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!

A 1am whinge and the novelties on Cambodia are wearing thin.

1am, hallway of Sontakia Mekong, K. Cham.

What really takes all my effort here is just day-to-day living. Work and lessons are tiring but day-to-day living is exhausting. Firstly, communication is a problem; that’s a given and not worth my dwindling energy to explain. Secondly, everything you do is watched by not only the other 20 volunteers in our group who are currently holed up in the Mekong Hotel but also by every Khmer person in Kampong Cham. Unfortunately being a Barang here seems to make you public property in the same way that appearing on a reality TV show makes you public property at home. If you meet any Khmer person in K. Cham who speaks English they’ve already spoken to half of the rest of the group and will tell you the gossip about the other volunteers that you’ve miraculously missed out on (if that’s possible). If you don’t pick up on the gossip in the market place or on the river front, it’ll come out as a topic of a translation sentence in Khmer class. Trying to keep anything off the gossip hit-list gets tiring.

Thirdly, searching for the few things you need on a day-to-day basis is ten times harder than at home. For manufactured goods, medicines or even seeing a doctor you’ll have to go to Phnom Penh even though K. Cham is supposedly the forth largest town in Cambodia. Then, getting back from PP is a problem because even though K. Cham is only 3 hours away, buses are likely to be booked up or you can sit in a taxi and wait another 2 hours for it to fill up before it’ll set off. Not to mention that all this has to be done on a VERY tight volunteer allowance which doesn’t stretch if anything happens to go wrong which needs extra expenditure (like fish-juice being spilt all over your bags in the bus meaning you have to spend $20 on new bags because the other ones won’t come clean and are making EVERYTHING you own smell of rotting fish).

Although I’ve traveled to and worked in developing countries before, I’ve never been anywhere which is quite so removed from the big chain corporations as Cambodia is. Even in Nicaragua, the second poorest country in the Americas, there were a couple of shopping malls in the capital and you could get pretty much anything you wanted if you were willing to pay the right price. In Cambodia, that luxury just doesn’t exist. Many things you can’t get no matter how much you’re willing to pay. The only way to get decent quality clothes is to hunt in the markets for seconds from the Gap, Next and H&M factories and most other commercial goods are imported and can be found randomly in markets or in back-street shops that you were never expecting to find. This is fine when you’re just browsing but if there’s something you want in particular it can be very frustrating. In a country so closely, and often mistakenly, associated with Thailand where Tescos, Boots and a new Marks and Spencers outlet have recently opened, this comes as somewhat of a shock.

I’m whining, I know. But it’s 1am and I can’t sleep so these things need writing down.

Home Sweet Home

Treng Treyung commune, Kompong Speu province.

“We’re here”
“Where?”
“Here”
“Where’s here?”
“Treng Treyung”
“Really? Oh.”

It would be very easy to drive right through the small cluster of houses flanked by a scruffy, smelly food market without even realising that you’d been there. There is no village centre, just the National Highway 4 (NH4) which is the Cambodian equivalent of the UK’s M1. It ships tonnes of goods every day from the port of Sihanoukville to Phnom Penh and even at 3am causes the houses on either side of it to rattle. This is where I’ll be living for the next year, just yards away from the Cambodian M1 and opposite the wooden shack which serves as the office for Mlup Baitong, one of the larger environmental NGOs in Cambodia.

I never had high hopes for a rocking nightlife in the village I’d be moving to but I did hope for a little more than this. Maybe a bakery and a pharmacy. Even an internet café. But no. There’s nothing. When I told the YfD team that I could cope with being on my own so long as I could get to civilisation, I never thought they’d really take me at my word on that one. I hardly even need to explore to know that there’s nothing here and for the first time since I’ve been in Cambodia, my heart is sinking to the pit of my stomach. It takes all my energy to smile faintly and mutter “Great. That’s not too far from Phnom Penh really is it?”

