Peanut butter in Kampong Cham

Sour s’dai. Kñom rien kmae.

Hi. I’m learning Khmer. I had my first lesson this morning. I’m also eating peanut butter out of a jar with one finger as I type with the others because lunch has been a rather haphazard affair today. Let me explain.

We travelled from Phnom Penh (PP) to Kompong Cham yesterday, all piled into a bus which Jan and Keith had miraculously managed to book for us all in their first week using little more than a few Khmer words and many hand signals. VSO have sent us to this sleepy little town for our language training in order to remove the tempting nightlife of PP. Given the amount of beer which has been consumed over the past week, that was probably a wise idea.

K. Cham has little in the way of entertainment. Once an important port town on the Mekong River, it now survives on faded memories as the newly built bridge has usurped the need for goods to be brought to the province by boat. Thus, while the town has more or less some approximation of most things you could want (eg. no sun screen but countless skin whitening moisturisers, an unreliable bus service but enough motorbike shops to put Silverstone to shame), the nightlife is hardly ‘rocking’. In fact, the one establishment which would be most likely to call itself a bar has a cocktail menu but the staff don’t know which liquor or juice is which and only have half the ingredients. Queue barman James nipping behind the bar to help the lost looking Khmer woman to find the closest thing to what was on the menu. I’ll stick to beer in future. Peaceful bike rides in the sun followed by a trip to the market to check out the plethora of fish, fruit, vegetables, and ‘miscellaneous plants’ are the order of the day. VSO were probably right – there’s a lot more likelihood that we’ll actually get some work done here.

Anyway, as a result of us being in K. Cham, we’re being put up in the Mekong hotel. Usually, volunteers (Neak-Smak-Chet in Khmer) stay in a volunteer house owned or rented by VSO. However, as seems to be the case with a lot of VSO Cambodia, there’s a lack of funds and the house was given up. This means that we have to eat out for every meal, every day which adds up to being very expensive on a volunteer allowance (which has also been cut by $40 since last year). As we’re not in a house, there’s no fridge or anywhere to store food. Leaving it in your room only invites in ants and other creepy crawlies and since it’s a constant battle to avoid mosquito bites at the best of times, especially now in dengue season, I’m not keen to invite more six legged beasts into my room.

So, the best plan seems to have been to buy a jar of peanut butter for an extortionate $3.40 and just buy bread to go with it every day for lunch which works out at a much more reasonable price than even the roadside pit-stop rice sellers. However, today the heat had left me with no appetite and I didn’t bother to buy bread earlier. Hence, in a very roundabout way, I’m eating peanut butter out of the jar with one finger whilst typing with the others.