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.