Having said all this, the villages where I’ll be working are nestled in idyllic mountains and seem to have some of the strongest community programmes I’ve seen. The Mlup Baitong staff are obviously well known and respected for supporting the attempts of villagers to bring themselves out of the poverty they’ve been left in since the Khmer Rouge. The villages in Kampong Speu are mainly remnants of the forced labour settlements which were created in 1975 by the Khmer Rouge when the citizens of Phnom Penh were marched out of their homes at only a few hours notice. Those living in the north of Phnom Penh were sent along the quickest route out of the city towards Battambong, those in the east towards Mondulkiri, those in the south to Takeo and those in west of Phnom Penh were sent along NH4 to Kampong Speu, my province. I’ve been told that many of the farmers were, just 30 years ago, part of the urban elite of Phnom Penh but all their wealth was lost in the 4 year dictatorship and when they returned to their homes in PP after the Vietnamese seized control of Cambodia removing Pol Pot from power, other people had already moved into the former homes in PP. As all the legal documents which would prove ownership had been burnt by the Khmer Rouge, the only choice many people had was to find a small plot of land in the countryside and try to scrape enough food out of the ground to feed their family. The regression in Khmer society from a burgeoning Asian country to an agrarian wasteland is unbelievably difficult for me to comprehend. I doubt that even a year living in Treng Treyung is going to be enough for me to even half-comprehend even one village’s situation but it’s going to be an interesting journey all the same.

Bad Lady Barang, Bad!

I’m running late for a hot Skype date with my mum at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club in Phnom Penh so I’ve hailed a tuk-tuk with particularly swish leather seats (which turn out to be a mistake as I melt into them on a night like this). We’ve just done a U-turn because the main road is blocked and I’m getting rather a long tour of Phnom Penh by night. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing as I’m just sat here thinking how much I like this city already. Sure, I’m also in a tuk-tuk because I don’t feel 100% safe walking around in the dark with my laptop but then again, in how many cities in the world would a lone girl feel 100% safe doing that. Here, I feel about a 65%.

Monks are still pacing the street although minus the yellow umbrellas which, in the day-time, are as essential as their bright orange robes. Street vendors are cooking up a treat on their barbeques and as we drive up Sisowath Quay I do a double take as I spot a couple of people I know from university. Small world. I’m too shocked to shout-out for a second and by the time I do the tuk-tuk’s passed them. The traffic in this bit of town looked to be moving but we soon reach a police blockade which needs to be bypassed slowly.

The whole time I’ve had a scarf over my head because I’ve found it means you get fewer stares as it’s not as obvious that the 5’10” giant in the tuk-tuk isn’t Khmer (at least that’s my thinking – how much it actually works is debatable). But, as we’re going slower, the police man spots me and walks over to the crawling tuk-tuk walking alongside with his hand on the side just inches from mine. I move my hand and avoid his eyes. I’m thinking “Shit shit shit shit shit shit shit”. The police are known for handing out random fines or attempting to take you to the station for no reason other than being a Barang. It supplements their $50 a month income. As it turns out, all he wanted was a good stare at the Barang in a tuk-tuk but as he moves away after a curious “hello?” (see the last entry for my views on this sort of greeting) I think hmm, at least I could have sworn to myself in Khmer now even if I can’t say anything else. In fact, swear words seem to be the only things that are understood without having to be repeated.

"Kñom chong choy pro-chea-chon kmae"
It’s a mouthful and I’m not pretending I could say it any more successfully than the volunteer who declared at a meeting with the Ministry of Education that he “wants to f*** Khmer people”. What he meant to say was “I want to help Khmer people” - Kñom chong chooy pro-chea-chon kmae.

Choy and chooy are unfortunately too similar. More unfortunately, Dara, the infamous language teacher, had already told me and Claire this story before yesterday’s class so when Roger, star pupil and former French and Russian teacher, came out with exactly the same phrase I don’t blame Dara for breaking down into a pile of embarrassed giggles in the middle of the class. This probably wasn’t helped when he caught my eye and realised that yes, of course I remembered how to say “f***” in Khmer and had found Roger’s faux pas just as funny as Dara had.

Unfortunately, YfDs are not known for their conservatism and whilst discussing the incident later in the evening at pregnant-ice-box lady’s ice-box beer bar, the word was repeated several times more loudly than was intended (I won’t name the culprit for the sake of the YfD-manager’s mental health). The true power of this new word was shown by the speed at which pregnant-ice-box lady came running over to shout “Ot la-or! Srey ot la-or! Ot la-or!” (bad, bad lady Barang, bad!) Promising we wouldn’t use the word again and muttering a few apologetic som-toh, som-tohs, we skulked off to bed only to be found the next night at dinner asking Dara the correct pronunciation of yoni. He never told us but the giggling gave it away. And yes, it does mean the same as in Sanskrit and no, I won’t be shouting it loudly at the next police-man who approaches my tuk-tuk.