket and some thin gloves for motorbike riding so the only injuries I have are a couple of grazes and a bit of a headache. That’ll teach me not to be so confident from now on!